Basically a deer with a human face. Despite probably being some sort of magical nature spirit, his interests are primarily in technology and politics and science fiction.
Spent many years on Reddit and is now exploring new vistas in social media.
Indeed. There are lots of proposals for perfectly portable decentralized user identities, subscriptions that transcend specific instances, and whatnot, but until those things actually arrive that’s not the Fediverse we’re dealing with. It’s a hassle having to switch instances.
It’s also possible that you’ve inadvertently wandered into an asshole convention.
The abuse of power is instance-specific, fortunately. The whole point of all this is that there are multiple instances. Just ignore the ones that are run by tankies, those instances are theirs to wallow in if they want.
Are there any laws against it where? You need to specify a jurisdiction.
My main reaction would be that whoever is paying for that data is a fool. It’s available for free.
That’s why I was suggesting such a simple approach, it doesn’t require AI or machine learning except in the most basic sense. If you want to try applying fancier stuff you could use those basic word-based filters as a first pass to reduce the cost.
Another more general property that might be worth looking for would be substantially similar posts that get cross-posted to a wide variety of communities in a short period of time. That’s a pattern that can have legitimate reasons but it’s probably worth raising a flag to draw extra scrutiny.
One idea for making it computationally lightweight but also robust against bots “tweaking” the wording of each post might be to fingerprint each post based on rare word usage. Spam is likely to mention the brand name of whatever product it’s hawking, which is probably not going to be a commonly used word. So if a bunch of posts come along that all use the same rare words all at once, that’s suspicious. I could also easily see situations where this gives false positives, of course - if some product suddenly does something newsworthy you could see a spew of legitimate posts about it in a variety of communities. But no automated spam checker is perfect.
Tinned tuna is also nice to add for some extra flavor and variety.
I’ve got a bunch of frozen mashed potatoes pre-divided into meal-sized tupperware. Microwave one of those and it’s quite hearty.
I’ve also got a rice cooker and it’s super easy to make something both substantial and tasty with one of those, dump in the rice and water and then add a tin of condensed soup as well. Push the button and come back later to dump it onto a plate. I’ve found most kinds of condensed soup work well, though avoid anything with “cream of” in the title as those can end up unpleasantly goopy.
And some of those hosts can decide to serve up their content to AI trainers. Some of those hosts can be run by AI trainers, specifically to gather data for training. If one was to try to prevent that then one would be attacking the open nature of the fediverse.
There have been many people raging about their content being used to train AIs without permission or compensation. I’m speaking to those people, not the “fediverse collectively”. As you suggest, the fediverse can’t say anything collectively.
I didn’t say it’d work great. I’m talking about what’s legally possible to do.
The US federal government is in many ways prevented from doing the right things by the details of its constitution. Even when the Supreme Court is genuinely following it, there’s a bunch of stuff in there that lets individual states do crazy stupid things that the federal government can’t really stop. So even given the powers that OP has given me in this scenario there’s some big limits to what can be done. If he was to give me the ability to amend the constitution or control the state governments I’d be able to do a lot more.
Gun control wouldn’t be my top priority in that case, but when I got around to it I’d put a ton of restrictions on interstate commerce related to guns and removing laws that may be preventing states from passing regulations on them. I’d be using my mind control to force the Supreme Court to interpret “well-regulated militia” in a sane way, so those states will then be able to put the brakes on if they want.
I don’t think there’s a lot that the American federal government can do to directly ban most kinds of firearms, based on how their constitution is set up, but stopping the large scale flow of guns (and ammo) into states that don’t want them should go a long way to curbing the problem for them.
That’s not enough support to be able to handle the gun control question. The supreme court is the real key. In theory it should be possible to pass sane gun control laws but over the years the supreme court has bent itself into pretzels trying to interpret any random yahoo with an AR-15 as being a “well-regulated militia.”
Yup. There are dumps of Reddit’s entire archive of comments and posts available via torrent, I suspect the only reason Reddit’s getting paid for that stuff right now is that it’s a legal ass-covering that’s comparatively cheap. Anyone who’s a little daring could use it to train an LLM and if they prep the data well enough it’d be hard to even notice.
Well, I hope my answer clarifies it. You can’t prevent LLMs from being trained on your public posts.
I really don’t see how it would be physically possible to do that and still allow the content to be publicly seen by other humans.
We’re sick of closed walled-garden monoliths like Reddit! Let’s move to an open federated protocol where anyone can participate and the APIs can’t be locked down!
…wait, not like that!
Yeah. This is what you signed up for when you joined the Fediverse, the ActivityPub protocol broadcasts your content to any other servers that ask for it. And just generally, that’s how the Internet works. You’re putting up a public billboard and expecting to be able to control who gets to look at it. That’s not going to work. Even robots.txt is just a gentleman’s agreement, it’s not enforceable.
If you really want to prevent AI from training on your content with any degree of certainty you’re probably looking for a private forum of some kind that’s run by someone you trust.
For reasons I no longer remember, about 14 years ago I stumbled across The Endless Forest. I poked around on the web page a bit, decided it was interesting but not interesting enough to actually install, and moved on. A short while later I saw something on Reddit that I felt like posting a comment on, and so I created an account and this was the first username that popped to mind.
Quite some time later I got into modding a game called Minetest, and a very common element in its API is the “facedir” of a node - short for facing direction. I had a lot of people assume I’d drawn my name from that, but it was sheer coincidence.
Fediverse postings are probably also being used for AI training. Just so you won’t be too shocked when it eventually comes out in the future.
deleted by creator
Sounds like a purity spiral may be revving up.