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0 pointsryukoposting7mo ago0 comments

Hi, website operator here. I don't want my content to be accessible to you through Perplexity.

I want my work to be freely available to any person who wants it. Feel free to transform my material as you see fit. Hell, do it with LLMs! I don't care.

The LLM isn't the problem, it's what companies like Perplexity are doing with the LLM. Do not create commercial products that regurgitate my work as if it was your own. It's de facto theft, if not de jure theft.

Knowing that it is not de jure theft, and so I have no legal recourse, I will continue to tune my servers to block and/or deceive Perplexity and similar tools.

By the way, I do not use my websites as a revenue stream. This isn't about money.

0 comments

skeledrew7mo ago

Another very important reason why I prefer Perplexity is due to attribution. It actually does cite the sources that it bases it's output on (unless it's something generic or calculated), so if I suspect something is off or want to look deeper into some particular aspect I can easily click through. And I've done enough click-throughs to be confident that Perplexity faithfully represents sourced content, and accurately gets exactly the bits I'm interested in, maybe 98% or more of the time.

It is your prerogative to tune your servers as you see fit, but as LLM adoption increases you'll merely find that your site has fewer and fewer visits overall, so your content will only be utilized by you and a vanishingly small group of other persons. Perhaps you're OK with that, and that's also fine for the rest of us.

It's strange you mention theft, and then say it isn't about money. For me, and many others, it's about practicality and efficiency. We went from having to visit physical libraries to using search engines, and now we're entering the era of increasingly intelligent content fetch+preprocess tools.

ryukopostingOP7mo ago

> as LLM adoption increases you'll merely find that your site has fewer and fewer visits overall, so your content will only be utilized by you and a vanishingly small group of other persons.

So far, AI has had the opposite effect on my site. I've now been featured on both Hackaday and Adafruit's blog. Both features were clearly AI-generated. Both posts coincided with an influx of emails from folks interested in my work.

Perplexity is good at citing things when it decides to cite things and when you tell it to cite things. It can and does spit out plain expository text with no indication of the information's origin. I do appreciate that you have better-than-usual habits about validating sources.

I think you may have misinterpreted my remark about money. With the direction conversations around AI have been going lately, I was expecting a backhanded accusation that I was farming ad revenue.

"It's not about money" meant that I have nothing to lose financially by losing direct human traffic to my websites. Instead, I stand to lose those aforementioned email conversations.

skeledrew7mo ago

> So far, AI has had the opposite effect on my site. I've now been featured on both Hackaday and Adafruit's blog. Both features were clearly AI-generated. Both posts coincided with an influx of emails from folks interested in my work.

This may be missing some context, but it seems as though you're saying that you made something with AI and it led to traction. That's great! Seems off the point that blocking LLM service will lead to less exposure over time though.

> Perplexity is good at citing things when it decides to cite things and when you tell it to cite things.

Maybe I'm just lucky, but a quick skim of my Perplexity history yielded only 2 instances of no citations, and they were for general coding queries. I've never had to ask it to cite anything, as that's built into the default prompt.

> lose those aforementioned email conversations.

I think those will remain a possibility as long as LLM users, or services, ensure citations are included in output.

1 more reply

weird-eye-issue7mo ago

To be honest I don't care.

episode4047mo ago

no one cares about your shitty blog lol

AlexeyBelov7mo ago

You can't post like this here.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

0 comments

skeledrew7mo ago

ryukopostingOP7mo ago

> as LLM adoption increases you'll merely find that your site has fewer and fewer visits overall, so your content will only be utilized by you and a vanishingly small group of other persons.

I think you may have misinterpreted my remark about money. With the direction conversations around AI have been going lately, I was expecting a backhanded accusation that I was farming ad revenue.

"It's not about money" meant that I have nothing to lose financially by losing direct human traffic to my websites. Instead, I stand to lose those aforementioned email conversations.

skeledrew7mo ago

> Perplexity is good at citing things when it decides to cite things and when you tell it to cite things.

> lose those aforementioned email conversations.

I think those will remain a possibility as long as LLM users, or services, ensure citations are included in output.

1 more reply

weird-eye-issue7mo ago

To be honest I don't care.

episode4047mo ago

no one cares about your shitty blog lol

AlexeyBelov7mo ago

You can't post like this here.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse