Finding a problem and providing the soluiton - thats what leads to mass adoption...
The Problem: Content producers - big or small are facing the same problem: How are they going to monetize their content when an Ai just scrapes their sites, processes their content and transforms it / generates new content and answers / excerpts from it?
Nobody will visit their websites when people just interact with an Ai. That means: No income from advertising or affiliate links.
Its similar already with googles "rich snippets" where they take a part of a websites content and display it in their SERPS directly (search engine result pages). Why put in the time to create content and pay for the hosting when the user never ends up on their website - and they can not monetize it anymore?
This is and will become a huge problem with Ai and LLMs. Imo Bitcoin / Lightning has a unique opportunity to solve that problem.
The Solution: In order to give the creators a fair share for the work they put in creating their content when an Ai is processing it, we need a solution.
How about a meta-tag on a website which includes a (minimum-) price in sats and a lightning address of the content creator on each webpage? You can say:
a) an Ai is not allowed to process my content. End of story
b) an Ai is allowed to process my content for at least X amount of sats, which has to be paid through lightning to the address in the meta-tag.
c) if an Ai processes the content without paying, it is copyright infringement.
So, for example you tell the Ai "Write an article about the 10 most recent developments in the field of neurosurgery in the last 2 weeks, write an excerpt of 200 words about each point.
And you say what that is worth to you, lets say 50.000 Sats.
The Ai then scans the web (likely uses google or bing) to get a number of websites, weighs the most popular topics and then creates the excerpts and the article.
The Ai knows which sources it used to create the article and spreads the 50.000 Sats equally to the sources over lightning.
This way the content creators can be paid for their work and the user defines how much they are willing to pay for benefiting from other peoples work.
This can help a solo writer on substack in the same way as an organization like the New York Times. Every content creator needs to somehow make money to pay their bills.
This is just a rough draft of the idea but what i want to say is: There is a problem which millions of people and organziations will face in the near future. And bitcoin / the lightning network can provide a very helpful solution to this problem - which is not possible with the legacy financial system. / credit cards. I know that restricted access to content (subscriptions) is also an alternative, but i focus on "the open internet" and publicly available information.
This way we can onboard / orangepill millions of people who dont give a fuck about bitcoin, decentralization or dont understand why the legacy financial system sucks. They just want to survive in a world dominated by Ai and get paid for the work they put out.
I would love to develop this idea further with whomever is interested. Maybe develop a prototype. When that is ready, popularize the idea so big content producers become aware of it. Bitcoin helps them - and they will adopt bitcoin as a solution to an existential problem they are facing.
Let me know what you think / what flaws you see / how it could be improved and how we could make this a reality.
Hey, interesting idea, however:
  1. How do you enforce this <meta> tag? Sounds similar to robots.txt which is not enforced. It's just a request which a web scraper can just ignore.
  2. Sounds similar to pay walls. People generally don't like to pay for content that they haven't seen yet.
I think you nailed the problem but the solution seems to be too idealistic/naive.
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This. And with the advent of LLM decentralization it's even less likely that they will honor the meta tag.
Der Gigi's articles about content/paywalls are insightful
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The majority of the users will use the big Ai´s from Google / Microsoft / Adobe etc. - only a minority will run their own open source LLM.
The majority could still download all movies from pirate bay - still they choose Netflix and pay for it.
I am pretty sure something like this will develop as well, the big content farms like NYT will demand compensation for using their content.
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Possible. If that is the case though I doubt the NY Times will settle in sats with Microsoft.
I think your idea is interesting but I see it difficult to implement.
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it would be good to have a solution in the pocket when the narrative develops imo.
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Hey, thanks for your thoughts.
  1. you can not enforce it, i am sure there will be the narrative developing that the content producers have to get a compensation for their effort somehow. So there will be "ethical" Ais (the big ones) which can not just ignore it and "steal" the content.
Similar to Netflix and Priate Bay - you can get everything for free if you want, but Netflix does not stream pirated movies as they would be sued and their brand reputation would be damaged. It will be similar with the big Ais from Google / MIcrosoft etc. - they can not just take the content and basically rewrite it and make money from it while the producer of the content gets nothing.
  1. The difference is that the Ai gets to read the content for free and only if it uses it in its answer for the user, the content producer gets paid.
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For me, the comparison with Netflix and Pirate Bay doesn't hold since it's obvious that Pirate Bay is infringing copyright.
This means that the following:
they can not just take the content and basically rewrite it and make money from it while the producer of the content gets nothing.
raises the question: Why not? Afaict, it is pretty hard to proof that an AI is just "rewriting" instead of just taking in information and producing "new content".
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The big content farms (media companies) will lobby like crazy to get some laws which makes big tech compensate them for their content. Politicians are afreaid of the power of the media, so they will get their compensation.
