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- cross-posted to:
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Maven, a new social network backed by OpenAI’s Sam Altman, found itself in a controversy today when it imported a huge amount of posts and profiles from the Fediverse, and then ran AI analysis to alter the content.
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…
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.
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.
This. If Maven offered me a stipend for life to have my content used (because they’re not going to remove it in 3 or 6 months, right? once ingested it’s there forever), then I would be far more open to at least discussing their terms.
Consent isn’t legally required if it’s fair use. Whether it’s fair use remains to be ruled on by the courts.