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).

  • @serenissi
    0•5 days ago

    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.

    and impossible in others (like mine, Switzerland)

    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.

    • @[email protected]
      3•5 days ago

      I’m not talking about giving up copyright to content.

      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.

      CC-0 means waiving any as much rights as possible legally, which depends on jurisdiction.

      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.

      I couldn’t find anything about default license of publicly available material in your country

      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.

      nor about the impossibility you mentioned

      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:

      1. Can I relinquish the copyright to one of my own works by assigning it to the public domain?

      Copyright arises automatically and, in contrast to property law, there is no procedure for simply giving up this right. An author, therefore, does not have any direct possibility of giving a work to the public domain. However, he is at liberty to simply tolerate copyright infringement and to waive legal prosecution. In addition, an author can actively decide to make his work available under an appropriate Creative Commons licence, which is very similar to the public domain, or an equivalent type of public licence.