Given how Reddit now makes money by selling its data to AI companies, I was wondering how the situation is for the fediverse. Typically you can block AI crawlers using robot.txt (Verge reported about it recently: https://www.theverge.com/24067997/robots-txt-ai-text-file-web-crawlers-spiders). But this only works per domain/server, and the fediverse is about many different servers interacting with each other.

So if my kbin/lemmy or Mastodon server blocks OpenAI's crawler via robot.txt, what does that even mean when people on other servers that don't block this crawler are boosting me on Mastodon, or if I reply to their posts. I suspect unless all the servers I interact with block the same AI crawlers, I cannot prevent my posts from being used as AI training data?

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[–] cecep@fedia.io 3 points 9 months ago (1 children)

You don't need to explain to me how the Fediverse works and I never said I have any expectation of privacy. But generally speaking, you're overlooking the fact that there always have been rules for what can, and cannot be done with information that is publicly available. Just because someone publicly posts his Facebook profile picture doesn't mean it's legal to use in an ad without permission, for example. People might break the rules, yes, but then they might face consequences, and that alone prevents many from breaking them in the first place. Not perfect, but better than nothing. And I'm saying we're in a process where rules are being renegotiated when it comes to using public information for AI training

[–] originalucifer@moist.catsweat.com 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

fair points, but i still posit that its a waste of time to attempt to regulate what can be viewed anonymously.

personally, i could not possibly care less about any of my data being ingested by 'ai'. not a battle i care to fight, or even find worthy of fighting.

[–] cecep@fedia.io 4 points 9 months ago

That's fair, but I think if AI companies would be legally required to disclose the sources of their training data and if you make some successor to robot.txt legally binding as well (both is being discussed in the EU for example), at least the "bigger players" in the AI industry would respect the rules. Better than nothing