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Maven Imported 1.12 Million Fediverse Posts
(wedistribute.org)
Pretty wild
The wildest part is that he's surprised that Mastodon peeps would react negatively to their posts being scrapped without consent or even notification and fed into an AI model. Like, are you for real dude? Have you spent more than 4 seconds on Mastodon and noticed their (our?) general attitude towards AI? Come the hell on...
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.
Yeah, and girls dress for rape. They are just aaasking for it!
I will go off on a tangent.
Just because something is online it does not mean I give a full green light on anything.
Fuck this noise of social parasitic networks hammering free service therefore pay with data into everyone's skull. And everyone posts crap.
It is a billion dollar business. LLMs are extracting millions and will generate more.
You know why? Because worthless shit you post online is not worthless after all.
Yes, you are reading it right. Pay me. Pay us.
Before anyone ridicules this. Yall be defending billion dollar corporations, staffed with millionaires below C-levels.
People should start demanding money from these greedy assholes.
I don't think they're making a moral argument, but pointing out the reality of the situation as it stands.
This is a problem that can only be fixed through legislation and aggressive enforcement backed by large punitive actions.
Until that happens, it's better to acknowledge and understand the reality of the situation, than to believe that a morally righteous condemnation will somehow unmake that reality.
It sucks. I agree with your philosophical stance, except for the payment for personal data, as I'd prefer a complete opt-out. However, none of that changes where we're at right now.
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Alternatively, use a closed ecosystem susceptible to data rot and loss.
Want to contribute to our open source project? Join our discord
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
I would rather my content be open to the world for however it wants to use it than owned by a single company that gets to profit off aggregating and selling it.
Fully agree. The annoyances of free and open are vastly outweighed by the negatives
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It sounds like they weren't "being fed into an AI model" as in being used as training material, they were just being evaluated by an AI model. However...
Have you spent more than 4 seconds on Mastodon and noticed their (our?) general attitude towards AI?
Yeah, the general attitude of wild witch-hunts and instant zero-to-11 rage at the slightest mention of it. Doesn't matter what you're actually doing with AI, the moment the mob thinks they scent blood the avalanche is rolling.
It sounds like Maven wants to play nice, but if the "general attitude" means that playing nice is impossible why should they even bother to try?
The anti-AI knee-jerk reactions can be extreme, I agree, but at the same time one of important features of Mastodon is that your feed is nor controlled by an algorithm in any way.
So when a company comes, takes those posts and screws with them to create an algorithm to show them, I understand people getting angry - at least some of them joined to be free of that exact thing...
One of the important features of Mastodon is that you can choose what your feed is. Everyone's feed has an algorithm determining what's in it even if it's just a simple "list the posts of everyone I've subscribed to in chronological order."
If someone else wants to see a feed of content that is curated and sorted in a different way, why get angry at them? They're not forcing you to see that feed.
Yeah, the general attitude of wild witch-hunts and instant zero-to-11 rage at the slightest mention of it. Doesn’t matter what you’re actually doing with AI, the moment the mob thinks they scent blood the avalanche is rolling.
This wasn't always the case. A lot of research on NLP uses scraped social media posts (2010's). People never had a problem with that (at least the outrage wasn't visible back then). The problem now is that our content is being used to create an AI product where there is zero consent taken from the end-user.
Source: My research colleagues used to work on NLP
For me, more specifically, the problem is they took my data and made a tool to sell it back to me without paying me for it.
I have no real issue with current ai stuff, other than you're effectively taking our stuff and want us to pay you for doing so.
If they weren't freeloading on everyone, I suspect you'd have a lot less angry people.
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It's not surprised. He's acting surprised because he got caught. It's pretty standard for these jerkass tech bros. "Move fast break things" is code "break laws be unethical" - as I think we've all seen if you do it often and fast enough you can keep way ahead of any kind of accountability because everybody else is trying to play catch up well the last thing has already filtered out of the news cycle.
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Look at that shit-eating grin, he knows. There's no way someone can be that out of touch, right? Right?!?
How does someone with a last name that close to secretion choose to go by Jimmy?
I was confused why a package manager would need to import posts from a social network.
Why name a new product the same as a very popular existing product?
Obviously it's named after Maven Black-Briar
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I was confused on what they were trying to accomplish, and even after reading the article I am still somewhat confused.
Instead, when a user posts something, the algorithm automatically reads the content and tags it with relevant interests so it shows up on those pages. Users can turn up the serendipity slider to branch out beyond their stated interests, and the algorithm running the platform connects users with related interests.
Perhaps I'm a minority, but I don't see myself getting much utility out of this. I already know what my interests are, and don't have much interest in growing them algorithmically. If a topic is really interesting, I'll eventually find out about it via an actual human.
