Technology

This is actually a thing. It's called "Model Collapse". You can read about it here.

I wonder if Open AI or any of the other firms have thought to put in any kind of stipulations about monitoring and moderating reddit content to reduce ai generated posts and reduce risk of model collapse.

Anybody who's looked at reddit in the past 2 years especially has seen the impact of ai pretty clearly. If I was running open ai I wouldn't want that crap contaminating my models.

I'm not a lawyer. But isn't the reason they had to go to reddit to get permission is because users hand over over ownership to reddit the moment you post. And since there's no such clause on Lemmy, they'd have to ask the actual authors of the comments for permission instead?

Mind you, I understand there's no technical limitation that prevents bots from harvesting the data, I'm talking about the legality. After all, public does not equate public domain.

What if I say the word gasp fuck?

Know any bots or ways to perma delete all Reddit comments?

Realistically, when you're operating at Reddit's scale, you're probably keeping a history of each comment for analytics purposes.

Now they get to train on all the "deleted" comments/posts as well.

Fediverse is designed to do exactly that. It's free flow of information which is a good thing. Don't let corporations hijack this beautiful concept. We all want information to be free.

I’m not mad about the scraping. The linkedin scraping case pretty much cemented that there was nothing that could be done to stop it. I’m just mad that I can no longer use the app of my choice. No such problem with Lemmy.

Scraping through a website at the scale they are talking about isn't really viable. You need access to the API so that you can have very targeted requests.

This is why reddit changed their API pricing and screwed over everyone using third party apps. They can make more money selling access to LLM trainers than they could from having millions of people using apps that rely on the API.

There's actually legal precedent against scrapping a website through unofficial channels, even if the information is public. But basically, if you scrape a website and hinder their ability to operate, it falls under "virtual trespassing".

I'm assuming it would be even worse now that everyone is using the cloud and that scrapping their site would cause a noticeable increase in resource cost (and thus, directly cost them more money because of cloud usage fees).

It's why APIs are such a big deal. They provide you with an official, controlled, entry point to a platform's data.

You're technically right, but nobody anticipated and therefore agreed on their posts being used for training LLMs.

It's not about it being used to train AI. It's about the AI either not being open source/I don't get access to it (i.e. not benefitting me) or reddit being paid for my comments (i e. also not benefitting me).

If this AI training would get me or the public access to the AI, or I would be paid for my comments instead of Reddit, I'd be fine with it.

Hate to break it to you, but the time to do that was over a year ago, and even then it wasn’t ever really a sure thing - we don’t really know what their backup policies are around that stuff.

This is what the former power user community that made an exodus from Reddit roughly a year ago has been trying to communicate, but a ton of people here seem to enjoy keeping their toes in the water over there, with rather predictable consequences (literally, the post we’re commenting on).

All that said: I am very much looking forward to the absolutely titanic lawsuit around GDPR I’m sure is in the works over this.

Worth doing, but I suspect they’re sending OpenAI snapshots of the database from before you did that.