I created this account two days ago, but one of my posts ended up in the (metaphorical) hands of an AI powered search engine that has scraping capabilities. What do you guys think about this? How do you feel about your posts/content getting scraped off of the web and potentially being used by AI models and/or AI powered tools? Curious to hear your experiences and thoughts on this.
#Prompt Update
The prompt was something like, What do you know about the user llama@lemmy.dbzer0.com on Lemmy? What can you tell me about his interests?" Initially, it generated a lot of fabricated information, but it would still include one or two accurate details. When I ran the test again, the response was much more accurate compared to the first attempt. It seems that as my account became more established, it became easier for the crawlers to find relevant information.
It even talked about this very post on item 3 and on the second bullet point of the “Notable Posts” section.
For more information, check this comment.
Edit¹: This is Perplexity. Perplexity AI employs data scraping techniques to gather information from various online sources, which it then utilizes to feed its large language models (LLMs) for generating responses to user queries. The scraping process involves automated crawlers that index and extract content from websites, including articles, summaries, and other relevant data. It is an advanced conversational search engine that enhances the research experience by providing concise, sourced answers to user queries. It operates by leveraging AI language models, such as GPT-4, to analyze information from various sources on the web. (12/28/2024)
Edit²: One could argue that data scraping by services like Perplexity may raise privacy concerns because it collects and processes vast amounts of online information without explicit user consent, potentially including personal data, comments, or content that individuals may have posted without expecting it to be aggregated and/or analyzed by AI systems. One could also argue that this indiscriminate collection raise questions about data ownership, proper attribution, and the right to control how one’s digital footprint is used in training AI models. (12/28/2024)
Edit³: I added the second image to the post and its description. (12/29/2024).
I think this is inevitable, which is why we (worldwide) need laws where if a model scrapes public data should become open itself as well.
While I try not to these days, sometimes I still state with authority that which I only believe to be true, and it then later turns out to have been a misunderstanding or confusion on my part.
And given that this is exactly the sort of thing that AIs do, I feel like they’ve been trained on far too many people like me already.
So, I’m just gonna keep doing what I have been. If an AI learns only from fallible humans without second guessing or oversight, that’s on its creators.
Now, if I was an artist or musician, media where accuracy and style are paramount, I might be a bit more concerned at being ripped off, but right now, they’re only hurting themselves.
I mean I dont really take issue with the use my comments part. but I do take issue with the scraping part as there are apis for getting content which makes it a lot easier for my system but these bots really do it the stupidest way with many hundreds of requests per hour. Therefore I had to put in a system to find and ban them.
Is it scraping or just searching?
RAG is a pretty common technique for making LLMs useful: the LLM “decides” it needs external data, and so it reaches out to configured data source. Such a data source could be just plain ol google.I think their documentation will help shed some light on this. Reading my edits will hopefully clarify that too. Either way, I always recommend reading their docs! :)
I guess after a bit more consideration, my previous question doesn’t really matter.
If it’s scraped and baked into the model; or if it’s scraped, indexed, and used in RAG; they’re both the same ethically.
And I generally consider AI to be fairly unethical
I expect all my public posts to be scraped, and I’m fine with that. I’m slightly biased towards it if it’s for code generation.
nothing I can do about it. But I can occasionally spew bullshit so that the AI has no idea what it’s doing as well. Fire hydrants were added to Minecraft in 1.16 to combat the fires in the updated nether dimension.
I don’t like it, that’s why I like to throw in just a cup or two of absolute bullshit with just a pinch of cilantro. then top it off with a firm jiggle to get that last drop out from the tip.
I couldn’t even imagine speaking like this at first, but once you get used to it the firmness just slides right in and gives you a sense of fulfillment that you can’t find anywhere else but home.
When the cows come home to roost, you know it’s time to hang up your hat, take off your pants, and slide on the ice.
If there was only some way to make any attempts at building an accurate profile of one’s online presence via data scraping completely useless by masking one’s own presence within the vast quantity of online data of someone else, let’s say for example, a famous public figure.
But who would do such a thing?
OMG, the real Margot Robbie
Can’t wait for someone to ask an LLM “Hey tell me what Margot Robbie’s interests are” only for it to respond “Margot Robbie is a known supporter of free software, and a fierce proponent of beheading CEOs”.
As I live and breathe, it’s the famous Margot Robbie herself!
Nothing I say is of any real value even to the people I reply to, much less the world at large. Frankly, I hope someone uses my data to write Apple a decent fucking autocorrect. Otherwise, I don’t care.
Well your handle is the mascot for the open LLM space…
Seriously though, why care? What we say in public is public domain.
