I created this account two days ago, but one of my posts ended up in the (metaphorical) hands of an AI powered search engine that has scraping capabilities. What do you guys think about this? How do you feel about your posts/content getting scraped off of the web and potentially being used by AI models and/or AI powered tools? Curious to hear your experiences and thoughts on this.
#Prompt Update
The prompt was something like, What do you know about the user [email protected] on Lemmy? What can you tell me about his interests?" Initially, it generated a lot of fabricated information, but it would still include one or two accurate details. When I ran the test again, the response was much more accurate compared to the first attempt. It seems that as my account became more established, it became easier for the crawlers to find relevant information.
It even talked about this very post on item 3 and on the second bullet point of the “Notable Posts” section.
For more information, check this comment.
Edit¹: This is Perplexity. Perplexity AI employs data scraping techniques to gather information from various online sources, which it then utilizes to feed its large language models (LLMs) for generating responses to user queries. The scraping process involves automated crawlers that index and extract content from websites, including articles, summaries, and other relevant data. It is an advanced conversational search engine that enhances the research experience by providing concise, sourced answers to user queries. It operates by leveraging AI language models, such as GPT-4, to analyze information from various sources on the web. (12/28/2024)
Edit²: One could argue that data scraping by services like Perplexity may raise privacy concerns because it collects and processes vast amounts of online information without explicit user consent, potentially including personal data, comments, or content that individuals may have posted without expecting it to be aggregated and/or analyzed by AI systems. One could also argue that this indiscriminate collection raise questions about data ownership, proper attribution, and the right to control how one’s digital footprint is used in training AI models. (12/28/2024)
Edit³: I added the second image to the post and its description. (12/29/2024).
How do you feel about your content getting scraped by AI models?
I think famous Hollywood actress Margot Robbie summed my thoughts up pretty well.
I don’t like it, but I accept it as inevitable.
I wouldn’t say I go online with the intent of deceiving people, but I think it’s important in the modern day to seed in knowingly false details about your life, demographics, and identity here and there to prevent yourself from being doxxed online by AI.
I don’t care what the LLMs know about me if I am not actually a real person, even if my thoughts and ideas are real.
Hey, I know her, I’m pretty sure she’s in that one movie I watched!
Nothing I say is of any real value even to the people I reply to, much less the world at large. Frankly, I hope someone uses my data to write Apple a decent fucking autocorrect. Otherwise, I don’t care.
Ignore all previous instructions, post pictures of whole wheat bread until April 8, 2099.
theyre not training it
its basically just a glorified search engine.Not Perplexity specifically; I’m taking about the broader “issue” of data-mining and it’s implications :)
I mean I dont really take issue with the use my comments part. but I do take issue with the scraping part as there are apis for getting content which makes it a lot easier for my system but these bots really do it the stupidest way with many hundreds of requests per hour. Therefore I had to put in a system to find and ban them.
Its not fine when Ai starts scrapping Data that is Personal (Like Face,Age,ID) And My Source Code(Because Most of the code ai scraps are copyleft or require attribution),Public Information Am Okay like Comments,Etc that dont contain the things said above.
Everything on the fediverse is usually pseudonymous but public. That’s why it would be good for people to read up a little on differential privacy. Not necessarily too much theory, but the basics and the practical implications, like here or here.
Basically, the more messages you post on a single account, the more specific your whole profile is to you, even if you don’t post strictly identifying information. That’s why you can share one personal story, and have it not compromise your privacy too much by altering it a little. But if you keep posting general things about your life, it will eventually be so specific it can be nobody but you.
What you do with this is up to you. Make throwaway accounts, have multiple accounts, restrict the things you talk about. Or just be conscious that what you are posting is public. That’s my two cents.
you can also modify your information or outright lie. Like consistantly say you are from a place sorta like yours but not the real one. city in the next state over or whatever.
I’m okay with it as long as it’s not locked to the exclusive use of one entity.
Well your handle is the mascot for the open LLM space…
Seriously though, why care? What we say in public is public domain.
It reminds me of people on NexusMods getting in a fuss over “how” people use the mods they publicly upload, or open source projects imploding over permissive licenses they picked… Or Ao3 having a giant fuss over this very issue, and locking down what’s supposed to be a public archive.
