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 [email protected] 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).
Whatever you put on public domain without explicit license, it becomes CC-0 equivalent. So while it feels violating, it’s perfectly fine. The best opsec should be separating your digital identities and also your physical life if you don’t want it to be aggregated in the same way. These technologies (scraping) have been around for a while and along with llm’s will stay for quite sometime in future, there’s no way around them.
PS: you, here, is generic you, not referring to OP.
In order to put something in the public domain, you need to explicitly do that. Publicising is not the same as putting something in the public domain.
This comment I’m writing here is not in the public domain and I don’t need to explicitly mention that. It’s “all rights reserved” by default in most western jurisdictions. You’re not allowed to do anything whatsoever with it other than what is covered by explicit exemptions from copyright such as fair use (e.g. you quote parts of my comment to reply to it).
Encoding my comment into the weights of a statistical model to closer imitate human writing is a derivative work (IMHO) and therefore needs explicit permission from the copyright holder (me) or licensee authorised by said copyright holder to sublicense it in such a way.
Technically, in the U.S., there is no way to intentionally put something in the public domain. The best you can do is tell everyone it’s public domain and pledge not to sue anyone for using it.
The shitty thing is that you could turn around tomorrow and start suing people for copyright infringement if they use that material.
What does “putting on public domain” mean to you? The way you say that sounds a little weird to me, like there is a misunderstanding here.
Dedicating copyrighted material to the public domain is a deliberate action in some jurisdictions, and impossible in others (like mine, Switzerland). Just publishing a text you wrote for public consumption is something different. That doesn’t affect your copyright at all. Unless you have an agreement with the publisher that you grant them a license to use your text by posting it to their website.
I’m not talking about giving up copyright to content. CC-0 means waiving any as much rights as possible legally, which depends on jurisdiction.
I couldn’t find anything about default license of publicly available material in your country, nor about the impossibility you mentioned by basic web search. I’m genuinely interested to read about it so do share sources if you can.
Btw there is a FEP and some discussions that talks exactly about the issue you mentioned in the root post.
Edit: formatting.
Hm, once again I don’t understand your meaning, sorry. The public domain in my understanding is the totality of all content that is not under copyright protection. So “putting on public domain” sounds to me like you’re talking about giving up copyright. Please explain what you mean with that phrase, since I seem to be misunderstanding.
Yes I’m a little familiar, I looked through the CC licenses before and decided CC0 wasn’t the best fit for Switzerland. CC0 is meant to dedicate a work to the public domain, i.e. waive all copyright from it. But I now see that it also specifically has a public license fallback for jurisdictions where the public domain dedication doesn’t work, in Section 3.
There isn’t such a thing as a default license here, nor have I heard of such a thing in general before. In my understanding a license is an agreement for partial or total transfer of copyrights. But the default state, in my understanding, is that the copyright lies with the creator and no agreement for transfer exists. Authors have the copyright over a work from the moment creation of a work in Switzerland. They can make agreements with others to confer some of these rights. In Switzerland, in contrast to other places, the authors additionally have moral rights that cannot be broken or sold at all. For a more digestible intro I would suggest this site.
The absence of the possibility of making works public domain before the copyright term runs out automatically is harder to show, it’s not like it’s forbidden by statute, but simply that there isn’t a recognized mechanism for it. The best thing I can link is the Factsheet about Public Domain from the following page on the site of the Swiss Federal Institute of Intellectual Property, check number 9 on page 4 in the PDF, it says:
I didn’t know this transferable vs non transferable classification of rights exists. It changed my theory about copyright as whole. Thanks!
What you are saying is essentially how it works in the U.S. too. There is no legal way to make your work public domain. The best you can do is just tell people it’s public domain and then not sue anyone for using the material. But you would still have the right to sue them.
Legal concept of grandfathering should be applicable here. There was no way for online artists to know that was going to be part of a corporately forced agreement to putting their work online. They aren’t even given an out in the US. At the very least work posted prior to the AI training public announcement that it was happening should be exempt.
That doesn’t address the problem that if artists don’t want their art scraped now they can’t post it anywhere and can’t make a living. How is that a free market? Let corporations exploit your work for free and make bank on it or starve isn’t a world anyone should be striving to live in.
This whole thing amounts to big corporations bullying individual artists out of playing field and it’s wrong. As if any of them were ever really a threat in the first place. They just like stepping on little people.
This is yet another reason why 2FA over phone is a bad idea. I create every account with a unique generated email, a unique generated password and minimal/random personal data. I’m finally at a place where it’s convenient to create accounts with no obvious connection …… but I only have one phone number. They say it’s for account security, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s mainly for data aggregation
Yes that is absolutely annoying and I hardly use such online services other than those I have to like bank, any government services, package delivery/ridebooking etc where in app call doesn’t exist and calling is necessary sometimes and some healthcare.
Sometimes they do it to reduce throwaway/inactive accounts as (npn voip) phone numbers are harder to get at scale than email ids. But ironically, some countries have law requiring them to keep the logs so it might be used to connect identity against one’s will, say, by law enforcement.