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...
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.
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.
You don't need to explain to me how the Fediverse works and I never said I have any expectation of privacy. But generally speaking, you're overlooking the fact that there always have been rules for what can, and cannot be done with information that is publicly available. Just because someone publicly posts his Facebook profile picture doesn't mean it's legal to use in an ad without permission, for example. People might break the rules, yes, but then they might face consequences, and that alone prevents many from breaking them in the first place. Not perfect, but better than nothing. And I'm saying we're in a process where rules are being renegotiated when it comes to using public information for AI training
That's fair, but I think if AI companies would be legally required to disclose the sources of their training data and if you make some successor to robot.txt legally binding as well (both is being discussed in the EU for example), at least the "bigger players" in the AI industry would respect the rules. Better than nothing
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
Blocking AI crawlers on the fediverse
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...