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.
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…
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
