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Facebook scraped every Australian adult user's public posts to train AI

abc.net.au

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Re: Facebook scraped every Australian adult user's public posts to train AI

#71

Post by solardev »

doublepg23 wrote: post #57
solardev wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it? I deleted my Facebook back in 2016 or so when it got so bad. Before that, I used extensions to make it show posts from friends in chronological order instead of whatever it was optimizing for by default (engagement/controversy, I think?) It's just such a toxic, manipulated environment... I don't use social media anymore, just text some friends, and am much happier.

You don’t consider HN social media?

I guess it's a gray area? It's more like a forum to me, of the pre-Facebook sort, more like Slashdot than reddit.

And there's extremely strong moderation here that does the opposite of Facebook: It optimizes against controversy and vitriol rather than encouraging it.

We end up with a bunch of nerds mostly talking shop and sometimes complaining about the job market, but that's still far less ragebaitey than most social media.

Re: Facebook scraped every Australian adult user's public posts to train AI

#72

Post by dotancohen »

SmellTheGlove wrote: post #32
SoftTalker wrote: post #10

Funny 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.

That would be supervised learning: they tell the model that these are undesirable::racist values. Or just fed into the RAG::blacklist dataset.

Re: Facebook scraped every Australian adult user's public posts to train AI

#73

Post by emporas »

SoftTalker wrote: post #10

Funny to think that the distillation of 16 years of Facebook posts is now considered "intelligence."

If it is high entropy, what's the significance of the source of information's age? It could as well be 2 years old and no one would care.

Re: Facebook scraped every Australian adult user's public posts to train AI

#74

Post by changoplatanero »

SmellTheGlove wrote: post #32
SoftTalker wrote: post #10

Funny 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.

I haven't worked at facebook for a number of years but I'm imagining what they trained on here was public instagram images and not the random text that people write on facebook. The text in facebook posts is likely to be low value but the images are a data gold mine.

Re: Facebook scraped every Australian adult user's public posts to train AI

#75

Post by derefr »

SoftTalker wrote: post #10

Funny to think that the distillation of 16 years of Facebook posts is now considered "intelligence."

What you get from the self-supervised training of a base model is more like "language fluency plus a web of crystallized-knowledge relationships."

But also, ML model training is a bit like the stock market: the noise/stupidity in individual examples points in a bunch of random directions, and so ends up cancelling out; while the signal all points in the same direction, and so ends up captured in the distilled model. (You might call this the "Anna Karenina principle of Information Distillation": all right answers are the same, while each wrong answer is wrong in a different way.)

Re: Facebook scraped every Australian adult user's public posts to train AI

#76

Post by autoexec »

trimbo wrote: post #59
mattcantstop wrote: post #16

I 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.

I don't agree because it creates this dilemma for creators: you need to put your work out there to get traction, but if you put your work out there and anything public is fair game, then it will be sampled by a computer and instantly recreated at scale. This might even happen without the operator knowing whose work is being ripped off. Commercial art producers have always ripped off minor artists. They would do it by…

> but if you put your work out there and anything public is fair game, then it will be sampled by a computer and instantly recreated at scale.

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.

> I personally know two artists who have sued major companies who ripped off their work for ads, and both won million-plus settlements.

Ultimately "AI did it" should never be allowed to be used as an excuse. If a company pays for a marketing guy who rips off someone's work and they can be sued for it, then a company that pays for an AI that rips off someone's work should still be able to be sued for it.

Re: Facebook scraped every Australian adult user's public posts to train AI

#77

Post by dotancohen »

solardev wrote: post #71
doublepg23 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don’t consider HN social media?

I guess it's a gray area? It's more like a forum to me, of the pre-Facebook sort, more like Slashdot than reddit. And there's extremely strong moderation here that does the opposite of Facebook: It optimizes against controversy and vitriol rather than encouraging it. We end up with a bunch of nerds mostly talking shop and sometimes complaining about the job market, but that's still far less ragebaitey than most socia…

  > And there's extremely strong moderation here that does the opposite of Facebook: It optimizes against controversy and vitriol rather than encouraging it.
Well, that and hot grits you insensitive clod.

Re: Facebook scraped every Australian adult user's public posts to train AI

#78

Post by ben_w »

__loam wrote: post #29
mattcantstop wrote: post #16

I 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.

You're probably among friends on this site, but outside tech coded spaces, most people understand that publicly available is not the same thing as an unlimited license to do whatever you want.

While true, likely more pertinent that most people don't have a clue what's possible legally or technically until it gets in the news.

Can't give informed consent if you don't know what the EULA means or what the machines can do.

Re: Facebook scraped every Australian adult user's public posts to train AI

#79

Post by datavirtue »

trimbo wrote: post #59
mattcantstop wrote: post #16

I 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.

I don't agree because it creates this dilemma for creators: you need to put your work out there to get traction, but if you put your work out there and anything public is fair game, then it will be sampled by a computer and instantly recreated at scale. This might even happen without the operator knowing whose work is being ripped off. Commercial art producers have always ripped off minor artists. They would do it by…

My wife works in a studio with a gaggle of artists who all blatantly "rip each other off" constantly.

Re: Facebook scraped every Australian adult user's public posts to train AI

#80

Post by datavirtue »

autoexec wrote: post #64

I 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.

The monsters!
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