• @brucethemoose
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    1 month ago

    Would lemmy instances do this?

    I know they can’t afford to now, but hypothetically? A lot of people here don’t seem to like data scraping for AI.

    • mozz
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      1 month ago

      Your Lemmy posts are already being scraped for AI

      The level of effort it would take to prevent would be infeasible to ask of even a non volunteer admin let alone a volunteer let alone literally all of them

      • Pennomi
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        61 month ago

        Your Lemmy posts are already being scraped for AI

        Good, hopefully it’ll make AI that is slightly less toxic than the rest of the internet.

        It always baffles me that people don’t want their content represented in an AI - every word you write that gets indexed is a vote for how future AI will behave.

        • @[email protected]
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          11 month ago

          Wait, do you actually want those companies to make even more money from your data, and want these environmentally disastrous “bullshit generators” to keep on going? I’m not saying stopping them is realistically possible, but if I had to choose, I’d greatly prefer a world without AI.

          • Pennomi
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            71 month ago

            You cannot choose a world without AI. They will get built regardless of what you want.

            With that in mind, the optimal (least bad) outcome is that your world views are represented in the dataset.

      • @brucethemoose
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        41 month ago

        That’s what I figured, but I am envisioning a future where lemmy is huge and the network of admins is quite sizable.

        I guess that doesn’t change much?

        • @[email protected]
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          171 month ago
          1. Run Lemmy instance
          2. Gain userbase
          3. Intercept data users are reading and posting from your instance and others
          4. Feed to AI
          5. Profit?

          Lemmy is way less privacy oriented than reddit and that’s by design.

        • @[email protected]
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          41 month ago

          It’s structural - you can be open or locked down, and it’s hard to decentralize if you’re not open

          You can make it easier or harder to work with that data, but ultimately it’s obsfucation - you could make it hard to parse and obscure details, but ultimately if you want decentralized federation you can’t hide too much

    • @[email protected]
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      1 month ago

      You don’t need to scrape. If you want to get all the content on Lemmy, just set up an instance and subscribe to all the top communities, and the instances will just send you all the content.

      So there isn’t really a way to monetise or block it. I guess you could only federate to a whitelist, but the biggest instances will federate by default with any new instances until they are given a reason to defederate.

    • @[email protected]
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      91 month ago

      Some Lemmy instances disallow indexing in robots.txt, however indexers can choose to ignore that and actually blocking them takes a lot more effort.

      • @brucethemoose
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        81 month ago

        Some places on a “budget” like Ao3 just rate limit hard.

        I don’t like that solution at all though.