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?
I wonder if content should carry some license automatically. Like if you agree to the TOS of an instance, your comments are automatically all licensed as CC:BY or CC:O or the more restrictive license of choice of the instance owner.
There’s someone running around lemmy with a creative commons sharealike link as a signature. Quite funny to be honest. I can’t remember the username though. They’re bound to show up sooner or later :)
All rights reserved.
Oh yeah it was @onlinepersona@programming.dev
You go champ! If an AI starts ending their posts with a CC BY-NC-SA license I know who to credit!
You’re welcome
I don’t object to my content being used for training. I do object to Reddit profiting from that data. It’s the reason I basically don’t participate on Reddit anymore. Anything I post in the fediverse I am aware I am offering it up for free to be crawled and used as seen fit as long as it is not monetized without my consent. I don’t consider model training to be monetization.
Fair reason for not participating in Reddit. I would argue though that while model training is not monetization per se, with this “AI as a platform” rationale promoted by OpenAI, Google and others, there is very direct link between model training and monetization. Monetization without your consent - especially when these companies refuse to reveal the sources of their training data. Wouldn’t be surprised if GPT-4 or Gemini have been trained on your Fediverse posts, or will be in the near future
You are correct. Some of the largest instances block bot traffic, but most don’t, meaning your posts have been seen by AI crawlers and will continue to be so.
Short of not participating in federation and only discussing things within a private non-federated community on a personal instance or something, I don’t think there’s a way to prevent it.
Mine is but a wee instance, but our bot blocklist is large. For the ones that slip through, once identified as bot traffic, the firewalls go up in their direction.
Thanks for confirming. It’s unfortunate that people who are outraged about Reddit selling their data to AI companies don’t really have an alternative in the fediverse.
I guess the best hope is for new mechanisms to control AI crawlers to emerge, so they can be blocked per user rather than per domain. Maybe https://spawning.ai will come up with something. One can hope.
I don’t see it as hypocritical at all. Public comments are, for me at least, put out for the public good. The same reason someone might license open source code with the MIT license. My issue with Reddit is that they restricted who can obtain the data and then privately sold them to only the highest bidder. They should be freely available to all who want to view them without restrictions on money or power.
it really sounds like you really want a walled garden so you can control your… .whatever. the fediverse is public by nature, so discussing how you can control public information is kinda… weird.
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.
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.
I don’t expect anything, I was merely asking a question to clarify this
Well, I hope my answer clarifies it. You can’t prevent LLMs from being trained on your public posts.
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!
Can you point to where the fediverse collectively said that? Speak for yourself and don’t act like fediverse was designed to suit your definition of freedom. The fediverse is open and federated as in, there are multiple instances and owners without a centralized administration and the owners who hosts those instances decide what to lock down.
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.
Surely the AI crawler company can set up their own node. They post nothing but collect everything going forward from the time they go live?
After reading your comment I was disappointed openai.social doesn’t exist
But robots.txt is not a legal document — and 30 years after its creation, it still relies on the good will of all parties involved
You can ask nicely, they can (and will) ignore it.
Also, I’ve already seen complaints about AI companies scraping everything ignoring
robots.txtAnd we would block the obedient and useful crawlers while doing no harm to malicious
