This is bad, but for completely unexpected reasons
I thought they withheld it because it identified issues with the democratic platform that would put them at odds with donors, but instead it's a half-assed opinion piece scratched out on toilet paper and riddled with errors and no evidence to speak of
Third-Way and other neo-liberal rags are claiming victory over this pile of shit - I'm happy to let them roll around in it by themselves
Like I said, sounds like the objection is to the use itself, rather than any marxist application of ownership or theft.
Fair enough to have a debate on the merits of LLMs and their cost, but to claim some copyright maximalist position just because you find them distasteful is a little reactionary, IMO.
I might point out that sentiment analysis is possibly the one broadly accepted use for language models, but it think thats a little beyond the point
“Who should own what” is the defining question of politics
Maybe I should have been more explicit. I didn't expect an earnest defense of personal ownership in the context of creative works openly shared within the public commons.
commons often have restrictions on their use to enable their continued existence.
I don't view the use of published creative works in the commons -especially for the purposes of political analysis and participation- to be detrimental to the continued existence of the commons. It doesn't follow from your analogy because the use of the creative work has nothing to do with it being a scarce or limited shared resource like grazing pasture. If anything, it seems like the objection is to the use itself, not to any kind of material ownership or labor relation. But even then, the claim would have to be strong enough to justify restricting using the works for public and political participation like in the OP
That’s fundamentally your data, and you should have recourse to get it removed from the internet to the extent possible
Apples and oranges. I'm not talking about private, intimate details or representations of your person that you've chosen not to share publicly, I'm talking about creative works that you've knowingly shared on public and widely visible internet platforms with full knowledge of the public nature of that participation. If someone posts some hideously racist image of themselves on twitter, and I save a screenshot of it as a part of my own public and political participation in the commons, and they later change their mind and try retracting that image, are they allowed to demand I delete it? I hardly think so, and I doubt you would either.
Granted, there are certainly valid examples of data falling under legitimate 'ownership' (different from 'authorship'), but I don't think that includes works that are shared and contribute to the public commons, especially when the contested use isn't a private for-profit use.
Freely available to participants. Not freely available to the site owners to go and pass on to multi billion AI corporations.
That isn't what is being described in that post though.... I agree that site owners shouldn't share private information about their users that isn't freely given with the intent of being made visible to the public internet. The practice being described is non-admin moderators (or, as implied, admin-sanctioned tools being used by mods) collecting the comment and post histories of specific users and using LLM's to summarize them through a political lens, and then using that summary to issue bans to those users on those grounds. With the exception of maybe user vote activity, the data being used for it is available to anyone just loading someone's user profile page in a browser. I would argue that anything transmitted via activitypub (including vote activity) is a part of that public commons, but that's a little beside the point. Anyone on the open internet can see and collect the content of any given user on Lemmy - AFAIK there has been no effort or intent to gatekeep the visibility of that data except by means of limiting certain traffic to prevent bots and crawlers hoovering everything on the internet and constantly overloading server traffic. Even those limitations, though, aren't intended to inhibit the visibility of data to any human with a screen to read it.
I'm of the opinion that the door should be open, aside from personally identifiable information that could be used for re-identify anonymous users. I also don't think admins should have/require/log PID on their servers at all, but insofar as it's necessary for managing the service it should be considered privileged and limited by laws similar to GDPR.
An individual prole has no capability to create a mass database of profiles of millions of people, de-anonymise them, purchase data from 10,000 companies and then use that data to target marketing at those individuals without their knowledge that this vast quantity of data is being used to manipulate them.
I guess i'm not sure how this applies to what's being described in the OP, then. I agree - the type of mass-collection, de-anonymization, and sale to private direct-marketing firms that the GDPR is written to protect against is absolutely antithetical to any type of socialist or open internet.
The practice being described in the OP (as far as I understand it) is simply collecting publicly accessible user activity that's transparently shared via activitypub and drawing "conclusions" (as much as an AI slop machine can produce 'conclusions') about the user from that activity - things like username, comments, posts, and vote activity. Thinking of activitypub as a kind of 'commons', I would think that the activity done within it is akin to a shared resource that is freely available to all participants. The type of private data that (IMO) would be considered personally owned and controlled (and outside the scope of practice being described) would be things like registration email and IP address and other data that is produced only as a matter of practical necessity and not by personal choice - anything that would be collected by a site admin as a matter of running a server and outside of the standard data transmitted via activitypub.
