this post was submitted on 26 Aug 2025
221 points (92.3% liked)
Technology
74524 readers
3739 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
The post I was on 5 seconds ago was about imugur and how people where confused when they added posts and comments to the image hosting site. Everyone wants a poece of the social media pie...but we need the infrastructure, the websites that host stuff and do it free and efficiently.
It's never free. The instance you're using isn't free; it's paid for by donations. ISPs and server hosts don't just give bandwidth out of charity or for the public good. One way or another, these for-profit companies are getting their pound of flesh, typically by selling targeted ad space.
The fact that these companies are adding chat features means they're now going to try mining conversations for additional consumer profile data points, which they can then sell to advertisers.
This new change is gross, and I hope nobody uses it.
It's not talked about too much, because it is not in the best interest of the stockholders. But AI as it was popularized by openAI and both images and text generators already reached a boundary of data availability. There's no more human made data. They are now resorting to synthetic data, which is to make one first generation LLM model create tons of data to train newer or more tailored weighs models. With the issue that this new models develop problems from inbreeding of the data. Training models on other genAI products poisons the models and corrupts their generative power in just a few generations. This is why genAI images are increasingly turning yellow, the same reason newer models are more fragile and hallucinate or go psychotic more easily than old models. So, the AI companies need new sources of human made data to mix in with the synthetic data.
The main problem is that we ran out, there's no more data made by humans to train AI with. Humans don't create new data fast enough to train all the new models with the new doodads and features the AI companies want to sell. So now these companies will pay anything just to get their hands on new fresh stuff. These is why any app in the planet will now pivot to do anything they can to get chats going. It's a new source of data to sell to data brokers.
Barf. I try hard not to think about it, since it's shoved in our faces at every turn, but you're absolutely right that our data is going to these AI corpos.
Imgur had the social media element since mid-2010s at least, maybe longer.
Yeah I'll never forget the first time I saw someone just casually browsing IMGUR and I was like WTF are you doing?