Nope, screw opt-out. OPT-IN ONLY, i want it to be disabled by default.
this post was submitted on 12 May 2025
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It is not hard. One just has to be committed enough.
I very much understand wanting to have a say against our data being freely harvested for AI training. But this article's call for a general opt-out of interacting with AI seems a bit regressive. Many aspects of this and other discussions about the "AI revolution" remind me about the Mitchell and Web skit on the start of the bronze age: https://youtu.be/nyu4u3VZYaQ
You can opt-out by deleting your accounts on corporate social networks.
Haha, no you can't.
Can you? When all businesses start using AI for customer interaction...
Ah yes. The "freedom" the usa has spread all over its country and other nations.. Yes of course we must protect that freedom that is ofc a freedom for people to avoid getting owned by giant corporations. We must protect the freedom of giant corporations to not give us ai if they want to. I don't disagree but think people are more important
I doubt we'll ever be offered a real opt-out option.
Instead I'm encouraged by the development of poison pills for the AI that are non-consensually harvesting human art (Glaze and Nightshade) and music (HarmonyCloak).
Remind me in 3 days.
Although poison pills are only so effective since it's a cat and mouse game, and they only really work for a specific version of a model, with other models working around it.
But do Glaze, Nightshade, and HarmonyCloak really work to prevent that information from being used? Because at first, it may be effective. But then they'll find ways around those barriers, and that software will have to be updated, but only the one with the most money will win.
AI is a venture capital money pit, and they are struggling to monetize before the hype dies out.
If the poison pills work as intended, investors will stop investing "creative" AI when the new models stop getting better (and sometimes get worse) because they're running out of clean content to steal.
AI has been around for many years, dating back to the 1960s. It's had its AI winters and AI summers, but now it seems we're in an AI spring.
But the amount of poisoned data is minuscule compared to the data that isn't poisoned. As for data, what data are we referring to: everything in general or just data that a human can understand?
I’ve deleted pretty much all social media, I’m down to only Lemmy. I only use my home PC for gaming, like CiV or cities skylines or search engines for things like travel plans. I’m trying to be as offline as possible because I don’t believe there’s any other way to opt out and I don’t believe there ever will be. Like opting out of the internet is practically impossible, AI will get to this point as well
I disagree with the base premise that being opt out needs to be a right. That implies that having data be harvested for companies to make profits should be the default.
We should have the right to not have our data harvested by default. Requiring companies to have an opt in process with no coercion or other methods of making people feel obligated to opt in is our right.
Exactly. The focus should be on data privacy, not on what technologies a service chooses to use.
being opt out needs to be a right. That implies that having data be harvested for companies to make profits should be the default.
As the years have passed, it has become the acceptable consensus for all of your personal information, thoughts, and opinions, to become freely available to anyone, at anytime, for any reason in order for companies to profit from it.
People keep believing this is normal and companies keep taking more. Unless everyone is willing to stand firm and say enough, I only see it declining further, unfortunately.
The death of the private life
I'm there with you, and I'd join in a protest to get it.
Actually and time for data sales to be illegal. Not even opt-in.
We should have the right to not have our data harvested by default.
I would maybe not go quite that far but at the very least this should apply to commercial interests and living people.
I think there are some causes where it should be acceptable to have your data usable by default, e.g. statistical analysis of health threats (think those studies about the danger of living near a coal power plant or similar things).
I disagree. Yes, there are benefits to a lot of invasions of privacy, but that doesn't make it okay. If an entity wants my information, they can ask me for it.
One potential exception is for dead people, I think it makes sense for a of information to be released on death and preventing that should be opt in by the estate/survivors, depending on the will.
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That implies that having data be harvested for companies to make profits should be the default.
I sure hope those studies are not being done by for profit companies!
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It should be opt in
You don't need AI. There are enough porn sites with real humans.
And lots of hentai for stuff that is humanly impossible
I think it may he more productive to get people to use alternative ai products that are foss and/or respect privacy.
You got downvoted because Lemmy users like knee jerk reactions and think that you can unmake a technology or idea. You can’t, Ai is here and it’s forever now. Best we can do is find ways to live with it and like you said, reward those who use it ethically. The Lemmy idea that Ai should be banned and not used is so unrealistic
You seem to misunderstand the ire;
AI in its current state has existed for over a decade. Watson used ML algorithms to beat Jeopardy by answering natural language questions in 2011. But techbros have gotten ahold of it and decided that copyright rules don’t apply to them and now the cat is out of the bag?!? From the outside it looks like bootlicking for the same bullshit that told us we would be using blockchain to process mortgages in 10 years… 10 years ago. AI isn’t just here to stay it’s been here for 70 years.
ML technology has existed for a while, but it's wild to claim that the technology pre-2020 is the same. A breakthrough happened.
Breakthroughs are more or less of a myth. Everything is iterative.
Breakthroughs are not a myth. They still happen even when the process is iterative. That page even explains it. The advent of the GAN (2014-2018), which got overtaken by transformers in around 2017 for which GPTs and Diffusion models later got developed on. More hardware is what allowed those technologies to work better and bigger but without those breakthroughs you still wouldnt have the AI boom of today.
I posted it because you claimed none of that happened before 2020.
I never claimed anything besides that breakthroughs did happen since you claimed, which is objectively true. You claimed very concretely that AI was the same for over a decade, aka it was the same in at least 2015 if I'm being charitable, all of these things were researched in the last 7-8 years and only became the products as we know them in the last 5 years. (Aka 2020)
You are clearly only reading the parts you want to read. Have fun.
The absolute irony
Agreed. The only thing that has really changed is how much hardware we can throw at it. ML has existed more or less since the 60s.
If AI is going to be crammed down our throats can we at least be able to hold it (aka the companies pushing it) liable for providing blatantly false information? At least then they'd have incentive to provide accurate information instead of just authoritative information.
As much as you can hold a computer manufacturer responsible for buggy software.
Is it really though? I haven’t touched it since the very early days of slop ai. That was before I learned of how awful it is to real people
They don’t mean directly, i guarantee that companies, service providers, etc that you are with do indeed use Ai. That’s what I took the headline to mean. Some facet of everyone’s life uses Ai now
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The problem is not the tool. It's the inability to use the tool without a third party provider.
Local is a thing. And models are getting smaller with every iteration.
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