It reminds me of people on NexusMods getting in a fuss over “how” people use the mods they publicly upload, or open source projects imploding over permissive licenses they picked… Or Ao3 having a giant fuss over this very issue, and locking down what’s supposed to be a public archive.
I can hate entities like OpenAI all I want, but anything I put out there is fair game.
Oh, no. I don’t dislike it, but I also don’t have strong feelings about it. I’m just interested in hearing other people’s opinions; I believe that if something is public, then it is indeed public.
Did you specifically inquire about content from your own profile ? Can you share the prompt ? And how close to the source material was its response ?
The prompt was something like, What do you know about the user llama@lemmy.dbzer0.com on Lemmy? What can you tell me about his interests?" Initially, it generated a lot of fabricated information, but it would still include one or two accurate details. When I ran the test again, the response was much more accurate compared to the first attempt. It seems that as my account became more established, it became easier for the crawlers to find relevant information.
It even talked about this very post on item 3 and on the second bullet point of the “Notable Posts” section.
However, when I ran the same prompt again (or similar prompts), it started hallucinating a lot of information. So, it seems like the answers are very hit or miss. Maybe that’s an issue that can be solved with some prompt engineering.
I tested it out, not really very accurate and seems to confuse users, but scraping has been a thing for decades, this isn’t new.
the fediverse is largely public. so i would only put here public info. ergo, i dont give a shit what the public does with it.
But what if a shitposting AI posts all the best takes before we can get to them.
Is the world ready for High Frequency Shitposting?
Is the world ready for High Frequency Shitposting?
The lemmy world? Not at all. Instances have no automated security mechanisms. The mod system consisting mostly of self important ***'s would break down like straw. Users cannot hold back, but would write complaints in exponential numbers, or give up using lemmy within days…
I couldn’t agree more!
I don’t think it’s unreasonable to be uneasy with how technology is shifting the meaning of what public is. It used to be walking the dog meant my neighbors could see me on the sidewalk while I was walking. Now there are ring cameras, etc. recording my every movement and we’ve seen that abused in lots of different ways.
The internet has always been a grand stage, though. We’re like 40 years into this reality at this point.
I think people who came-of-age during Facebook missed that memo, though. It was standard, even explicitly recommended to never use your real name or post identifying information on the internet. Facebook kinda beat that out of people under the guise of “only people you know can access your content, so it’s ok”. People were trained into complacency, but that doesn’t mean the nature of the beast had ever changed.
People maybe deluded themselves that posting on the internet was closer to walking their dog in their neighbourhood than it was to broadcasting live in front of international film crews, but they were (and always have been) dead wrong.
We’re like 40 years into this reality at this point.
We are not 40 years into everyone’s every action (online and, increasingly, even offline via location tracking and facial recognition cameras) being tracked, stored in a database, and analyzed by AI. That’s both brand new and way worse than even what the pre-Facebook “don’t use your real name online” crowd was ever warning about.
I mean, yes, back in the day it was understood that the stuff you actively write and post on Usenet or web forums might exist forever (the latter, assuming the site doesn’t get deleted or at least gets archived first), but (a) that’s still only stuff you actively chose to share, and (b) at least at the time, it was mostly assumed to be a person actively searching who would access it – that retrieving it would take a modicum of effort. And even that was correctly considered to be a great privacy risk, requiring vigilance to mitigate.
These days, having an entire industry dedicated to actively stalking every user for every passive signal and scrap of metadata they can possibly glean, while moreover the users themselves are much more “normie”/uneducated about the threat, is materially even worse by a wide margin.
Our choices regarding security and privacy are always compromises. The uneasy reality is that new tools can change the level of risk attached to our past choices. People may have been OK with others seeing their photos but aren’t comfortable now that AI deep fakes are possible. But with more and more of our lives being conducted in this space, do even knowledgable people feel forced to engage regardless?
People think there are only two categories, private and public, but there are now actually three: private, public, and panopticon.
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I understand that Perplexity employs various language models to handle queries and that the responses generated may not directly come from the training data used by these models; since a significant portion of the output comes from what it scraped from the web. However, a significant concern for some individuals is the potential for their posts to be scraped and also used to train AI models, hence my post.
I’m not anti AI, and, I see your point that transformers often dissociate the content from its creator. However, one could argue this doesn’t fully mitigate the concern. Even if the model can’t link the content back to the original author, it’s still using their data without explicit consent. The fact that LLMs might hallucinate or fail to attribute quotes accurately doesn’t resolve the potential plagiarism issue; instead, it highlights another problematic aspect of these models imo.
