I don't think we should ban ad blockers, but I also think it's fair to suggest that the loss of organic traffic could be affecting the incentive to create new digital content, at least as much as the fear of having your content absorbed into an LLM's training data.
IMO the backlash against LLMs is more philosophical, a lot of people don’t like them or the idea of one learning from their content. Unless your website has some unique niche information unavailable anywhere else there’s no direct personal risk. RAG would be a more direct threat if anything.
It's really about who is getting the value from the work of the content. If content creators of all sorts have their work consumed by LLMs, and LLM orgs charge for it can capture all the value, why should people create to have their work vacuumed up for the robot's benefit? For exposure? You can't eat or pay rent with exposure. Humans must get paid, and LLMs (foundational models and output using RAG) cannot improve without a stream of works and data humans create.
Whether you call it training or something else is irrelevant, it's really exploitation of human work and effort for AI shareholder returns and tech worker comp (if those who create aren't compensated). And the technocracy has not been, based on the evidence, great stewards of the power they obtain through this. Pay the humans for their work.
AI scrapers increase traffic by maybe 10x (this varies per site) but provide no real value whatsoever to anyone. If you look at various forms of "value":
* Saying "this uses AI" might make numbers go up on the stock market if you manage to persuade people it will make numbers go up (see also: the market will remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent).
* Saying "this uses AI" might fulfill some corporate mandate.
* Asking AI to solve a problem (for which you would actually use the solution) allows you to "launder" the copyright of whatever source it is paraphrasing (it's well established that LLMs fail entirely if a question isn't found within their training set). Pirating it directly provides the same value, with significantly less errors/handholding.
* Asking AI to entertain you ... well, there's the novelty factor I guess, but even if people refuse to train themselves out of that obsession, the world is still far too full of options for any individual to explore them all. Even just the question of "what kind of ways can I throw some kind of ball around" has more answers than probably anyone here knows.
Because it's injected into a previously working product - even if it makes it worse - and automatically injects its ideas. That counts as "somebody using it".
Because it's bundled with other products that do provide value, and that counts as "someone using it".
Because some middle manager has declared that I must add AI to my workflow ... somehow. Whatever, if they want to pay me to accomplish less than usual, that's not my problem.
Because it's a cool new toy to play around with a bit.
Because surely all these people saying "AI is useful now" aren't just lying shills, so we'd better investigate their claims again ... nope, still terminally broken.
