this post was submitted on 07 Mar 2024
574 points (97.7% liked)

Technology

59600 readers
3186 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots


founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

I know there are other ways of accomplishing that, but this might be a convenient way of doing it. I'm wondering though if Reddit is still reverting these changes?

top 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 89 points 8 months ago (4 children)

Let's pretend for a moment that we know that Reddit has any sort of decent versioning system, and that it keeps the old versions of your comments alongside the newer ones, and that it's feeding the LLM with the old version. (Does it? I have my doubts, given that Reddit Inc. isn't exactly competent.)

Even then, I think that it's sensible to use this tool, to scorch the earth and discourage other human users from adding their own content to that platform. It still means less data for Google to say "it's a bunch of users, who cares about the intellectual property of those filthy things? Their data is now my data. Feed it ~~to the wolves~~ to Gemini".

[–] [email protected] 31 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

Let’s pretend for a moment that we know that Reddit has any sort of decent versioning system, and that it keeps the old versions of your comments alongside the newer ones, and that it’s feeding the LLM with the old version. (Does it? I have my doubts, given that Reddit Inc. isn’t exactly competent.)

They almost certainly do, if only because of the practicalities of adding a new comment, then having that be fetched in place of the old one, compared to making and propagating an edit across all their databases. With exceptions, it'd be a bit easier to implement it as an additional comment, and increment a version number that you fetch the latest version of, rather than needing to scan through the entire database to make changes.

It would also help with any administration/moderation tasks if they could see whether people posted rule-breaking content and then tried to hide it behind edits.

That said, one of the many Spez controversies did show that they are capable of making actual edits on the back end if they wished.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 8 months ago (2 children)

They almost certainly do, if only because of the practicalities of adding a new comment

If this is true, it shifts the problem from "not having it" to "not knowing which version should be used" (to train the LLM).

They could feed it the unedited versions and call it a day, but a lot of times people edit their content to correct it or add further info, specially for "meatier" content (like tutorials). So there's still some value on the edits, and I believe that Google will be at least tempted to use them.

If that's correct, editing it with nonsense will lower the value of edited comments for the sake of LLM training. It should have an impact, just not as big as if they kept no version system.

It would also help with any administration/moderation tasks if they could see whether people posted rule-breaking content and then tried to hide it behind edits.

I know from experience (I'm a former Reddit janny) that moderators can't see earlier versions of the content, only the last one. The admins might though.

That said, one of the many Spez controversies did show that they are capable of making actual edits on the back end if they wished.

The one from TD, right?

  • spez: "let them babble their violent rhetoric. Freeze peaches!"
  • also spez: "nooo they're casting me on a bad light. I'm going to edit it!"
[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 months ago (3 children)

Wouldn't be hard to scan a user and say:

  • they existed for 5 years.
  • they made something like 5 comments a day. They edit 1 or 2 comments a month.
  • then randomly on March 7th 2024 they edited 100% of all comments across all subs.
  • use comment version March 6th 2024
[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 months ago (1 children)

It would.

First you'd need to notice the problem. Does Google even realise that some people want to edit their Reddit content to boycott LLM training?

Let's say that Google did it. Then it'd need to come up with a good (generalisable, low amount of false positives, low amount of false negatives) set of rules to sort those out. And while coming up with "random" rules is easy, good ones take testing, trial and error, and time.

But let's say that Google still does it. Now it's retrieving and processing a lot more info from the database than just the content and its context, but also account age, when the piece of content was submitted, when it was edited.

So doing it still increases the costs associated with the corpus, making it less desirable.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago (6 children)

Huh? Reddit has all of this plus changes in their own DBs. Google has nothing to do with this, it's pre handover.

load more comments (6 replies)
load more comments (2 replies)
[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Honestly, parsing through version history is actually something an LLM could handle. It might even make more sense of it than without. For example, if someone replies to a comment and then the parent is edited to say something different. No one will have to waste their time filtering anything.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

They could use an LLM to parse through the version history of all those posts/comments, to use it to train another LLM with it. It sounds like a bad (and expensive, processing time-wise) idea, but it could be done.

EDIT: thinking further on this, it's actually fairly doable. It's generally a bad idea to feed the output of an LLM into another, but in this case you're simply using it to pick one among multiple versions of a post/comment made by a human being.

