They always were.
Only now they’ve agreed to pay Reddit for it. This is what their third party lockdown was really all about.
They’re helping themselves to your Lemmy comments for free, as that’s just how it’s designed. If you post anything publicly anywhere, it’s getting slurped up by a bot somewhere.
I’m not a lawyer. But isn’t the reason they had to go to reddit to get permission is because users hand over over ownership to reddit the moment you post. And since there’s no such clause on Lemmy, they’d have to ask the actual authors of the comments for permission instead?
Mind you, I understand there’s no technical limitation that prevents bots from harvesting the data, I’m talking about the legality. After all, public does not equate public domain.
users hand over over ownership to reddit the moment you post
Not ownership. Just permission to copy and distribute freely. Which basically is necessary to run a service like this, where user-submitted content is displayed.
And since there’s no such clause on Lemmy, they’d have to ask the actual authors of the comments for permission instead?
It’s more of a fuzzy area, but simply by posting on a federated service you’re agreeing to let that service copy and display your comments, and sync with other servers/instances to copy and display your comments to their users. It’s baked into the protocol, that your content will be copied automatically all over the internet.
Does that imply a license to let software be run on that text? Does it matter what the software does with it, like display the content in a third party Mobile app? What about when it engages in text to speech or braille conversion for accessibility? Or index the page for a search engine? Does AI training make any difference at that point?
The fact is, these services have APIs, and the APIs allow for the efficient copying and ingest of the user-created information, with metadata about it, at scale. From a technical perspective obviously scraping is easy. But from a copyright perspective submitting your content into that technical reality is implicit permission to copy, maybe even for things like AI training.
Well even if it was a legal argument, they wouldn’t care. Like Facebook and all the rest. They say they don’t share your data but we all know that’s a lie
They are public communication platforms, how could they not share your data publicly?
Some day historians will be able to look back at this moment and be able to determine it was what caused ChatGPT to become horny and weird.
Only an idiot would decide to mindlessly trawl Reddit to train an LLM. They’ll be confused when their model suddenly is confidently wrong about everything and have no clue.
You are a hundred percent right, but how many idiots are there out there?
Uncountably many
Finally found a use for MS Edge, loaded up Nuke Reddit History and removed all comments and posts: https://microsoftedge.microsoft.com/addons/detail/nuke-reddit-history/bklbcgohenjegdibgmppligaapohkgip
Hate to break it to you, but the time to do that was over a year ago, and even then it wasn’t ever really a sure thing - we don’t really know what their backup policies are around that stuff.
This is what the former power user community that made an exodus from Reddit roughly a year ago has been trying to communicate, but a ton of people here seem to enjoy keeping their toes in the water over there, with rather predictable consequences (literally, the post we’re commenting on).
All that said: I am very much looking forward to the absolutely titanic lawsuit around GDPR I’m sure is in the works over this.
Not even a year ago. Reddit has been used for training data for well over a decade. We used it in 2012 in an AI class.
My point is that there was not a revenue-generating b2b contract allowing another company to exploit it at scale, while compensating Reddit directly.
LLMs have been training on Reddit posts since at least 2012. Nothing really new here.
It’s ground zero for Bots training on other Bots
So they filled reddit with bot generated content, and now they’re selling back the same stuff likely to the company who generated most of it.
At what point can we call an AI inbred?
This is actually a thing. It’s called “Model Collapse”. You can read about it here.
“Model collapse” can be easily avoided by keeping old human data with new synthetic data in the training set. The old archives of Reddit content from before there was AI are still around.
A model trained on jokes about bacon, narwhals, and rage comics.
By “old archives” I mean everything from 2022 and earlier.
But there were still bots making shit up back then. r/SubredditSimulator was pretty popular for awhile, and repost and astroturfing bots were a problem form decades on Reddit.
Existing AIs such as ChatGPT were trained in part on that data so obviously they’ve got ways to make it work. They filtered out some stuff, for example - the “glitch tokens” such as solidgoldmagikarp were evidence of that.
This form of propaganda is my pet peeve. It’s not “your posts” as soon as you put something to public you don’t get to eat your cake. It’s out there, you shared it. Don’t share it if you don’t want humanity to ingest and use it.
You’re technically right, but nobody anticipated and therefore agreed on their posts being used for training LLMs.
Public information is public information.
Oh boy have I bad news for you. You ever heard of copyright?
Have you ever heard of fair use?
