- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
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.
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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.
A mild copyright violation based on a system designed around the constant distribution of copies of things is NOT a parable about sexual violence, people.
I feel like this extremely insensitive rape take is the fediverse’s version of the Godwin Law.
ITT people not recognizing that there’s a difference between comparing and equating.
People, it’s possible to make analogies to more serious situations without saying the two things are equal. The statement above is saying it’s there’s a shared mentality, not a shared level of consequence/seriousness.
You’re right but…
It’s the same with open source products. Companies just take it, make billions off it, give nothing back, will try the embrace, enhance , extinguish tactics, will hide any GPL licensing because of course they would…
It’ll happen anyway, and you can’t stop it. Like you said, girls dress to rape is bullshit. But if a girl goes in a skimpy bikini in a Bombay bus at 9pm, then you’re kind of asking for something. Open source is open for everyone, that is kind of the point, it’s the reason why it became so big in the first place, but it WILL be abused because there are always abusers out there
Are you seriously co.parong having your shitty Internet comments scrapped by AI to someone actually raping you? Wtf?
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
Yeah but doesn’t hubzilla (https://hubzilla.org/page/info/discover) applies a privacy layer to how its content it is distributed? The issue then lies also in how the social network gets implemented in function of its purpose, in hubzilla vs lemmy case for instance is a public board vs a social network
That doesn’t mean it’s licensed to be used in a for profit software.
I’ve had this argument with other people, but essentially at this point there is no licensing beyond server ownership here, and most servers don’t have any licenses defined. Even if they do, then sure they did something wrong… but how would you ever prove it or enforce it? The only way to actually disallow them is to switch from open federation to closed - which goes against what we’re trying to build with federation.
There has been instances before where LLMs gave up clues as to what source it used. When that happens, they can be sued.
Im okay with people using our data for whatever, since it’s all open and it should be. But I rather put a little bit of effort to make for profit use technically illegal. It’s better than nothing.
If it ends up being ruled that training an LLM is fair use so long as the LLM doesn’t reproduce the works it is trained on verbatim, then licensing becomes irrelevant.
Just because our data is accessible doesn’t mean it’s legally licensed to be used by a for profit company. Free doesn’t meant you can do what you want with it, it just means no cost.
I don’t disagree. I’m just saying that so long as you’re putting content on this platform, you are powerless to stop any service from using the features of the platform in whatever way they want.
It was built for easy and open consumption of user content by other services.
Oh yeah for sure. Anything I type here is for the whole world to see and I’m okay with that as long as it’s anonymous.
People can complain, but the Fediverse is built to make consuming user’s data easy
Correction: it is built to make consuming users’s data not easy, but more human.
WHat you are thinking of is AP, not “Fediverse”, and even then that’s a stretch.
Correction: it is built to make consuming users’s data not easy, but more human.
What does that even mean?
WHat you are thinking of is AP, not “Fediverse”, and even then that’s a stretch.
Honestly, I think Fediverse is inseparable from AP (or some similar protocol). You can split hairs if you want, but the thing that makes it different from all other social media services is that it allows the content created by users on one service to be imported into a different service.
You can hope and dream that it is only services like Lemmy consuming user content from services like Mastadon, but this same protocol makes it easy for services like ChatGPT to consume the same data.
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.
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.
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.
I’m surprised as well. We put our posts up for anyone to replicate and republish, yet we still get mad when somebody replicates and republishes it. It does not make sense. Activitypub is an open network with zero privacy expectations.
And yet we don’t want our posts to be fed into AI slop, nor do we want independent hosts to pay for the massive amount of traffic generated by a massive corporate entity to trying to consume data en masse.
What has our copyright got to do with privacy expectation?
His Mastodon: https://mastodon.social/@jsecretan/with_replies
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
I mean maven is super bloated so it wouldn’t surprise me
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.
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.
Motherfucker this is what hashtags are for.
So you don’t ever want to learn about new things? And even if you did, you wouldn’t want those new things be efficiently suggested to you and instead be bundled with a bunch of other boring crap?
Also, what you’re asking for is what the tool seems to do. You would put the slider all the way to one side to avoid having new stuff suggested. Existing social media platforms often just shove stuff at you endlessly.
