- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- fediverse@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- fediverse@lemmy.ml
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.
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.
Alternatively, use a closed ecosystem susceptible to data rot and loss.
Would you want art to be unfindable because scraping for AI image generation happens? It’s a solution looking for problems.
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
That doesn’t mean it’s licensed to be used in a for profit software.
If it ends up being ruled that training an LLM is fair use so long as the LLM doesn’t reproduce the works it is trained on verbatim, then licensing becomes irrelevant.
I’ve had this argument with other people, but essentially at this point there is no licensing beyond server ownership here, and most servers don’t have any licenses defined. Even if they do, then sure they did something wrong… but how would you ever prove it or enforce it? The only way to actually disallow them is to switch from open federation to closed - which goes against what we’re trying to build with federation.
There has been instances before where LLMs gave up clues as to what source it used. When that happens, they can be sued.
Im okay with people using our data for whatever, since it’s all open and it should be. But I rather put a little bit of effort to make for profit use technically illegal. It’s better than nothing.
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.
I don’t disagree. I’m just saying that so long as you’re putting content on this platform, you are powerless to stop any service from using the features of the platform in whatever way they want.
It was built for easy and open consumption of user content by other services.
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.
What does that even mean?
Honestly, I think Fediverse is inseparable from AP (or some similar protocol). You can split hairs if you want, but the thing that makes it different from all other social media services is that it allows the content created by users on one service to be imported into a different service.
You can hope and dream that it is only services like Lemmy consuming user content from services like Mastadon, but this same protocol makes it easy for services like ChatGPT to consume the same data.