Why 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.
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Facebook scraped every Australian adult user's public posts to train AI
241–250 of 267 posts
Re: Facebook scraped every Australian adult user's public posts to train AI
#242Presumably “scraped” isnt the right term here. They already have the raw data, they Won’t be “scraping “ it from the website they’ll just be investing it from where they store it
The authors of the title most likely wanted to suggest a similarity between metas use of the data and scraping. In some legislations there are rules about scraping. And for many less technical people it sounds scary.
Au contraire. By calling it wrong you get the clicks and muddle legislation discussions. The Conversation will start with anti scraping, but then every user "gave" metabook the images and accepted privacy terms...
Re: Facebook scraped every Australian adult user's public posts to train AI
#243That’s nothing. AOL has just finished training on 29 years of emails and messages. it’s hoped that with more H100s the AI will finally be able to calculate the full amount due by BillG for the emails mom has been forwarding.
TIL AOL still exists.
It's even creepier that the company no longer meaningfully exists, but the data lives on.
Re: Facebook scraped every Australian adult user's public posts to train AI
#244Re: Facebook scraped every Australian adult user's public posts to train AI
#245Earlier quoted context omitted.
The topic of expectations reminds me of this article https://spectrum.ieee.org/online-privacy
I think that "shifting baseline syndrome" is a major issue, but on the privacy side of things people don't seem to really understand where we're at currently, and they seem to be very good at lying to themselves about it. You can find youtube videos of people outright screaming at photographers in public, insisting that no one has a right to take a picture of them without their permission while the entire time they'r…
There's little that any individual can realistically do about smartphone spying. There are situations where it's borderline unworkable to not have a smartphone. The importance of the phone increased greatly over the same period during which companies increased tracking or at least acknowledged that they were doing it.
Leaving that aside, people probably react that way because the corporation just wants to gather advertising data from everyone, impersonally, while the photographer is taking a direct and specific interest.
Re: Facebook scraped every Australian adult user's public posts to train AI
#246Was "public" ever the default setting? I remember it as being opt-in if you ever wanted something to show beyond your friends-of-friends.
Yes, “Everyone” was the default for years https://readwrite.com/facebook_pushes_people_to_go_public/
I think at an early point, about when Facebook was in the "open to all university students" phase, there wasn't even a private option.
Re: Facebook scraped every Australian adult user's public posts to train AI
#247Earlier quoted context omitted.
> That's just how the internet works. Don't put something on the internet if you don't want it to be globally distributed and copied. And if someone takes a picture of your artwork, or takes a picture of your person, and posts that to the internet without your consent? Have you given up your rights then? My answer: Absolutely not.
What AI does is much more like the Old Masters approach of going to a museum and painting a copy of a painting by some master whose technique they wish to learn. This has always been both legal, and encouraged. Or borrowing a thick stack of books from the library, reading them, and using that knowledge as the basis for fiction. That's a transformative work, and those are fine as well. My take is that training AI mode…
Nice scapegoating Anthropomorphized.
Correct analogy is like someone taking pictures of the paintings, going home and applying a photoshop filter, erasing the original signature and adding theirs.
The law already covers that very much so.
Re: Facebook scraped every Australian adult user's public posts to train AI
#248Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is just copyright infringement reworded to pretend it's not. I own the things I write, and publishing it on the internet doesn't negate that. OpenAI doesn't have the right to claim it, no matter what they think, and neither does anyone else.
Firstly publishing something on Facebook explicitly gives them the right to "copy" it. It certainly gives them the right to exploit it (it's literally their business model.) Secondly, Facebook is behind a login, so it's not "public" in the way HN comments are public. You'd have gained more kudos had you argued that point. Thirdly this article I about MetaAI not OpenAI. So, no, OpenAI isn't claiming anything about you…
OpenAI is not reading voraciously, it is not a human being. It makes copies of the data for training.
If there were an actual AI system which was trained by continuously processing direct fetches from the Web, without storing them but directly using it when for internal state transitions, then that might make the reading analogy work. But then AI engineers couldn't do all the analysis and annotation steps that are vital to the training process.
Re: Facebook scraped every Australian adult user's public posts to train AI
#249Presumably “scraped” isnt the right term here. They already have the raw data, they Won’t be “scraping “ it from the website they’ll just be investing it from where they store it
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Re: Facebook scraped every Australian adult user's public posts to train AI
#250Why 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.
Ah, well, that makes it alright then. Move along, people, there’s nothing to see here. What’s that? What do you mean you didn’t know about the company slurping your data for their own personal gain, or knowingly poisoning you¹ and selling you defective deadly products²? Didn’t you read that one forum comment by a random person that one time? You shouldn’t be surprised. They’ve always been evil, so what can we do other than cross our arms? All hail our corporate overlords!
> I’m not sure if they can peek into WhatsApp messages.
But someone knows. And if you use WhatsApp and get screwed later, wouldn’t you rather not having your concerns dismissed?
I don’t use WhatsApp, but do have an anecdote. I have a friend who just started using Instagram and purposefully follows no one. She doesn’t have Facebook. Recently a friend recommended to her a specific product on WhatsApp and then she started getting ads for it on Instagram.
¹ https://www.sydney.edu.au/news-opinion/news/2024/05/02/how-c...