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.
The main problem now is that Ars Technica and all other Conde Nast publications, with it now having a vested interest in openAI (they’re getting paid by them), can no longer be reliably trusted to report on any AI or AI-adjacent topic whatsoever. And every user comment and content is now owned by openAI.
I’m not so sure Ars has a vested interest in OpenAI. I actually read through 10 pages of comments. Ken Fisher was pretty active in them, and noted several times that Ars doesn’t see any of the money from this deal.
Ars does not. Their chief editor has said as much. But Conde Nast absolutely does, and it WILL happen where CN will start telling Ars what they can and can’t do, because that’s how corporate ownership works. It happens every single time without fail, and that is why you can no longer trust anything they post related to AI. You toe the line to capital’s interest, or CN is gonna eject you from the org.
Conde Nast doesn’t have an interest in driving away their readers, and AI bullshit absolutely will drive them away. They know this. Ken Fisher is the editorial lead for AI at Conde Nast (not just Ars), and said as much in the comment section.
AI is absolutely fucking things up on a grand scale in all sorts of industries, but as of right now, Ars is relatively safe and I don’t think we need to inflate the scale of the danger.
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.
Understood and have seen the comments. I don’t blame you for being upset. It’s a crappy situation.
Their EIC is in the comments replying to people. He seems buttoned up about it (understandably) but I get the impression he’s not thrilled
Definitely not thrilled, and he says in the comments that ars does not benefit financially from this.
This is the logical endpoint for all the people who were complaining that scraping the open web for training is somehow immoral/illegal. Instead of stopping AI those with deep pockets will continue to train on everything while open source and small company efforts will be locked out.
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…
I would have signed it too, but only because I’m awesome on fiddle and I could totally win my soul back.
Either you sell your soul for something, or get it taken from you, leaving you with nothing.
Fuck those shitheads.
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
Thanks for describing it, I misread the first sentence.
Still, it’s AI creeping into their news. Even if it does change the content now, first step leads to a second step later. And that may not be noticed by me
Best to just train myself to not use them now