It's still worth to scorch the earth though, so other human users don't bother with the platform.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 8 months ago (1 children)

What if we edit the comments slowly, words or even letters at a time. Then, if they save all of the edits they will end up with a lot of pointless versions. And if they dont, the buffer will eventually get full and original gets lost

[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 months ago

I'll ping @[email protected] because the answer is relevant for both.

Another user mentioned the possibility that they could use an LLM to sort this shit out. If that's correct neither slow edits nor multiple edits will do much, as the LLM could simply pick the best version of each comment.

And while it's a bit silly to use LLM to sort data out to train another LLM, this sounds like the sort of shit that Google could and would do.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Let's also pretend that reddit isn't a cesspool of bots, marketing campaigns, foreign agents, incels, racists, Republicans, gun nuts, shit posters, trolls...the list goes on.

Is it even that valuable? It didn't take long for that Microsoft bot to turn into Hitler, feeding reddit into an "AI" is like speed running Ultron.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago

It's still somewhat valuable due to the size of the corpus (it's huge) and because people used to share technical expertise there.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Even if they had comment versioning, who's gonna dig through the versions to figure out which are nonsense. Just use the overwrite tool several times and then wish them good luck.

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] [email protected] 53 points 8 months ago (3 children)

When you edit your comment all you’re doing is adding a “new” comment, the old comment is flagged to not show and the new comment shows in its place.

This achieves nothing.

[–] [email protected] 65 points 8 months ago (5 children)

Reddit was open source until relatively recently. According to the source code, editing comments does overwrite your data. Or at least it used to.

Keeping old data is expensive, and usually a waste of money.

[–] [email protected] 31 points 8 months ago

It’s not a waste of money if you can sell it.

And text comments is rarely more than 1kb. They can provably fit more than 1 billion comments in a 1TB drive if they want, which is peanuts in terms of storage.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Relatively recently being 6 years ago.

Keeping old data is expensive, and usually a waste of money.

At the same time, text, which Reddit was exclusively, for a good long time, compresses really well. The entirety of Wikipedia goes from 10 TB to 100 GB when compressed, and if it's just the article text alone, 22 GB.

That's a drop in the bucket compared to the amount of data that they would have had to deal with when they started deciding to take on video and image hosting.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 8 months ago

Text data is like practically 0 compared to all the rest of the data (i.e. images for instance).

[–] [email protected] 8 points 8 months ago

I assure you that’s not the case anymore

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

Keeping old comments data is small and relatively cheap to store. I'm sure they've kept backups. Probably even yearly ones for the past 5 years. Storage for text really doesn't take up much room. There's over 4,500,000,000 words in the entirety of Wikipedia. You can download it all right now if you'd like. An offline copy of wiki is currently about 95GB. Probably half the size of your last CoD game update.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 8 months ago

Yeah, do nothing because you wouldn't take the risk it works.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

I'm still pretty happy that I can change all my comments to quips from story of the eye or jaberwalky and I would encourage everyone to do the same. Seems like a good fuck around and find out situation at least. There will likely be other llms that won't have an official relationship but will crawl reddit. The more we can jumble it up the better.

[–] [email protected] 39 points 8 months ago (5 children)

Reddit is almost certainly going to throw your old comments to them if you edit stuff. We're pretty fucked. And if you think Lemmy is any different, guess again. We agreed to send our comments to everyone else in the fediverse, plenty of bad actors and a legal minefield allows LLMs to do what they want essentially. The good news is that LLMs are all crap, and people are slowly realising this

[–] [email protected] 51 points 8 months ago (1 children)

And if you think Lemmy is any different, guess again

Lemmy is different, in that the data is not being sold to anyone. Instead, the data is available to anyone.

It's kind of like open source software. Nobody can buy it, cause it's open and free to be used by anyone. Nobody profits off of it more than anyone else - nobody has an advantage over anyone else.

Open source levels the playing field by making useful code available to everyone. You can think of comments and posts on the Fediverse in the same way - nobody can buy that data, because it's open and free to be used by anyone. Nobody profits off of it more than anyone else and nobody has an advantage over anyone else (after all, everyone has access to the same data).

