Chris Coyier on LLMs using your data
2024-08-28 10:53:00 +07:00 by Mark Smith
Chris Coyier went on a bit of a friendly rant about LLMs using your data [53:29]. I think it’s super interesting to hear his perspective because he’s not a big media or tech company, he just runs some small businesses, Code Pen & CSS Tricks, and they happen over the years to have published a lot of great web development content and code. A lot of the web is from sources like that, narrow niches where hard working folks spent years creating and currating content, often labours of love, and it’s all just being hoovered up so a very small amount of people, often already part of very large a profitable businesses, can make out like bandits.
Here’s what Chris has to say about it:
To me it still boils down to the like ‘Yeah but you like took my stuff’. And nobody wants to tell you that that’s true or false. There are a lot of LLMs now. It’s not just Llama, ChatGPT4, whatever the names of these models are. There are a ton of models. There are so many [...] It’s not like there is a list, like this LLM is trained on this list of sources. I’ve never seen that ever. So what’s the deal? Were you? Were you trained on my stuff? Did you read my book? Did you scrape Codepen? Did you learn about CSS from CSS-Tricks? Did you do that, or not? Cause you didn’t ask me. I’ve never gotten an email from any model ever ever in my inbox. I get lots of email, and I’ve never gotten one that says ‘do you mind if we train it on your stuff’.
Then you’ll hear a news article like "Matt Mullenweg awarded 20 billion for allowing Wordpress to be used in language models". Why didn’t they just scrape him too? Are they more scared of his lawyers than mine? Cause I don’t have one and he does. Or Reddit allowed to be a source. Or Stack Overflow allowed to be a source.
So if you are big enough they will ask you or they will pen a deal with you, but most content surely they just scrapped up and gave nothing to. It almost makes it hurt more. Oh like I see, you got to be rich to make money, that’s the trick.
I think it’s great that he’s speaking out, others in his position should do the same. If we don’t have the conversation now, we'll all be pushed into offers we can’t refuse, or worse. We are all in this together.