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.
Pretty wild
The wildest part is that he’s surprised that Mastodon peeps would react negatively to their posts being scrapped without consent or even notification and fed into an AI model. Like, are you for real dude? Have you spent more than 4 seconds on Mastodon and noticed their (our?) general attitude towards AI? Come the hell on…
People can complain, but the Fediverse is built to make consuming user’s data easy. If you don’t want AI using your data, don’t put it on such an easily “scrapable” network.
Yeah, and girls dress for rape. They are just aaasking for it!
I will go off on a tangent.
Just because something is online it does not mean I give a full green light on anything.
Fuck this noise of social parasitic networks hammering free service therefore pay with data into everyone’s skull. And everyone posts crap.
It is a billion dollar business. LLMs are extracting millions and will generate more.
You know why? Because worthless shit you post online is not worthless after all.
Yes, you are reading it right. Pay me. Pay us.
Before anyone ridicules this. Yall be defending billion dollar corporations, staffed with millionaires below C-levels.
People should start demanding money from these greedy assholes.
This is what I’ve been saying the entire time. It sucks, and it’s wrong, but the fediverse is built from the ground up as an open sharing platform, where amour data is shared with anyone. It shouldn’t be, and it’s wrong, but there is nothing to stop anyone from doing it. To change that would alter federation at a core level
People can complain, but the Fediverse is built to make consuming user’s data easy
Correction: it is built to make consuming users’s data not easy, but more human.
WHat you are thinking of is AP, not “Fediverse”, and even then that’s a stretch.
Just because our data is accessible doesn’t mean it’s legally licensed to be used by a for profit company. Free doesn’t meant you can do what you want with it, it just means no cost.
It sounds like they weren’t “being fed into an AI model” as in being used as training material, they were just being evaluated by an AI model. However…
Have you spent more than 4 seconds on Mastodon and noticed their (our?) general attitude towards AI?
Yeah, the general attitude of wild witch-hunts and instant zero-to-11 rage at the slightest mention of it. Doesn’t matter what you’re actually doing with AI, the moment the mob thinks they scent blood the avalanche is rolling.
It sounds like Maven wants to play nice, but if the “general attitude” means that playing nice is impossible why should they even bother to try?
The anti-AI knee-jerk reactions can be extreme, I agree, but at the same time one of important features of Mastodon is that your feed is nor controlled by an algorithm in any way.
So when a company comes, takes those posts and screws with them to create an algorithm to show them, I understand people getting angry - at least some of them joined to be free of that exact thing…
Yeah, the general attitude of wild witch-hunts and instant zero-to-11 rage at the slightest mention of it. Doesn’t matter what you’re actually doing with AI, the moment the mob thinks they scent blood the avalanche is rolling.
This wasn’t always the case. A lot of research on NLP uses scraped social media posts (2010’s). People never had a problem with that (at least the outrage wasn’t visible back then). The problem now is that our content is being used to create an AI product where there is zero consent taken from the end-user.
Source: My research colleagues used to work on NLP
It’s not surprised. He’s acting surprised because he got caught. It’s pretty standard for these jerkass tech bros. “Move fast break things” is code “break laws be unethical” - as I think we’ve all seen if you do it often and fast enough you can keep way ahead of any kind of accountability because everybody else is trying to play catch up well the last thing has already filtered out of the news cycle.
I’m surprised as well. We put our posts up for anyone to replicate and republish, yet we still get mad when somebody replicates and republishes it. It does not make sense. Activitypub is an open network with zero privacy expectations.
His Mastodon: https://mastodon.social/@jsecretan/with_replies
I was confused why a package manager would need to import posts from a social network.
Why name a new product the same as a very popular existing product?
I was confused on what they were trying to accomplish, and even after reading the article I am still somewhat confused.
Instead, when a user posts something, the algorithm automatically reads the content and tags it with relevant interests so it shows up on those pages. Users can turn up the serendipity slider to branch out beyond their stated interests, and the algorithm running the platform connects users with related interests.
Perhaps I’m a minority, but I don’t see myself getting much utility out of this. I already know what my interests are, and don’t have much interest in growing them algorithmically. If a topic is really interesting, I’ll eventually find out about it via an actual human.
Yeah, we’re trying to get the fuck away from algorithms. That’s what makes the fediverse such a big draw currently, for me.
You’re on slrpnk.net, I assume it’s not implementing any of this stuff. As long as you don’t sign up for Maven I don’t see how this is going to affect you.
I mean yeah, maybe it won’t affect me directly, I like the instance I’m on and it’s a pretty respectable one. However, indirectly, this is very relevant to any Fediverse user, regardless of the instance or platform they’re using. Allowing abuses like this to happen without any pushback is a surefire way of turning this place into a shithole just like the rest of the internet. I appreciate the fact that, at least for now, it’s different here.
Also, maybe this isn’t my only homebase? Just saying.
So you don’t ever want to learn about new things? And even if you did, you wouldn’t want those new things be efficiently suggested to you and instead be bundled with a bunch of other boring crap?
Also, what you’re asking for is what the tool seems to do. You would put the slider all the way to one side to avoid having new stuff suggested. Existing social media platforms often just shove stuff at you endlessly.
That’s why I keep saying it’s pointless to defederate corpos. They’ll just scrape everything before you notice.
And it’s also damming for private messaging on mastodon.
I once read vague complaints about it being a rushed implementation. While I won’t trust those without evidence, I for sure wouldn’t trust mastodon with my PMs. At least, not until how this was allowed to happen is figured out and fixed if necessary.
P.S. I’m still not sure I believe in PMs in the fediverse. If I need to share something and care about keeping it private, I’d rather move the conversation elsewhere.
I was under the impression that DM’s on Mastodon (and Lemmy too) weren’t ever stated as being secure and I think that they were both pretty transparent about this particular aspect.
Defederation is more about not being flooded with 1000x more users than the Fediverse currently has
So far we only have a corpo fedi-twitter in form of Threads. In that case non-corpo instance user has to specifically follow someone before their content is federated so that sounds like a bit overblown issue.
Seems pretty easy for any corporation to setup something like https://lemmy-federate.com/ but for Maston/IceShrimp/Misskey accounts to federate the important corporate accounts to the targeted non-corpo instances
Classic Scam Altman!