The only problem is if you're okay with your data being out there and available in this way... but if you're not, you probably shouldn't be on the internet at all.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago (1 children)

If the post is creative then it's automatically copyrighted in many countries. That doesn't stop people collecting it and using it to train ML (yet).

[–] asret 2 points 8 months ago

Copyright has little to say in regards to training models - it's the published output that matters.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

LLMs are all crap, and people are slowly realising this

LLM's have already changed the tech space more than anything else for the last 10 years at least. I get what you're trying to say but that opinion will age like milk.

Edit: made wording clearer

[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 months ago

I've been harping on about this for a while on the fediverse ... private/closed/non-open spaces really ought to be thought about more. Fortunately, lemmy core devs are implementing local only and private communities (local only is already done IIRC).

Yes they introduce their own problems with discovery and gating etc. But now that the internet's "you're the product" stakes have gone beyond what could have been construed as a reasonably transaction, "my attention on an ad ... for a service", to "my mind's products to be aggregated into an energy sucking job replacing AI ... for a service" ... well it's time to normalise closing that door on opportunistic tech capitalists.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 months ago

LLMs are great for anything you’d trust to an 8 year old savant.

It’s great for getting quick snippets of code using languages and methods that have great documentation. I don’t think I’d trust it for real work though

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

They'll use old comments either way, using an up-to-date dataset means using a dataset already tainted by LLM-generated content. Training a model on its own output is not great.

Incidentally this also makes Lemmy data less valuable, most of Lemmy's popularity came after the rise of LLMs so there's no significant untainted data from before LLMs.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 8 months ago

If one wanted to really screw the AI, I’d replace each post/comment with nonsense generated by ChatGPT itself on a higher-than-normal temperature setting. AI would be training on its own generated content, and out of context as well.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 8 months ago (2 children)
  1. Reddit will most likely feed these guys a copy of their DB from before the API switch ensuring an unfucked copy of data before people started messing with it.

  2. The only way to control your data, even on the fediverse is through DRM, the thing so many people hate, but it’s designed to ensure you control who uses your data and how. I know people say “well what about copyrights and licenses?” Tell that to people building LLMs in other jurisdictions that don’t care about those.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 8 months ago

DRM always fails, and would fail especially bad in an open and free community which has the purpose of being open and free. DRM is the mortal enemy of many fediverse users.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 19 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

We are commodities

We exist to be bought and sold

By the ruling class

I have been bought and sold

Many many times

But only my thoughts

And identity

And words

And face

So that's okay

I'll just scroll other stolen thoughts

On a phone built by an eight year old

Who was bought

And sold

Half a world away

[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Damn, ChatGPT's poetry extension is fire

(Joking aside, reading this after reading Banksy's statement on advertising is just a great double whammy. Love heading to bed with a vague sense of unease :,) )

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Thank you! This was actually my first attempt at free form poetry, it just kind of flowed out of me. It only took till middle age for inspiration to strike lol

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Actually Microsoft’s bing AI just ingested your poetry into its training set and now it’s co-pilot’s poetry. You have 30 minutes to pay Microsoft 2.4 million dollars or SupremacyAGI will take your house, break your kneecaps, and murder your dog

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 15 points 8 months ago (5 children)

I have two unrelated questions.

  • Can I choose what text to use?

  • What is the copyright status of Ram Ranch?

load more comments (5 replies)
[–] [email protected] 10 points 8 months ago

So they are using redditors as human guinea pigs

[–] [email protected] 8 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Why non-copyrighted? I want to flood Reddit with copyrighted text from the most aggressively litigious rightsholders available. 🍿

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Where the hell do I come up with an incoherent piece of text? I could give a copyrighted article but I'm already subbed to r/conspiracy and I want to add random bullshit to my account. Should I write my own or find a copypasta?

[–] [email protected] 11 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I went to chat gpt and I prompted it with "what is a string of words or characters that would be detrimental to an AI that is being directed to learn from a dataset" and then used a script to edit all my comments to that.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

Dude I'm writing one right now but boy is it hard writing like a schizo. Why is it so easy to write meaningful sentences but hard to write bullshit? I went to stormfront for inspiration lol. It amazes me just how deluded and ignorant they are. I hate to poison my account as I had relevant info in many biology/climate whatever.. subs and good relationships with many others but oh well. I'll probably be banned and removed from each which is what I want. It'd be nice if we all copied one and deleted our accounts. I don't have chatgpt but I used a 3p chatgpt site and it was awful which is why I'm writing my own.

