Reddit Inc. has signed a contract allowing a company to train its artificial intelligence models on the social media platform’s content, according to people familiar with the matter, as it nears the potential launch of its long-awaited initial public offering.
Why wouldn’t they enhance it themselves, like Twitter has been doing for months? Once they make signing in mandatory and implement per-user rate limits the information will disappear from the internet and will only be available to people who are paying in some way.
That’s what I just did with my account of 10 years. I had all comments overwritten with gibberish and purged them a few days later. I’ll send them a final DSGVO request and delete it afterwards.
I’d be very surprised if comments weren’t versioned in some way, so even if you delete or rewrite that data, it’s probably still there and a part of training data.
They said years ago that they only kept one previous version, which is why everyone overwrote and then deleted their stuff.
It’s possible that reddit changed that, but honestly? That requires a level of foresight that I believe is entirely beyond spez. He didn’t foresee AI products, he literally paid all the bandwidth for them to harvest the data, he didn’t foresee changes to API pricing, he didn’t foresee the protests, how long they’d last, or how many people just walked away.
Hell, in the previous big “closed subs” protest they’d never even considered a moderator rebellion: once the mods took the subs private, the admins were accidentally locked out as well - they had to negotiate to get them re-opened while they worked on backdoor changes that wouldn’t break reddit.
I just don’t see them having the foresight to add in preservation code, nor to allocate the database and storage space to keep up with it. I think if you overwrote and then deleted your stuff, reddit doesn’t have it anymore. Of course, it’s still out there, in Google’s cache and the internet archive and all the other snapshots she preservation schemes and the data already harvested for the various AIs, but at least it’s no longer indeed reddit’s control, and they won’t be able to profit from it.
That argument is a very short (not very detailed) way of surmising the current issue with our world as a whole.
Don’t like how cars have taken over the world, are the reason cities are hard to live in for low income families, and cause massive amount of climate damage? You can thank the 1% for that.
Frustrated with how you don’t really own anything, your digital “property” can be taken away from you at a moments notice, and that everything you enjoy gets stuffed with schemes to make more money off of vulnerable people? You can thank the 1% for that.
Angered that health care costs truly absurd amounts, that medicine is sold to the consumer with a 10,000% mark up, or that a single accident that was not their fault could land someone in debt for life? You can thank the 1% for that.
A disturbing amount of things that are not good for our planet, keep the poor people poor, and generate inferior products/experiences is directly because of the insane power that the rich hold over our worlds systems.
“It helps someone I don’t like because they are richer than me” is actually a wonderful definition of harm.
Reddit used to be an amazing place of community and content that you couldn’t find anywhere on the internet. Then in the pursuit of money and the power that the 1% have Reddit (the company) started implementing practices that actively made the experience worse for the user, violated a person’s ownership of their content, and removed choice just like authoritative/dictatorship governments do.
It feels to most people that there is nearly nothing that can be done about it. So when a person has the opportunity to directly go against the rich caste in our world they will take that opportunity immediately.
I recommend taking a hard look at the things that concern you with our world, or cause you pain/annoyance/discomfort and try and learn WHY the issue is the way it is. The majority of the time is because some rich person/group of people (I’m looking at you lobby groups) has an obscene amount of power compared to all of the people affected.
Lastly there is a reason that “Tax the rich/Eat the rich” is the rally cry of generations.
I was directly addressing all of the points you raised.
You said it concentrates wealth, but open source does the opposite of that - it allows small companies and individuals to earn money using the technology without having to pay for its use.
You said it “harms everyone but the 0.1%.” I am benefited by it, not harmed, and I am very much not part of the 0.1%.
No, I said things about AI and open source. I raised open source as part of my counter to your argument that this is “concentrating wealth.”
Here, I’ll explain in detail what’s going on.
In response to an article about Reddit licensing your content to AI trainers, capt_wolf said “it’s time to purge your account.” Presumably as a way to stop that from happening. I asked why that was a bad thing, specifically how it harmed us in any meaningful way. You came in at that point and suggested:
It’s a scheme to further concentrate wealth
It harms everyone but the 0.1%.
I raised open source as a counter to the “wealth concentration” point, because open source does the opposite - it spreads the wealth to any who want it. It puts these resources into the commons.
I also pointed out that I personally benefit from AI tools, so it does the opposite of harming me. As I am not part of the 0.1%, that’s a counter to your second point.