I also don't oppose the existence of property writ large, nor do I oppose restrictions to the use of that property. I just don't think that the fruits of creative labor shared via the online commons can be practically or theoretically thought of as 'personal property' in the way we're describing.
Sure, but even with something like online political discourse you can do better than getting obsessed over a bastardized provincial political term (liberal which means something completely different outside of the US)
Sorry, I'm having a hard time following the train of thought - are you referring to my use of 'liberal-democratic institutions'?
I don't want to word-vomit on you unnecessarily if you're pointing to something else or speaking broadly about leftist discourse on lemmy (i've seen plenty of debates like the one you're describing)
and providing cover for promoters of russian and Chinese genocidal imperialism and propaganda
Ok well now i'm even more confused - where is this jab coming from?
Maybe you're taking issue with my categorizing db0 as a leftist space and are speaking broadly about the perspectives about china and russia from that instance? What are we talking about here?
I'm honestly a little surprised to see the earnest employment of the concept of 'ownership' so explicitly on hexbear, even in the context of personal data.
I always thought of online forums as an extension of the concept of the commons, and laws and restrictions like the GDPR were more of a liberalization of the walling-in and privatization of common 'lands' by capitalists. I'm not confident that 'my data is my data even after it has been made publicly available to anyone, everywhere' is a part of a socialist vision of the internet.
The worthiness of a discussion has no bearing on the intent and framing of the person prompting it.
The questions are being raised by the same person who included global reputation scores in his backend piefed code for the purposes of suppressing his personal pet peve behaviors. I find that to be informative context for considering the intent of the discussion being prompted.
edit: Oh look, here he is saying exactly what I was just pointing out was likely the intent
Right - which is why it was quite interesting watching Fox news have a 20 minute power struggle over the sudden popularity of May Day in the US and the rise of ""extreme socialist sentiment""
All online political discourse is performance - feel free to speculate how well it is representative of IRL leftist spaces in the west.
Although maybe Rimu should have been more clear in pointing out that this seems to be not an official instance tool, but rather something some moderators have cobbled together themselves.
This isn't an issue of clarity. His closing call to action is to 'develop awareness so that people can choose which instances to join and interact with'. There aren't any practical administrative solutions to the problem being called out, with the exception of defederation or the threat thereof. Any single user on the entire fediverse can copy-paste user activity into any LLM and use the output to make moderation decisions, or craft personalized agitprop or whatever else, but centering the focus on instances that allow their usage turns the issue into a nail that can be solved with a hammer.
I don't see a technical or practical way to limit - let alone render impossible - AI moderation tools that is not at odds with decentralized open-protocol social media.
If you can copy-paste user activity into a textbox, this remains trivial.
I'm lowkey kind of fascinated this morning with what feels like a moment of real panic among western liberal-democratic institutions (projecting a little from my morning news and coffee). That an anarchist instance is getting this much targeted harassment feels like a microscopic extension of that (if I allow myself to be so bold)
As far as I can tell, dbzer0 isnt even being explicitly called out here, but it has an undeniable bdzer0 flavor to it. If it doesnt come out that this was one of our mods at this point, I'd almost be disappointed.
Aside from the ethical implications of profiling users or of using a corporatly owned server and model to execute this, I see nothing uniquely concerning about this practice that isnt already a risk of federated social media generally.
Every mod on every instance is free to use whatever tools or standards for moderation they want - that's an intentional byproduct of federation. Similarly, the collection of this data for use with llms is a bygone conclusion at this point - there was never any way of preventing that from happening with a federated network.
I think the only thing here to talk about is the way these questions are being framed as a question of intra-instance policy. We already have communities where moderation abuse can be called out and adjudicated- why pose this as a question of instance administration when there doesnt seem to be any evidence for it?
Right - I cant imagine there are enough rare metals in those components that would make them more valuable as scrap than as working server grade components
Yea, I just think theres a segment of liberals who are in denial about what a "Jewish State" actually is.
Either it's defacto segregation (which happens through social or economic means) and only nominally a Jewish state, or it's state-enforced segregation that requires apartheid and violence to maintain.
Either way - zionism is racist in its most fundamental aspects and should be snuffed out like chattel slavery and South African apartheid
This is bad, but for completely unexpected reasons
I thought they withheld it because it identified issues with the democratic platform that would put them at odds with donors, but instead it's a half-assed opinion piece scratched out on toilet paper and riddled with errors and no evidence to speak of
Third-Way and other neo-liberal rags are claiming victory over this pile of shit - I'm happy to let them roll around in it by themselves