Basically a deer with a human face. Despite probably being some sort of magical nature spirit, his interests are primarily in technology and politics and science fiction.
Spent many years on Reddit and is now exploring new vistas in social media.
Indeed. There are lots of proposals for perfectly portable decentralized user identities, subscriptions that transcend specific instances, and whatnot, but until those things actually arrive that’s not the Fediverse we’re dealing with. It’s a hassle having to switch instances.
That’s why I was suggesting such a simple approach, it doesn’t require AI or machine learning except in the most basic sense. If you want to try applying fancier stuff you could use those basic word-based filters as a first pass to reduce the cost.
Another more general property that might be worth looking for would be substantially similar posts that get cross-posted to a wide variety of communities in a short period of time. That’s a pattern that can have legitimate reasons but it’s probably worth raising a flag to draw extra scrutiny.
One idea for making it computationally lightweight but also robust against bots “tweaking” the wording of each post might be to fingerprint each post based on rare word usage. Spam is likely to mention the brand name of whatever product it’s hawking, which is probably not going to be a commonly used word. So if a bunch of posts come along that all use the same rare words all at once, that’s suspicious. I could also easily see situations where this gives false positives, of course - if some product suddenly does something newsworthy you could see a spew of legitimate posts about it in a variety of communities. But no automated spam checker is perfect.
And some of those hosts can decide to serve up their content to AI trainers. Some of those hosts can be run by AI trainers, specifically to gather data for training. If one was to try to prevent that then one would be attacking the open nature of the fediverse.
There have been many people raging about their content being used to train AIs without permission or compensation. I’m speaking to those people, not the “fediverse collectively”. As you suggest, the fediverse can’t say anything collectively.
Yup. There are dumps of Reddit’s entire archive of comments and posts available via torrent, I suspect the only reason Reddit’s getting paid for that stuff right now is that it’s a legal ass-covering that’s comparatively cheap. Anyone who’s a little daring could use it to train an LLM and if they prep the data well enough it’d be hard to even notice.
Well, I hope my answer clarifies it. You can’t prevent LLMs from being trained on your public posts.
I really don’t see how it would be physically possible to do that and still allow the content to be publicly seen by other humans.
We’re sick of closed walled-garden monoliths like Reddit! Let’s move to an open federated protocol where anyone can participate and the APIs can’t be locked down!
…wait, not like that!
Yeah. This is what you signed up for when you joined the Fediverse, the ActivityPub protocol broadcasts your content to any other servers that ask for it. And just generally, that’s how the Internet works. You’re putting up a public billboard and expecting to be able to control who gets to look at it. That’s not going to work. Even robots.txt is just a gentleman’s agreement, it’s not enforceable.
If you really want to prevent AI from training on your content with any degree of certainty you’re probably looking for a private forum of some kind that’s run by someone you trust.
Plenty of for-profit companies use open protocols and don’t harm them in the slightest.
Almost any website you visit, for example.
We believe in open protocols and hate walled gardens!
Except our walled garden!
What’s wrong with the logic used to justify using public data to train large language models?
Calling it “stealing content” is loaded terminology. You’re posting content on an open protocol whose very purpose is to broadcast it far and wide.
Unless there’s some actual technical reason why this a bad idea, I don’t buy the “ethical” hand-wringing here. It sounds like just another case of not liking specific social media companies and wanting the defaults to conform to those personal dislikes.
The article’s paywalled, but presumably they’re talking to active developers and people who run large instances.
Oh, be assured that threads will one day defederate and build a wall so you can’t access their content anymore.
Isn’t that already the case? The Fediverse is doing fine under current circumstances.
calm the removed down
What, and miss out on the delicious dopamine that comes from being part of a mob gripped by righteous anger? This is a chance to be mad at the same thing that everyone else is mad at, risk-free.
Well, semi-serious. Doing this to “save characters” is obviously silly, we’ve spent way more characters discussing how to save characters than could possibly have been saved (and it’s not a valuable “savings” regardless). But I was paying attention to the practicality, because IMO the best silly things are things you can take seriously.
That’s one step too far, though. There’d be no way to distinguish them without that number.
You could also drop the “.” in this case, saving another three.
Sounds like a purity spiral may be revving up.