Done it a few months ago but then again if I was working at reddit and in charge of preparing the dataset to feed to the llm, I’d give it access to both a recent one and a snapshot from before July 2023 (or whenever shit hit the fan and we all came to lemmy), most edits would have been made in protest. And AI can figure out which ones by itself
If you’re talking about Glaze or Nightshade, those techniques are not proven to be particularly effective. Lots of people want them to work but that doesn’t make it so.
There’s so much actually great content posted across reddit over the years, it blows my mind that people decided that was something that needed to be mentioned all the time.
This is going to produce the saltiest AI the world has ever seen.
“Hey reddit ai , give me an idea how to balance my budget and pay my student debt, mate”. “here ya go, I got a noose for you. Also I’m not your mate, dude”.
" Hey reddit ai, draw for me a house with a genz family". Here ya go. " Hey reddit ai, why did you show me a pic of a highway ramp with homeless people?"
I so want to see Reddit die. I browsed the site for the first time in 2007. I adored it. Now it is nothing but a cesspool of morons trying to find an echo chamber for their idiocy, led by king of the morons, Spez.
It’s time for better competition in this space and the Fediverse is one step toward that goal.
FYI: reddit orphans content. In other words your posts/comments are undeletable.
I found instances of such late last year by way of search results. I clicked a username to see more posts by that account. The only content on their profile page was a final deletion message about the API changes.
Their post history was discoverable by using “<username> site:reddit.com” on Google. All of their posts/comments still show up under their username instead of the normal [deleted]. Clicking the username takes you to their empty profile page.
So what we know from this now is that reddit has been saving original submissions. Whereas before their claim was that only the last edits are stored. Which is why the deletion scipts became a thing. People took it on good faith that we could delete our posts. At some point they stopped doing that. Or perhaps it was all a lie the whole time. Who knows.
Lol no. I just really want to invent some insane words, forget about them and then see them years later in some media publication that wasn’t properly reviewed and edited.
This is how I cleaned (most) of my old posts: Searched them via Google. As they’re posted under my username I was able to change them into nonsense before deleting then. Even though they never appeared under my profile anymore.
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I wouldn’t like having my Shitposts harvested.
what could go wrong with training your ai based on the posts of the most racist and misogynistic people on the internet?
My god they’ll create a super redditor
It’s not 4chan… but someone did train one of those once.
That varies by subreddit, which might actually help in training LLMs to recognize the difference.
Damn Facebook is owned by Reddit now?
Well… We all knew that was coming. If you still have an account haven’t done so, now’s a good time to purge your account!
That will remove your account from public view, but will it remove it from the data they use for AI training?
If not, you’re just enhancing the value of their proprietary data.
Why wouldn’t they enhance it themselves, like Twitter has been doing for months? Once they make signing in mandatory and implement per-user rate limits the information will disappear from the internet and will only be available to people who are paying in some way.
Reddit account data has been training AI for over a decade. If you ever used it, you’re already in a training set
That’s what I just did with my account of 10 years. I had all comments overwritten with gibberish and purged them a few days later. I’ll send them a final DSGVO request and delete it afterwards.
Better yet, use an overwrite script to help turn their training models to jelly
I’d be very surprised if comments weren’t versioned in some way, so even if you delete or rewrite that data, it’s probably still there and a part of training data.
They said years ago that they only kept one previous version, which is why everyone overwrote and then deleted their stuff.
It’s possible that reddit changed that, but honestly? That requires a level of foresight that I believe is entirely beyond spez. He didn’t foresee AI products, he literally paid all the bandwidth for them to harvest the data, he didn’t foresee changes to API pricing, he didn’t foresee the protests, how long they’d last, or how many people just walked away.
Hell, in the previous big “closed subs” protest they’d never even considered a moderator rebellion: once the mods took the subs private, the admins were accidentally locked out as well - they had to negotiate to get them re-opened while they worked on backdoor changes that wouldn’t break reddit.
I just don’t see them having the foresight to add in preservation code, nor to allocate the database and storage space to keep up with it. I think if you overwrote and then deleted your stuff, reddit doesn’t have it anymore. Of course, it’s still out there, in Google’s cache and the internet archive and all the other snapshots she preservation schemes and the data already harvested for the various AIs, but at least it’s no longer indeed reddit’s control, and they won’t be able to profit from it.
Why? How does it harm you in any meaningful way?
