Given how Reddit now makes money by selling its data to AI companies, I was wondering how the situation is for the fediverse. Typically you can block AI crawlers using robot.txt (Verge reported about it recently: https://www.theverge.com/24067997/robots-txt-ai-text-file-web-crawlers-spiders). But this only works per domain/server, and the fediverse is about many different servers interacting with each other.
So if my kbin/lemmy or Mastodon server blocks OpenAI’s crawler via robot.txt, what does that even mean when people on other servers that don’t block this crawler are boosting me on Mastodon, or if I reply to their posts. I suspect unless all the servers I interact with block the same AI crawlers, I cannot prevent my posts from being used as AI training data?
Is it? Reddit is technically “public” too in the sense that you can view all the content without an account, yet Google and others pay for the data anyway. And for many years, people made stuff public and could reasonably expect it won’t show up in any major search engines because Google, MS and others respected robot.txt. I know it was never legally binding. I’m also not naive, I know I give up control when I post publicly and there won’t ever be a perfect solution to the AI crawler situation. But a lot is changing right now, regulatory and technologically.
the fact that google has to pay for the data proves the walled garden you claim is public.
the fediverse is public, by default. it publicly distributes information to other publicly accessible servers… by default.
its public information on publicly accessible servers that are opt-out by default. publicly.
im baffled how people can have some expectation of privacy in such a clearly defined public space.