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.
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.
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.