Even if it’s just another scheme to further concentrate wealth (and it is at least that), that harms everyone but the 0.1%.
I draw plenty of benefit from AI tools. There are open source models that anyone can run.
My original question remains unanswered. “It may help someone I don’t like because they are richer than me” is a pretty weak concept of “harm.”
That argument is a very short (not very detailed) way of surmising the current issue with our world as a whole.
Don’t like how cars have taken over the world, are the reason cities are hard to live in for low income families, and cause massive amount of climate damage? You can thank the 1% for that.
Frustrated with how you don’t really own anything, your digital “property” can be taken away from you at a moments notice, and that everything you enjoy gets stuffed with schemes to make more money off of vulnerable people? You can thank the 1% for that.
Angered that health care costs truly absurd amounts, that medicine is sold to the consumer with a 10,000% mark up, or that a single accident that was not their fault could land someone in debt for life? You can thank the 1% for that.
A disturbing amount of things that are not good for our planet, keep the poor people poor, and generate inferior products/experiences is directly because of the insane power that the rich hold over our worlds systems.
“It helps someone I don’t like because they are richer than me” is actually a wonderful definition of harm.
Reddit used to be an amazing place of community and content that you couldn’t find anywhere on the internet. Then in the pursuit of money and the power that the 1% have Reddit (the company) started implementing practices that actively made the experience worse for the user, violated a person’s ownership of their content, and removed choice just like authoritative/dictatorship governments do.
It feels to most people that there is nearly nothing that can be done about it. So when a person has the opportunity to directly go against the rich caste in our world they will take that opportunity immediately.
I recommend taking a hard look at the things that concern you with our world, or cause you pain/annoyance/discomfort and try and learn WHY the issue is the way it is. The majority of the time is because some rich person/group of people (I’m looking at you lobby groups) has an obscene amount of power compared to all of the people affected.
Lastly there is a reason that “Tax the rich/Eat the rich” is the rally cry of generations.
It’s because the rich cause us harm.
Completely unrelated to anything my post said.
I was directly addressing all of the points you raised.
You said it concentrates wealth, but open source does the opposite of that - it allows small companies and individuals to earn money using the technology without having to pay for its use.
You said it “harms everyone but the 0.1%.” I am benefited by it, not harmed, and I am very much not part of the 0.1%.
You’re hallucinating. (Pun intended.)
Neither Capt. Wolf nor I said a single thing about AI or Open Source. And the article didn’t mention anything about Open Source.
No, I said things about AI and open source. I raised open source as part of my counter to your argument that this is “concentrating wealth.”
Here, I’ll explain in detail what’s going on.
In response to an article about Reddit licensing your content to AI trainers, capt_wolf said “it’s time to purge your account.” Presumably as a way to stop that from happening. I asked why that was a bad thing, specifically how it harmed us in any meaningful way. You came in at that point and suggested:
I raised open source as a counter to the “wealth concentration” point, because open source does the opposite - it spreads the wealth to any who want it. It puts these resources into the commons.
I also pointed out that I personally benefit from AI tools, so it does the opposite of harming me. As I am not part of the 0.1%, that’s a counter to your second point.
Done it a few months ago but then again if I was working at reddit and in charge of preparing the dataset to feed to the llm, I’d give it access to both a recent one and a snapshot from before July 2023 (or whenever shit hit the fan and we all came to lemmy), most edits would have been made in protest. And AI can figure out which ones by itself
Unless you live in the EU or California, odds are that just deletes the public data, I’m sure Reddit retains it and would sell it.
Even if you live in the EU or California. How would anyone know or prove in court that Reddit kept a copy?
by forcing them to actually be open about it (this will not happen)
You know how artists can poison their images for AI… We need a way to poison content on Reddit
I would say most of the content is already poison.
Shit posts would do it. That’ll turn the AIs into morons who spurt out “rizz” and “skibidi” instead of anything useful
i think that’s just called posting on reddit
If you’re talking about Glaze or Nightshade, those techniques are not proven to be particularly effective. Lots of people want them to work but that doesn’t make it so.
There’s nothing stopping anyone doing the same with lemmy posts though is there?
NO! There isn’t, lemmy is one giant honeypot.
deleted by creator
Could you post your social security number, please?
Nah, lemmy censors that, but only if it’s your Social Security number. Here, I’ll post mine as proof.
With dashes:
***********
Without:
*********
And here’s a different SSN that’s not mine:
420-69-8008
Pretty cool!
