If you are the source I think they could make plenty of sense. As an example, I run a website where I've spent a lot of time documenting the history of a somewhat niche activity. Much of this information isn't available online anywhere else.
As it happens I'm happy to let bots crawl the site, but I think it's a reasonable stance to not want other companies to profit from my hard work. Even more so when it actually costs me money to serve requests to the company!
Imagine someone at another company reads your site, and it informs a strategic decision they make at the company to make money around the niche activity you're talking about. And they make lots of money they wouldn't have otherwise. That's totally legal and totally ethical as well.
The reality is, if you do hard work and make the results public, well you've made them public. People and corporations are free to profit off the facts you've made public, and they should be. There are certain limited copyright protections (they can't sell large swathes of your words verbatim), but that's all.
So the idea that you don't want companies to profit from your hard work is unreasonable, if you make it public. If you don't want that to happen, don't make anything public.
If someone writes valuable stuff on a blog almost nobody finds, that's a tragedy.
If LLM's can process the information and provide it to people in conversations where it will be most helpful, where they never would have found it otherwise, then that's amazing!
If all you're trying to do is help people with the information you've discovered, why do you care if it's delivered via your own site or via LLM? You just want it out there helping people.
This is why I care if my ideas are presented to others by an LLM (that maybe cites me in some % of cases) or directly to a human. There is already a difference between a human visiting my space (acknowledging it as such) to read and learn information and being a footnote reference that may or may not be read or opened, without an immediate understanding of which information comes from me.
Even if someone were to do it out of sheer passion without a care for financial gains, I'm sure they'd still appreciate basic validation and recognition. That's like the cheapest form of payment you could give for someone's work.
I don't understand why "actually, you're egotistical if you dare to desire recognition for stuff you put love and effort to" is such a common argument in those discussions. People are treated like machines that should swallow their pride and sense of self for the greater good, while on the other end, there is a (not saying YOU in particular did it) push to humanize LLMs.
Ultimately these AI tools are useful because they have access to huge swaths of content, and the owners of these tools turn a lot of revenue by selling access to these tools. Ultimately I think the internet will end up a much worse place if companies don't respect clearly established wishes of people creating the content, because if companies stop respecting things like robots.txt then people will just hide stuff behind logins, paywalls and frustraing tools like cloudflare which use heuristics to block malicious traffic.
You do, but you give up those rights when you make the work public.
You think an author has any control over who their book gets lent to once somebody buys a copy? You think they get a share of profits when a CEO reads their book and they make a better decision? Of course not.
What you're asking for is unreasonable. It's not workable. Knowledge can't be owned. Once you put it out there, it's out there. We have copyright and patent protections in specific circumstances, but that's all. You don't own facts, no matter how much hard work and research they took to figure out.
How do you square these two? Of course big companies profit from your work, this is why they send all these bots to crawl your site.
For me, the dividing line is whether someone else's profit is at my expense. If I sell a book, and someone starts hawking cheaper photocopies of it, that takes away my future sales. It's at my expense, and I'm harmed.
But if someone takes my book's story and writes song lyrics derived from it, I might feel a little envy (perhaps I've always wanted to be a songwriter), but I don't think I'd harbor ill will. I might even hope for the song to be successful, as it would surely drive further sales of my book.
It's human nature to covet someone else's success, but the fact is there was nothing stopping me (except talent) from writing the song.