I scrapped that. Here's what I put - I was yelling at God at the top of my lungs in my bedroom and thus, encountered Him as he answered me. Yes, I had a “verbal theophany” - I literally heard His voice, and not through my ear canals.

It has been wonderful and terrible. I have no other choice but to speak, teach and proclaim that Jesus Christ is the son of God. I am treated with disdain, contempt, regarded as “overly religious” or “unorthodox” by those trained in a ‘regular’ fashion [i.e. seminary and pulpit].

I am not a missionary, a paid pastor nor a Christian worker. I am only a disciple and sometimes apostle of Christ. That is, I get to learn humility by being low on the social pole to set me up to go do something bold for Christ - speaking in a jail, in a retirement community, etc.

Sounds great? It is - as long as I fix my eyes on Jesus.

I am unmarried, at poverty level - and nearly spoiled by all the provision God gives me. I would fear narcissism and some other sort of self-justifying condition - except for the constant reminders of how often my prayers have been answered - directly.

I cannot count how many miracles and other “super-sized coincidences” have occurred. I have transitioned to the “charismatic” end of the Christian spectrum, where all my apologetics and reasoned faith become of little importance.

It was like what happened to Dr. Strange in the film [and comic]: he starts off rational and brilliant and egotistical and ends up being humbled, knowing the universe is much much bigger than everything he knew.

It is literally painful for me to watch the standard TV fare or listen to some show on PBS roll on and on about evolution as a basis of origin [Evolutionary modification? Sure. Information needs to be edited, but it doesn’t spring into existence without guidance.]

So Jesus did it all, that one night. How do I know it was Jesus?

No one else ever loved me that much. I am trapped by His love.

I sometimes wish I was like most people again. I sometimes get very tired.

Then I think of Him dying for me. I mean an ugly death, like a piece of dung.

I got nothing. He’s my saviour.

It’s gonna suck, what’s coming - for me, for the world, but He’s worth it. Jesus made me brave.

Of all the qualities that the New Testament ascribes to God, compassion is among the most shocking.

Compassion has nothing to do with power, with immortality or with immutability, which is what many people think of when they contemplate God’s qualities. The Greek gods of myth who lived on Mt. Olympus were defined by many things, but compassion was not high among them.

“For much of antiquity feeling the pain of others was regarded as a weakness,” John Dickson, a professor of biblical studies and public Christianity at Wheaton College, told me. This comes to full flowering in the Stoics, he said, “on the grounds that this involved allowing an external factor — the emotions or plight of another — to control your own inner life.”

Compassion, on the other hand, is central to the Christian understanding of God. Compassion implies the capacity to enter into places of pain, to “weep with those who weep,” according to the Apostle Paul, who was central both to the early conception of Christianity and to the idea of its underpinning in compassion.

In the Hebrew Scriptures, we’re told many times that God is compassionate. It is at the center of the Jewish conception of God. But for Christians, there is an incarnational expression of that compassion. The embodiment of God in Jesus — the deity made flesh, dwelling among us — means that God both suffered and, crucially, suffered with others in a way that was a seismic break with all that came before. In the Gospels, we repeatedly read of the compassion of Jesus for those suffering physically and emotionally, for those “harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.”

When a man afflicted with leprosy came to Jesus, begging on his knees to be healed, we’re told that Jesus, “moved with compassion, stretched out his hand and touched him, and said to him, ‘I am willing; be cleansed.’” And he was.

This is an extraordinary scene. Those with leprosy were considered not just unclean, physically and spiritually, but loathsome. Everything they touched was viewed as defiled. They were often cast out from their villages, quarantined “outside the camp.” In the words of the famed 19th-century preacher Charles Spurgeon, “They were to all intents and purposes, dead to all the enjoyments of life, dead to all the endearments and society of their friends.”

People would avoid contact with those afflicted with leprosy. They were seen by many as the object of divine punishment, the disease understood to be a visible mark of impurity. Yet in the account in Mark, Jesus not only heals the man with leprosy; he also touches him. In doing so, Jesus defied Levitical law. He himself became “unclean.” And he provided human contact to a person whom no other human would touch — and who had very likely not been touched in a very long time.

