Maven, a new social network backed by OpenAI’s Sam Altman, found itself in a controversy today when it imported a huge amount of posts and profiles from the Fediverse, and then ran AI analysis to alter the content.
Been looking into #Maven all morning
Just going to copy-paste two posts
The head admin/dev @jsecretan claims:
“Happy to remove any of your posts from Maven and cease ingestion from those servers going forward”
So, after the fact, individuals on Mastodon have to contact you personally and ask you to stop?
Is that your position?
Reminds me of Byron Miller (@Supernovae @universeodon.com) and his since-deleted “In four months of having full text seach [we haven’t heard from anyone who has be directly harmed]…”
That last is a paraphrase because Supernovae has pretty much removed any mention of himself from the Fediverse, right down to deleting his involvement with Mastodon on Github, causing renchap to opine:
“I suspect that @Supernovae closed it because they do not want to be involved with Mastodon anymore.”
here: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/21398#issuecomment-2145321855
Executive summary: there are a lot of people On Here™ who don’t appreciated every new idea all you bright-eyed young creatives can come up with
Instructive to read #Maven’s #About page and see who’s behind it.
Here: https://www.heymaven.com/about
Selected excerpts from “Who is behind Maven?”
“CEO Ken Stanley is an expert on open-ended discovery in both AI and human systems and … (most recently leading the Open-Endedness Team at #OpenAI ).”
At: “Is Maven part of a larger company?”
“No, Maven is an independent startup.”
But
"Here are a few of our investors, who also commented on their reasons for supporting Maven:
-- Ev Williams, co-founder of #Twitter: “Maven lets you follow your deepest curiosities instead of the trends of the day.”
-- Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI: ”In Maven, there is a chance for AI to play a role in fixing much that is broken in our online discourse.”
-- Rana El Kaliouby, co-founder of Affectiva…"
Sam Altman
Where have I heard that name before?
Hmmm it was even able to pull in private DMs.
Maybe private DMs on Mastadon aren’t as private as everyone thinks… that, or the open nature of Activity Pub is leaking them somehow?
Edit - From the article:
Even more shocking is the revelation that somehow, even private DMs from Mastodon were mirrored on their public site and searchable. How this is even possible is beyond me, as DM’s are ostensibly only between two parties, and the message itself was sent from two hackers.town users.
From what @delirious_owl@discuss.online mentioned below, it sounds like this shouldn’t be very shocking at all.
They’re called DMs not PMs
? Did you mean that the other way around? And if you did… forgive me, I don’t really use Mastodon. I was never much of a twitter fan. I don’t really like how all of my likes are public (although I guess I have had to get used to that with Lemmy).
PM never implied any form of end to end encryption. It only ever meant people couldn’t see it apart from site operators. I genuinely don’t believe people thought it meant otherwise.
But on a federated system, everyone can see all messages. That’s expected.
The shocking part was less about Maven’s methods or lack of ethics, and more along the lines of “How the fuck did they do that?!”
What @delirious_owl@discuss.online seemed to be implying is that direct messages on Mastodon should be considered “public” rather than “private”.
I’m assuming that’s along the same lines of how Lemmy users generally think that their upvotes/downvotes are private when in reality, if you know how to look for them, you can see them.
Even more shocking is the revelation that somehow, even private DMs from Mastodon were mirrored on their public site and searchable. How this is even possible is beyond me, as DM’s are ostensibly only between two parties, and the message itself was sent from two hackers.town users.
I find this hard to believe but stranger things have happened.
Why would you expect anything that you post on social media to be private? I don’t get it.
You missed the point. It is not about if it is private or not, it is how they use it. You are allowed (on some pages) to read news article. Are you allowed to copy and publish them on your own site? No. You have a Copyright on your posts same as a author has on his books.
If it is legal or not is still to be discussed.
Similar to how data was mined (or even still is) about users without consent. Now there is for example the GDPR.
Still doesn’t explain how public posts on a public, decentralized social media platform are implied to be “mine” or that I have any influence on the end use. It’s hosted on someone else’s computer from the get go, if anything the server owners are the content owners more than I am.
Edit it’d be like if I started seeding a file on a torrent platform, then got upset when someone downloaded it.
I write a book that gets published. I still hold copyright over it even if it is in someone else’s bookshelf. What rights the copyright holder and the person has is regulated by law. For example a physical book can be resold or lent to someone else, but it is not allowed to copy it and sell the copies.
I can cite text from the boom, that falls under fair use but I cannot use whole chapters in a derived work.
I still hold copyright over my messages online, even when it is public or published, that is basic copyright law in most relevant legislations. If the training of an LLM and later selling access to the LLM with copyright infringed data is fair use is yet to be determined.
To be honest, the extreme negative reaction was a surprise to me, as I thought interaction between disparate systems was the entire point, but clearly we didn’t navigate the culture correctly.
Noooo fucking shit? If they spent more than a minute on a proper instance and not milquetoast mastodon dot social, they would have realised that a good number of fedi users despise shenanigans like this?