The little content producer will get fucked likely - and then they will not produce conttent anymore. Not all of them - but the majority.
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The big content farms (media companies) will lobby like crazy to get some laws which makes big tech compensate them for their content. Politicians are afreaid of the power of the media, so they will get their compensation.
The little content producer will get fucked likely - and then they will not produce conttent anymore. Not all of them - but the majority.
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Great idea, but how would you make sure that the AI is actually paying the content creator? If someone offers an AI service which does not pay the creator, they have an economic advantage. You would need a pay-wall for the content which contradicts your idea of an open internet.
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Thanka for your reply.
As stated above, i am aware that there will always be ways to get stuff for free - but the big companies can not do that.
And the big content producers will force them to compensate for using their content.
It is the question if we can create a system which allows the small guy to be able to live from content production as well in the future.
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so basically, you would publish the content under a license which states that you can only reuse it if you have paid a ln invoice?
I don't want to discourage you, but that whole copyright issue is really complex and hard to enforce. In Europe, there were several attempts to force Google to pay publishers for the use of certain content and all of them have failed as far as I know.
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in germany the media got a law for that, it is called "Leistungsschutzrecht"
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Monetising the delivery of content is the approach we envision at Indra. It's a paywall but you pay a little ahead of what you consume, and you can't access it without accepting the fee, and the content is, could be anything, we want relays competing to deliver. It's not the central purpose of Indra, being a low latency mixnet, but if you add a scheme like prisms it could solve the problem of monetising content and seeing it evaluated more objectively.
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Thanks for your reply, could you give me some links for me to read about Indra and Prisms?
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https://github.com/indra-labs/indra is the very WIP repository, there is a draft white paper in there in the docs. The current state of the work is I have got all the protocol working via a simulated network, right now in the process of connecting it up to libp2p's DHT for sharing peer and hidden service information. In a few weeks time we may have a minimal testnet working, maybe even started on the interface to LND's payment subscription and wallet management APIs.
Details of how this would apply to monetising creator and publisher fee splits would be something else. I don't know much about the prisms, they essentially are a way where you pay into an address and it is automatically split to two or more other addresses. I know with Taproot it will be easy to do this on-chain but I'm more interested in how to make it so content creators can be automatically paid when their content is delivered out of the fees... This is what prisms do, on LN.
The content monetisation problem can be solved using a relay network because its normal operation is loading session balances with AMP payments and spending them via sending packets that route through them. It is just a small extra layer to interface between the session spends and dispatching a royalty fee in accordance a metadata format which specifies this.
It's definitely something I want to develop more once the main Indra network is running. I'm sure you can see how it becomes a primary mechanism of payment for data in general but specifically "intellectual property" in a performance kinda way. Easy to see how nice the whole thing can be for the user to not have to think about paywalls or subscriptions, just set their client to keep reliable relay sessions topped up and the fee rate on the service.
Game theory in Indra uses a minimal trust model, you pay ahead for traffic, but you can pay very small amounts, so loss is minimised. Once you have good relays set up you can move general traffic around, and the relays that deliver specific content types have fee rates for the data for the service, and the idea would be that for any given piece of content, again, somewhat trust-based, the relay is supposed to account the data volume for each rights claim and forward it as soon as practical to the LN address specified.
Such schemes are not really specifically within the scope of Indra, but charging for relaying traffic and charging for delivery of content can be the very same thing, and greatly reduce the cognitive burden, once you wrap your head around the idea of treating your indra session balances as credit for accessing content, and relating it to people's familiarity with prepaid balance account systems.
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If the scraper will honor the meta tag, then this problem:
The Problem: Content producers - big or small are facing the same problem: How are they going to monetize their content when an Ai just scrapes their sites, processes their content and transforms it / generates new content and answers / excerpts from it?
doesnt exist. People can just use the existing ads, paywalls, membership programs that they use now and just put the "dont scrape me" meta tag on the site
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Just a note regarding LLM (ChatGPT). Do not treat them as search engines (search engine is big database where you remember the source of your information plus the exact content). Consider it as a big memory (closer to human memory). It learns patterns, most common sequences etc. It has no idea where the information came from. So you cannot implement your idea with actual LLM. You will endup with classical search engine.
Often the LLM blends the information, mixes it and even halucinates nonsense. Examples where LLM answers the exact "copyrighted" text is probably rare and it can happen seeing the text many times. I guess it can do good replicas of Shakespeare, but not of your local writter.
To understand the LLM more.. just remember that is does not have any logic. It is just memory. It does not understand math and coding. It remembers 1+1=2.
Your idea has some interesting points. How to treat the middle man. Something learns from your content (not copies it) and then sells it. And my question is.. Can I trust this middle man?