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?
Why non-copyrighted? I want to flood Reddit with copyrighted text from the most aggressively litigious rightsholders available. 🍿
It was irony. The tool is even more clear on that with providing you a link you should NOT use because it’s copyrighted (!!!).
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 wolvesto Gemini”.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.
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!”
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
It sounds like what’s needed here is a version of this tool that makes the edits slowly, at random intervals, over a period of time. And perhaps has the ability to randomize the text in each edit so that they’re all unusable garbage, but different unusable garbage (like the suggestion of taking ChatGPT output at really high temp that someone else made). Maybe it also only edits something like 25% of your total comment pool, and perhaps makes unnoticeably minor edits (add a space, remove a comma) to a whole bunch of other comments. Basically masking the poison by hiding it in a lot of noise?
Now you’re talkin .
Intra comment edit threshold would be fun to explore
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
So they are using redditors as human guinea pigs
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
-
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.
-
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.
deleted by creator
-
It’s not reddit’s data, it’s the users’. Reddit management is just overentitled jerks.
Someone didn’t read the TOS
Admittedly, I haven’t read the TOS… but I don’t need to. At least where I live it would be illegal to claim ownership of someone else’s work (unless you paid a living wage to create it, or something along those lines. A software company for example can claim ownership of employee created software).
Maybe you should read them. They are not claiming ownership. They are claiming that you licenced them to use your contributions for whatever purpose they want. Different thing.
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.
