I created this account two days ago, but one of my posts ended up in the (metaphorical) hands of an AI powered search engine that has scraping capabilities. What do you guys think about this? How do you feel about your posts/content getting scraped off of the web and potentially being used by AI models and/or AI powered tools? Curious to hear your experiences and thoughts on this.
#Prompt Update
The prompt was something like, What do you know about the user llama@lemmy.dbzer0.com on Lemmy? What can you tell me about his interests?" Initially, it generated a lot of fabricated information, but it would still include one or two accurate details. When I ran the test again, the response was much more accurate compared to the first attempt. It seems that as my account became more established, it became easier for the crawlers to find relevant information.
It even talked about this very post on item 3 and on the second bullet point of the “Notable Posts” section.
For more information, check this comment.
Edit¹: This is Perplexity. Perplexity AI employs data scraping techniques to gather information from various online sources, which it then utilizes to feed its large language models (LLMs) for generating responses to user queries. The scraping process involves automated crawlers that index and extract content from websites, including articles, summaries, and other relevant data. It is an advanced conversational search engine that enhances the research experience by providing concise, sourced answers to user queries. It operates by leveraging AI language models, such as GPT-4, to analyze information from various sources on the web. (12/28/2024)
Edit²: One could argue that data scraping by services like Perplexity may raise privacy concerns because it collects and processes vast amounts of online information without explicit user consent, potentially including personal data, comments, or content that individuals may have posted without expecting it to be aggregated and/or analyzed by AI systems. One could also argue that this indiscriminate collection raise questions about data ownership, proper attribution, and the right to control how one’s digital footprint is used in training AI models. (12/28/2024)
Edit³: I added the second image to the post and its description. (12/29/2024).
the fediverse is largely public. so i would only put here public info. ergo, i dont give a shit what the public does with it.
I don’t think it’s unreasonable to be uneasy with how technology is shifting the meaning of what public is. It used to be walking the dog meant my neighbors could see me on the sidewalk while I was walking. Now there are ring cameras, etc. recording my every movement and we’ve seen that abused in lots of different ways.
The internet has always been a grand stage, though. We’re like 40 years into this reality at this point.
I think people who came-of-age during Facebook missed that memo, though. It was standard, even explicitly recommended to never use your real name or post identifying information on the internet. Facebook kinda beat that out of people under the guise of “only people you know can access your content, so it’s ok”. People were trained into complacency, but that doesn’t mean the nature of the beast had ever changed.
People maybe deluded themselves that posting on the internet was closer to walking their dog in their neighbourhood than it was to broadcasting live in front of international film crews, but they were (and always have been) dead wrong.
Our choices regarding security and privacy are always compromises. The uneasy reality is that new tools can change the level of risk attached to our past choices. People may have been OK with others seeing their photos but aren’t comfortable now that AI deep fakes are possible. But with more and more of our lives being conducted in this space, do even knowledgable people feel forced to engage regardless?
We’re like 40 years into this reality at this point.
We are not 40 years into everyone’s every action (online and, increasingly, even offline via location tracking and facial recognition cameras) being tracked, stored in a database, and analyzed by AI. That’s both brand new and way worse than even what the pre-Facebook “don’t use your real name online” crowd was ever warning about.
I mean, yes, back in the day it was understood that the stuff you actively write and post on Usenet or web forums might exist forever (the latter, assuming the site doesn’t get deleted or at least gets archived first), but (a) that’s still only stuff you actively chose to share, and (b) at least at the time, it was mostly assumed to be a person actively searching who would access it – that retrieving it would take a modicum of effort. And even that was correctly considered to be a great privacy risk, requiring vigilance to mitigate.
These days, having an entire industry dedicated to actively stalking every user for every passive signal and scrap of metadata they can possibly glean, while moreover the users themselves are much more “normie”/uneducated about the threat, is materially even worse by a wide margin.
But what if a shitposting AI posts all the best takes before we can get to them.
Is the world ready for High Frequency Shitposting?
Is the world ready for High Frequency Shitposting?
The lemmy world? Not at all. Instances have no automated security mechanisms. The mod system consisting mostly of self important ***'s would break down like straw. Users cannot hold back, but would write complaints in exponential numbers, or give up using lemmy within days…
I run my own instance and have a long list of user agents I flat out block, and that includes all known AI scraper bots.
That only prevents them from scraping from my instance, though, and they can easily scrape my content from any other instance I’ve interacted with.
Basically I just accept it as one of the many, many things that sucks about the internet in 2024, yell “Serenity Now!” at the sky, and carry on with my day.
I do wish, though, that other instances would block these LLM scraping bots but I’m not going to avoid any that don’t.
you might be interested to know that UA blocking is not enough: https://feddit.bg/post/13575
the main thing is in the comments
Well your handle is the mascot for the open LLM space…
Seriously though, why care? What we say in public is public domain.
It reminds me of people on NexusMods getting in a fuss over “how” people use the mods they publicly upload, or open source projects imploding over permissive licenses they picked… Or Ao3 having a giant fuss over this very issue, and locking down what’s supposed to be a public archive.
I can hate entities like OpenAI all I want, but anything I put out there is fair game.
As with any public forum, by putting content on Lemmy you make it available to the world at large to do basically whatever they want with. I don’t like AI scrapers in general, but I can’t reasonably take issue with this.
There are at least one or two Lemmy users who add a CC or non-AI license footer to their posts. Not that it’s do anything, but it might be fun to try and get the LLM to admit it’s illegally using your content.
It’d be hilarious if the model spat out the non-AI license footer in response to a prompt.
Those… don’t hold any weight lol. Once you post on any website, you hand copyright over to the website owner. That’s what gives them permission to relay your message to anyone reading the website. Copyright doesn’t do anything to restrict readers of the content (I.e. model trainers). Only publishers.