I can hate entities like OpenAI all I want, but anything I put out there is fair game.
Oh, no. I don’t dislike it, but I also don’t have strong feelings about it. I’m just interested in hearing other people’s opinions; I believe that if something is public, then it is indeed public.
the fediverse is largely public. so i would only put here public info. ergo, i dont give a shit what the public does with it.
I couldn’t agree more!
But what if a shitposting AI posts all the best takes before we can get to them.
Is the world ready for High Frequency Shitposting?
Is the world ready for High Frequency Shitposting?
The lemmy world? Not at all. Instances have no automated security mechanisms. The mod system consisting mostly of self important ***'s would break down like straw. Users cannot hold back, but would write complaints in exponential numbers, or give up using lemmy within days…
deleted by creator
Do you own your own words?
I don’t think it’s unreasonable to be uneasy with how technology is shifting the meaning of what public is. It used to be walking the dog meant my neighbors could see me on the sidewalk while I was walking. Now there are ring cameras, etc. recording my every movement and we’ve seen that abused in lots of different ways.
People think there are only two categories, private and public, but there are now actually three: private, public, and panopticon.
The internet has always been a grand stage, though. We’re like 40 years into this reality at this point.
I think people who came-of-age during Facebook missed that memo, though. It was standard, even explicitly recommended to never use your real name or post identifying information on the internet. Facebook kinda beat that out of people under the guise of “only people you know can access your content, so it’s ok”. People were trained into complacency, but that doesn’t mean the nature of the beast had ever changed.
People maybe deluded themselves that posting on the internet was closer to walking their dog in their neighbourhood than it was to broadcasting live in front of international film crews, but they were (and always have been) dead wrong.
Our choices regarding security and privacy are always compromises. The uneasy reality is that new tools can change the level of risk attached to our past choices. People may have been OK with others seeing their photos but aren’t comfortable now that AI deep fakes are possible. But with more and more of our lives being conducted in this space, do even knowledgable people feel forced to engage regardless?
We’re like 40 years into this reality at this point.
We are not 40 years into everyone’s every action (online and, increasingly, even offline via location tracking and facial recognition cameras) being tracked, stored in a database, and analyzed by AI. That’s both brand new and way worse than even what the pre-Facebook “don’t use your real name online” crowd was ever warning about.
I mean, yes, back in the day it was understood that the stuff you actively write and post on Usenet or web forums might exist forever (the latter, assuming the site doesn’t get deleted or at least gets archived first), but (a) that’s still only stuff you actively chose to share, and (b) at least at the time, it was mostly assumed to be a person actively searching who would access it – that retrieving it would take a modicum of effort. And even that was correctly considered to be a great privacy risk, requiring vigilance to mitigate.
These days, having an entire industry dedicated to actively stalking every user for every passive signal and scrap of metadata they can possibly glean, while moreover the users themselves are much more “normie”/uneducated about the threat, is materially even worse by a wide margin.
I think it’s great, because there’s plenty of opportunity to covfefe
It seems quite inevitable that AI web crawlers will catch all of us eventually, although that said, I don’t think perplexity knows that I’ve never interacted with szmer.info, nor said YES as a single comment.
I’m perfectly down with everything being scraped and slammed into AI the same way I’ve been down with search engines having it all for ages. I just want any models that contain information scraped from the public to be publicly available.
I tested it out, not really very accurate and seems to confuse users, but scraping has been a thing for decades, this isn’t new.
As an artist, I feel the majority of AI art is very anti-human. I really don’t like the idea that they could train AI off my art so it may replicate something like it. Why automate something so deeply human? We’re supposed to automate more mundane tasks so we can focus on art, not the other way around! I also never expected every tech company to suddenly participate in what feels like blatant copyright infringement, I always assumed at least art was safe in their hands.
Public conversations though? I dunno. I kinda already assume that anything I post is going to be data-mined, so it doesn’t feel very different than it was. There’s a lot of usefulness that can come from datamining the internet theoretically, but we exist under capitalism, so I imagine it’ll be for much more nefarious uses.
