My original, editorialized title: Ars Technica Sells Out
Linking to this because I know people here read Ars Technica, and I totally didn’t become a subscriber three days before this was announced. Nope. No sir.
llms suck because they steal content and are unreliable since they don’t link back to sources
Open ai makes a deal to pay media org for there content and makes it so they can link back to original article
“Ars technica sold out”
It’s funny because you’re making the opposite point of the one you think you’re making. Cause if you put together the two pieces of information from your comment, the entire picture is:
Open ai makes a deal to pay media org for there content and makes it so they can link back to original article, with the money they make from stealing everybody else’s content
That’s already pretty bad, even without that points you neglected to mention, like how some of the content that is indirectly making money for Ars Technica is stolen from their competitors, or how Ars Technica basically became a worthless journalistic source for AI at a time where public opinion is not yet settled on its morality and precedent has not been set on its legality. How is this not “sold out” to you?
Condé Nast didn’t just sell access to their subsidiaries’ content, but also to the user generated content on those subsidiaries’ sites. That’s at issue here.
It also has a possibility to cause a conflict of interest for Ars Technica to write about OpenAI. That’s the second issue here.
And, as per the editor in chief, the money doesn’t go to Ars Technica, but to Condé Nast.
Yes they sold access to the user content we’ve generated after we explicitly agreed to the fact that they may do so. If you’ve chosen to not read the fine print when you created an account and created content for them, that’s sort of up to you tbh.
All media companies have owners and potential conflicts of interest. Arstechnica (Conde Nast) is no different. They’ve explicitly called out any potential for conflict of interest when it has arisen in the past.
Of course the money goes to Conde Nast, they own the brand Ars Technica and employ the people who write for it; that doesn’t mean it doesn’t figure on Ars Technica’s budget when Conde Nast decides whether to continue paying the salary of the staff.
I am going to stop reading them myself.
It’s not so much ideological than practical, I simply don’t have the time to fact check them, or figure out which are the real articles and which are the AI ones, etc etc
That’s not what’s happening. The AI is ingesting the human made content (articles and comments). It isn’t writing any of the content of the site. I’m just going to cancel my subscription if they don’t give me a means to opt out of my comments feeding ChatGPT
what’s the problem here? openai isn’t pirating content if they pay for it,? have i misunderstood something
I understand them. If they refused for integrity reasons, openai would steal their content anyways via scrapers.
Suing them for copyright infringement, even if is the desire we all have, is ultra expensive.
I would also have signed that deal with the devil…
Damnit! I still like and respect the Ars Technica staff but Condé Nast can piss off.
I feel for you KingThrillgore. I was thinking of supporting the site with a subscription but not after this. Still if enough people stop subscribing we may loose them altogether. This is a double edged shit sword.
I made it clear in my comment I was not happy about this after I became a subscriber. It will not auto-renew. If I had done it with a credit card and not Paypal, I’d try for a chargeback.
For what its worth, nobody else active on the site is happy about this, either. Lots of unsubscribes are being claimed in the comments (including mine).
Edit: and a comment from the EIC says CN will not share revenue from OpenAI with Ars Technica. Incredible. They’re basically getting nothing out of it.