It shows my password as hunter2 on my end how about yours
then call me winnie the pooh
Imagine AI mods trained by reddit mod models.
I would love a GPT model that just replies to every prompt with “Ya’ll can’t behave.”
Y’all need Jesus
“Trained by the sweaty armpit of humanity”
@cosmicrookie @ardi60 “Why does this bloody thing keep asking ‘a/s/l’ and ‘Do you want a NSFW roleplay?’ even when I tell it no?!?!”
Just think, in 1000 years your body will be long dead but you’ll be forced to live on as a poster! Death is not an option. 😌
Great. Now all the AI bots will just be saying “This” and “came here to say that.”
This
This
Came here to say that.
removed by mod
Remember Narwal bacons at midnight guys
This guy 👆🏻
Username checks out
Chef’s kiss
That
“When does le narwhal bacon?”
Wow that’s an old one lol
“poop knife xDD hehe”
There’s so much actually great content posted across reddit over the years, it blows my mind that people decided that was something that needed to be mentioned all the time.
You just did that yourself lol
There are plenty of memorable stories from reddit, and some get mentioned regularly. It’s a culture…
I’ve never seen that, so my strategy of avoiding the top subs apparently worked out.
Thanks for the gold kind stranger
“ChatGPT, solve this problem for me.”
“As an AI language model, username checks out.”
“Are you me?”
“Reddit moment”
Google Reddit comedy
I am waiting for an LLM that trained on 4chan it would be pure gold.
Good news.
Not good enough it only trained on /pol/ it seems
Fair. The rest of the site is a lot more normal. More being a relative term, of course.
Uh i don’t think anypart of 4chan is normal they are the kind of people who you will hate IRL
What makes you think that?
Take a guess
Fuck 4chan
I don’t want STDs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay_(chatbot)
She got the sprit
Oh no.
I stopped posting there the moment they pulled the trigger on the API change. I used to like cruising LinuxQuestions and answering people, too.
Yup, I provided a bit of good content, but I left as soon as the API change was announced.
This is going to produce the saltiest AI the world has ever seen.
“Hey reddit ai , give me an idea how to balance my budget and pay my student debt, mate”. “here ya go, I got a noose for you. Also I’m not your mate, dude”.
" Hey reddit ai, draw for me a house with a genz family". Here ya go. " Hey reddit ai, why did you show me a pic of a highway ramp with homeless people?"
This is why I deleted my posts. Also, 60 million is a jokingly lowball figure.
I wonder how reddit users feel about this. I wouldn’t know, I DNS blocked the site months ago.
I left my posts up because they will actually cause the website to be worth less.
Same, let him cook
That’s cute that you think your posts are actually deleted.
I so want to see Reddit die. I browsed the site for the first time in 2007. I adored it. Now it is nothing but a cesspool of morons trying to find an echo chamber for their idiocy, led by king of the morons, Spez.
It’s time for better competition in this space and the Fediverse is one step toward that goal.
So they’re cashing in by selling other people’s conversations.
Yeah.
FYI: reddit orphans content. In other words your posts/comments are undeletable.
I found instances of such late last year by way of search results. I clicked a username to see more posts by that account. The only content on their profile page was a final deletion message about the API changes.
Their post history was discoverable by using “<username> site:reddit.com” on Google. All of their posts/comments still show up under their
usernameinstead of the normal[deleted]. Clicking the username takes you to their empty profile page.So what we know from this now is that reddit has been saving original submissions. Whereas before their claim was that only the last edits are stored. Which is why the deletion scipts became a thing. People took it on good faith that we could delete our posts. At some point they stopped doing that. Or perhaps it was all a lie the whole time. Who knows.
No, that’s Google keeping the content of the pages they scraped at the time they scraped them.
What happens if you edit every other post with absolute nonsense sentences? I doubt they have a way to go through that?
I think in theory simple check such as edits to the majority of a profile would be enough to detect it.
Are you saying the original answers are not nonsense already?
Lol no. I just really want to invent some insane words, forget about them and then see them years later in some media publication that wasn’t properly reviewed and edited.
Chaotic evil! Where do I sign up?
Finally a good use for LLMs
They would probably notice and roll them back. Bulk edits raise some red flags.
This is how I cleaned (most) of my old posts: Searched them via Google. As they’re posted under my username I was able to change them into nonsense before deleting then. Even though they never appeared under my profile anymore.