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?
That’s right; they’ve always been documented to be DMs, not PMs.
But because of the discordbabies people confuse both.
Well the problem is user perception/understanding.
The reality is they were literally direct messages, not private messages.
Defederation is more about not being flooded with 1000x more users than the Fediverse currently has
Unfortunately a lot of people think it’s to do with scraping as well. The amount of “defederate Threads so that they can’t scrape my data” posts I saw was about 50-50 with the sensible takes.
So far we only have a corpo fedi-twitter in form of Threads. In that case non-corpo instance user has to specifically follow someone before their content is federated so that sounds like a bit overblown issue.
Seems pretty easy for any corporation to setup something like https://lemmy-federate.com/ but for Maston/IceShrimp/Misskey accounts to federate the important corporate accounts to the targeted non-corpo instances
There’s no real harm in that unless they spam, at which point those accounts can be banned which shouldn’t overwhelm moderators.
Plus even if you defederate them, oops, it’s all public anyway!
I was confused at first, I thought it was the Apache project
Classic Scam Altman!
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.
If that’s truly the case, nothing on earth can protect your data.
That being said, large corporations are far more liable to consumer protection lawsuits, especially in areas like the EU.
They also have enough lawyer power to find loop holes. Stuff like if your main compute cluster is in xyz state or in xyz islands then you can get away with a fine the fraction what you can make with this data.
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.
Why do you think it won’t hold water legally? There’s a case going right now against Github Copilot for scraping GPL licences code, even spitting it back out verbatim, and not making “open” AI actually open.
Creative Commons is not a joke licence. It actually is used by artists, authors, and other creative types.
Imagine Maven or another company doing the same shit they just did and it coming to light there were a bunch of noncommercially licences content in there. The authors could band together for a class action lawsuit and sue their asses. Given the reaction of users here and on mastodon, I wouldn’t even be surprised if it did happen.
I mostly mention that to fend off the people that use the main basis of their argument as the effectiveness because that’s not why I’m doing it.
I do think it could work legally if the courts want to remain consistent, but that isn’t guaranteed.
Don’t we also need a critical mass of people adding licenses to posts? So that a class action suit can be launched. Because it would be inviable and a very rapid path to self-defeat if people started to try and individually sue big corpo.
Also I’m missing a way to automatically add this to my posts. Something like a browser extension.
This post is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.
Yeah the more people the better so its easier to have a class action lawsuit.
Also for me I’m using a text expander so that after I type a shortcut it automatically adds the rest of the text for me.
Also for me I’m using a text expander so that after I type a shortcut it automatically adds the rest of the text for me.
I request of you, show me your ways!
Well on firefox/chrome extensions you can search for text expander and choose an extension that works for you.
Or if you are using a phone you can do the same on the app store and I think there should be a few options.
Once you download one of them it should give instructions on how to use it, but in general it asks you to create a phrase that you want to be automatically triggered and a shorter phrase that automatically replaced with the longer phrase.
For example-
long phrase: The quick brown fox jumped over the moon.
short phrase: /qfox
and every time you typed /qfox it would replace it with “The quick brown fox jumped over the moon.”
It’s especially for these kinds of dumb cases where they simply copy content wholesale and boast about it. With more people licencing their contents as non commercial, the “hot water” these companies get in could not just be trivial but actually legal.
Would be great if web and mobile clients supported signatures or a “licence” field from which signatures were generated. Even better would be if people smarter than me added a feature to poison AI training data. This could also be done by a signature or some other method.
I don’t know; AFAIK, Reddit successfully argued that they own Wallstreetbets’ trademarks in court. That might void all of these licenses depending on the ToS of the instance being used.
Lol that shit don’t do shit
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.
I don’t think you can use gpl for anything but code. Creative commons license would be more appropriate.
Does Maven have anything to do with AI despite being backed by a dude who works for open AI?
Yes, the entire platform trains itself on posts within its platform to make algorithmic decisions and present it to users. Instead of likes or follows, you just have that.
But it doesn’t actually produce content that’s AI generated by an LLM model?
yeah but who posts to mastodon under public instead of unlisted/quiet public?
Pretty much everybody.