Yeah, we're trying to get the fuck away from algorithms. That's what makes the fediverse such a big draw currently, for me.
Only algorithm I need is posts I subscribe to, in descending order. That's about it
You're on slrpnk.net, I assume it's not implementing any of this stuff. As long as you don't sign up for Maven I don't see how this is going to affect you.
I mean yeah, maybe it won't affect me directly, I like the instance I'm on and it's a pretty respectable one. However, indirectly, this is very relevant to any Fediverse user, regardless of the instance or platform they're using. Allowing abuses like this to happen without any pushback is a surefire way of turning this place into a shithole just like the rest of the internet. I appreciate the fact that, at least for now, it's different here.
Also, maybe this isn't my only homebase? Just saying.
TikTok is really popular operating on essentially the same principle. I, for one want nothing to do with that.
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That's why I keep saying it's pointless to defederate corpos. They'll just scrape everything before you notice.
The fact they even got DMs from at least one instance is crazy.
And it's also damming for private messaging on mastodon.
I once read vague complaints about it being a rushed implementation. While I won't trust those without evidence, I for sure wouldn't trust mastodon with my PMs. At least, not until how this was allowed to happen is figured out and fixed if necessary.
P.S. I'm still not sure I believe in PMs in the fediverse. If I need to share something and care about keeping it private, I'd rather move the conversation elsewhere.
I was under the impression that DM's on Mastodon (and Lemmy too) weren't ever stated as being secure and I think that they were both pretty transparent about this particular aspect.
You're right, regarding Mastodon. I won't edit my other comment, though, both to preserve the original chain of thought and because that brings up another discussion.
To quote the EFF:
We feel that the intended usage of the feature will not determine people’s expectation of privacy while using it.
Offering people a feature with preexisting expectations, similar to other things that fulfill those expectations, then telling people "We know it looks like a duck but don't expect it to quack!"
...It begs the question: was the feature really a good idea?
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Defederation is more about not being flooded with 1000x more users than the Fediverse currently has
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Plus even if you defederate them, oops, it’s all public anyway!
Classic Scam Altman!
I was confused at first, I thought it was the Apache project
Oh shit, the persona guy was right! We should all be adding license to our comments, so could not legally train model that are then used for commercial purposes.
The easiest way is a sitewide NoAI meta tag, since it’s the current standard. Researchers are much more likely to respect a common standard and extremely unlikely to respect a single user’s personal solution adding a link to their comments.
This is the only way I see it being acceptable. How do we add this to instances?
I feel like the bad thing about this is, whereas the researchers will mostly respect this, companies who want to make money out of data will still secretly keep using the data anyways. I am more ok with the data being used for non-profit research and not for making money but this would likely have the opposite effect.
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Thanks for linking me 🙏 The makers of Maven probably set off a bomb now and people might ask for anti-AI features on the clients and servers.
yeah they were. I hope more people start doing it even if it doesn't legally hold water its still a good way to show that fediverse users won't stand for that.
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Am I misunderstanding this, or did they just fuck up the integration so it's one way with a plan to make it two ways after, and the AI alteration is just sentiment analysis on whatever they took?
Looks like it.
In addition to pulling in posts, the import process seems to be running AI sentiment analysis to add tags and relational data after content reaches Maven’s servers. This is a core part of Maven’s product: instead of follows or likes, a model trains itself on its own data in an attempt to surface unique content algorithmically.
But of course, that news doesn't give the reader those lovely rage endorphins or draw clicks.
This is the Fediverse, having the content we post get spread around to other servers is the whole point of all this. Is this a face-eating leopard situation? People are genuinely surprised and upset that the stuff we post here is ending up being shown in other places?
There is one thing I see here that raises my eyebrows:
Even more shocking is the revelation that somehow, even private DMs from Mastodon were mirrored on their public site and searchable. How this is even possible is beyond me, as DM’s are ostensibly only between two parties, and the message itself was sent from two hackers.town users.
But that sounds to me like a hackers.town problem, it shouldn't be sending out private DMs to begin with.
They kind of fucked up everything in approaching this by not talking to the community and collecting feedback, making dumb assumptions in how the integration was supposed to work, leaking private posts, running everything through their AI system, and neglecting to represent the remote content as having came from anywhere else.
The other thing is that Maven's whole concept is training an AI over and over again on the platform's posts. Ostensibly, this could mean that a lot of Fediverse content ended up in the training data.
Genuine question, do instances not have a GPL license on their content? With that license, anyone can use all the data but only for open source software.
Instances don't actually own the copyright to comments. The poster owns the copyright and licenses it to the instance. Which lets the instance use it, but not sublicense to others.
The current assumption made by these companies is that AI training is fair use, and is therefore legal regardless of license. There are still many ongoing court cases over this, but one case was already resolved in favor or the fair use position.
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this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2024
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