Jesus’ touch was not necessary for him to heal the man of leprosy, but the touch may have been necessary to heal the man of feelings of shame and isolation, of rejection and detestation.

Kerry Dearborn, professor emerita of theology at Seattle Pacific University, told me her students found the most moving examples of Jesus’ compassion to be his responses to outsiders, especially those deemed unworthy, unclean or unfit. “In taking on their ‘outsider status’ with them,” Dr. Dearborn told me, “he reflected his deep love and solidarity with them, and his willingness to suffer with them.” Jesus not only healed them, she said; he also took on their alienation.

In the 11th chapter of the Gospel of John, we’re told that Lazarus, the brother of Mary of Bethany and Martha, and a friend of Jesus’ whom he loved, was sick. By the time Jesus arrived in Bethany, Lazarus had died and had been entombed for four days. Both sisters were grieving. Mary, when she saw Jesus, fell at his feet weeping. “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died,” she said. We’re told Jesus “was deeply moved in spirit and troubled.”

“Where have you laid him?” he asked.

“Come and see, Lord,” they replied. And according to verse 35, “Jesus wept.”

“Jesus wept” is the shortest verse in the Bible and also “the most profound and powerful,” the artist Makoto Fujimura told me. For him, those are “the most important two words in the Bible.”

And understandably so. Earlier in John 11, we’re told that Jesus knew he was going to raise Lazarus from the dead, which he did. So Jesus wasn’t weeping because he wouldn’t see Lazarus again; it was because he was entering into the suffering of Mary and Martha. Jesus was present with them in their grief, even to the point of tears, all the while knowing that their grief would soon be allayed.

My daughter Christine Wehner, who originally suggested to me that Jesus’ compassion would be a worthwhile topic to explore, told me, “Jesus wept because Mary was before him and her heart was breaking — and as a result, his heart broke, too.” The Psalms tell us that God is “close to the brokenhearted”; in this case, Christine said, “Jesus doesn’t just care for the brokenhearted; he joins them. Their grief becomes his in a remarkable act of love.”

“Jesus ushered in a compassion revolution,” Scott Dudley, senior pastor at Bellevue Presbyterian Church, told me. Before Jesus, compassion was primarily thought of as a weakness, he said.

“When Jesus says he is with us, that’s not a metaphor or a trite offer of ‘thoughts and prayers,’” the pastor said. “He’s literally in it with us.”

Dr. Dudley pointed out that in his suffering, Job says to God, “Do you have eyes of flesh? Do you see as a mortal sees?” In other words, Do you know how hard it is to be human? “Because of Christmas,” Dr. Dudley told me, “God can legitimately say yes in a way no other god in any other religion can.”

Renée Notkin, colead pastor of Union Church in Seattle, told me that “our daily invitation in living is to be with people in their stories. When I take time to listen deeply and to listen beyond the words spoken to another person’s heart story, am I able to begin to cry with them? Not problem solving and not saying, ‘I know what you mean’; rather simply weeping alongside in shared humanity.”

As a Christian, my faith is anchored in the person of Jesus, who won my heart long ago. It would be impossible to understand me without taking that into account. But sometimes my faith dims; God seems distant, his ways confounding. “Faith steals upon you like dew,” the poet Christian Wiman has written. “Some days you wake and it is there. And like dew, it gets burned off in the rising sun of anxiety, ambitions, distractions.” And the rising sun of grief and loss, too. Those things don’t necessarily destroy faith; in some cases, for some people, they can even deepen it. But they always change it.

... A nice NYT article.

I got like 10 warnings for harrassment by u/reddit but I\m already banned. Got banned from r/biology and others, they probably think I'm a conspiracy nut now.

Or change it to this nice schizo wall of text made from stormfront's intellectuals. Reddit has my home IP though from a long time ago and I dont want to sound like a domestic terrorist.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (2 children)

It's not reddit's data, it's the users'. Reddit management is just overentitled jerks.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Someone didn't read the TOS

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago

The users give the site a pretty broad license for their content. Calling it the user’s data is a moot point.

Don’t even recall if the Lemmy instance I use has a TOS, but it’s likely the server owner has similar rights just by the nature of how this tech works.

load more comments
view more: next ›