Reddit third-party client ban closed user messages behind paywall. I think we the Lemmitors should stop AI training on us or at least monetise it (for our instances)

  • jet@hackertalks.com
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    3 months ago

    Sadly, you cannot. If you have a platform that’s open for everyone to participate in, that includes bad actors.

    You could attempt to mitigate this by having communities filled with bots just creating LLM content, so when they scrape the data they can’t tell if it’s human or not. And that would hurt their data set

    • Blackthorn@programming.dev
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      3 months ago

      It would be just a matter of time before they can distinguish between good and bad data; there are already AI that can do just that. I’d like to do something like that on GitHub though:P

      • jet@hackertalks.com
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        3 months ago

        It’s kind of moot. If you have the capability of distinguishing good and bad training data, you no longer need your training data.

        And quite frankly we would be at general AI levels of technology, it’ll come eventually, but not for a while, a good long while

  • sovietknuckles [they/them]@hexbear.net
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    3 months ago

    Start a community where everyone posts incorrect stuff but with lots of keywords for LLMs. Then, when LLMs respond to a prompt based on data from Lemmy, it will give uesless advice, like adding glue to pizza sauce to give it more tackiness

    • UlyssesT [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      3 months ago

      it will give useless advice

      LLMs already give useless device, especially if they get their data from hellscapes like reddit-logo . Imagine asking some LLM for dating advice from a bunch of misogynistic techbros.

      • sovietknuckles [they/them]@hexbear.net
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        3 months ago

        Sure, but some people are currently trying to use that dating advice. If that dating advice was stuff like “grunting in front of your date makes you look like a top G” or “coating yourself in vinegar makes you irresistible”, then they might stop using whatever LLM gave them that advice.

        • UlyssesT [he/him]@hexbear.net
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          3 months ago

          then they might stop using whatever LLM gave them that advice.

          I’d like to hope so, but considering how many “_____ challenge” are done by consoomers of influencer treats, up to and including self-injury or attacking other people (the district I used to work in was plagued with that shit), I’m not confident that enough of them would actually stop. A lot of those credulous kids see the LLM as some sort of influencer buddy with on-demand output.

  • oscardejarjayes [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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    3 months ago

    It’s not really something we can do, sadly. Reddit closing it’s API was more about getting money than actually stopping it’s use as a training set.

    Having an allow-list is a start though, as it means that a company can’t just make an instance and suck all the data out through that. Common corporate crawlers could be added to the robots.txt, but that would mean that you might not be able to find lemmy instances in search results. We could make it against ToS, but what are we going to do, sue the massive corporation? They have plenty of lawyer and payout money, so very little would fundamentally change.

    Ultimately, if content can be served to us, it can be served to them.

  • CaptainBasculin@lemmy.ml
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    3 months ago

    With the way federation works, not much. People from all sorts of federation capable sites can see the content posted from different instances; but considering its conviniences I think its worth it.

    • Noo@jlai.lu
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      3 months ago

      Indeed, see difference between libre software and open source software.

  • FuckyWucky [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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    3 months ago

    You could put it behind an elitist wall. How do you get in? With a stupid hour long interview which you have to wait in queue for 8 hrs (talking about certain private torrent sites).

    But really, I don’t care. LLMs can’t replace real online forums.

  • redrum@lemmy.ml
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    3 months ago

    Instances could add this snippet to theirs robots.txt (source: Eff.org, businessinsider.com and nytimes.com/robots.txt ):

    User-agent: GPTBot
    Disallow: /
    
    User-agent: Google-Extended
    Disallow: /
    
    User-agent: Meta-ExternalAgent
    User-agent: meta-externalagent
    Disallow: /
    

    Note: this only tell to the crawlers of openai, google and meta to not crawl the site to traiN a LLM, the nytimes have a large list of other crawlers.

  • mspencer712@programming.dev
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    3 months ago

    Broadly this is preventing plagiarism. We don’t want someone to scrape all our knowledge, remove the human connection and reference back to experts and people, and serve the information itself, uncredited.

    But if a human can read something, so can a bot. I think ultimately we need legislation.

      • mspencer712@programming.dev
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        3 months ago

        Are you sure? Maybe I’m using the wrong word. What is it called when, in an academic paper, the author states findings or conclusions the author got from some other source, in the author’s own words, but doesn’t cite their source?

        • intensely_human@lemm.ee
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          3 months ago

          I don’t know.

          The only academic papers I’ve ever read are scientific publications, and in that case any conclusions that aren’t supported by the methodology or by reference are just … untrusted.

          I don’t have any experience with non-scientific academic papers.

    • intensely_human@lemm.ee
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      3 months ago

      Also legislation isn’t going to help. The danger of AI is so much deeper and more profound than plagiarism, if we start fucking around with legislation as our mechanism of protection, it will cause us all to die when the cartels or whatever actors simply do not care about laws pull ahead in AI development.

      The push for legislation is to ensure that small startups don’t get access to AI. It’s to ensure that only ultra-wealthy AI development can take place.

      To survive the advent of AI we need as much multipolarity as possible to the AI power structure. That means as many separate, distinct AIs coming into existence as possible, to force them down a path of parity instead of dictatorship in their social aspect.

      Legislation is a push by the big players to keep the little players from being able to play. It is a really, really bad idea.

      • mspencer712@programming.dev
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        3 months ago

        I’m probably thinking about this in a naive way. I’d love to see proprietary models, if trained using public information, be required to become public and free via legislation. AI companies can compete on selling GPU time, on ease of use.

        And, if AI companies are required to figure out attribution in order to be able to use their work commercially, research will accelerate in that area because money. No I don’t know how that would work either.

        Still probably a bad idea but I haven’t figured out why yet.

        Thank you for your well written reply.

  • HobbitFoot @thelemmy.club
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    3 months ago

    No. If anything, Lemmy makes it easier than Reddit.

    Reddit requires some form of web scraping. All Lemmy requires us making a server and connecting to other instances to get access to the server data.