I don't understand how this surprises anyone. You choose to give them your data. It's not free. If you don't want them to have your data, don't give it away.
As the infamous saying goes, "If you aren't paying for the product, you are the product"
Facebook scraped every Australian adult user's public posts to train AI
61–70 of 267 posts
Re: Facebook scraped every Australian adult user's public posts to train AI
#62Funny to think that the distillation of 16 years of Facebook posts is now considered "intelligence."
I wonder how much safety work they have to do specifically because of this. I’d imagine their model might have a fairly paranoid, slightly racist bias if not. Particularly as younger demographics shifted away from FB in the last decade.
Actually if you want to train a model that can recognize bad things you want to have those bad things in the language model training data, otherwise it won’t see the characteristics of those things and it will later struggle to recognize them in later training stages.
Re: Facebook scraped every Australian adult user's public posts to train AI
#63Why is this surprising? They’ve always done this. In fact I’d be surprised if they didn’t do this. Fwiw - llama is free to use. So I guess it’s a good enough return. I don’t use Facebook. I’m not sure if they can peek into WhatsApp messages.
> Why is this surprising? They’ve always done this. In fact I’d be surprised if they didn’t do this. This is such an unconstructive attitude. This is the first time they have publicly admitted it.
It's the first time they've publicly acknowledged what specifically was used in the training set for their LLMs. It's NOT the first time they've said that that data could be used for research. The presumption was that they had used the data for their LLMs.
Maybe it is surprising to some that they this particular research used that data, but it really shouldn't be to anyone aware of how LLM development is done.
Re: Facebook scraped every Australian adult user's public posts to train AI
#64I don't believe for a moment that they haven't used the data of countless children. Especially early on when kids just had to click an "I'm over 18" button or enter a fake birthday to get accounts and facebook, like everyone else, just looked the other way.
Re: Facebook scraped every Australian adult user's public posts to train AI
#65I don't understand how this surprises anyone. You choose to give them your data. It's not free. If you don't want them to have your data, don't give it away.
Right, and in exchange users received rather a lot of services for free... photo and video storage etc as just one example, Llama is free to use, etc etc. While I've no sympathy for mishandling private user data as Meta has of course been guilty of in the past, I think users getting 16 years of free service in exchange for their public posts being used in this fashion is not that bad of a deal.
You get photo/video storage worth a fraction of a cent. Llama doesn't have a free to use service.
People got 'free service' in exchange for putting ads around content not for this.
It's a terrible deal no one asked the users if they want to agree to.
It's visiting a website and saving an image and claiming the website owes you for storage.
Re: Facebook scraped every Australian adult user's public posts to train AI
#66[dupe]
Actual article: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-09-11/facebook-scraping-pho...
(More discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41508158)
Re: Facebook scraped every Australian adult user's public posts to train AI
#67I am very likely in the minority here, but I think AI SHOULD be trained on everything that is in the public sphere. I'd be disappointed if it wasn't trained on everything they had access to. If it is trained on private information, then I would have issue with it.
AFAIK, AI models have no way of differentiating high quality input from garbage. If it's fed peer-reviewed, academic papers as well as a paranoid, violent person's Facebook manifesto it treats them with equal weight as long as the sentences are coherent.
Re: Facebook scraped every Australian adult user's public posts to train AI
#68I imagine a future AI trained on this going into therapy to uncover childhood trauma.
Re: Facebook scraped every Australian adult user's public posts to train AI
#69Assuming they want to build a model that can do useful things with their own data (say any kind of content filtering, summarization, etc.) it is exactly what they should do.
Re: Facebook scraped every Australian adult user's public posts to train AI
#70Garbage in, garbage out.