this post was submitted on 07 Mar 2024
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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?

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[–] lvxferre@mander.xyz 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".

[–] T156@lemmy.world 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.

[–] lvxferre@mander.xyz 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!"
[–] GBU_28@lemm.ee 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
[–] lvxferre@mander.xyz 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.

[–] GBU_28@lemm.ee 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.

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[–] londos@lemmy.world 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.

[–] lvxferre@mander.xyz 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.

[–] reksas@sopuli.xyz 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

[–] lvxferre@mander.xyz 6 points 8 months ago

I'll ping @lemmyvore@feddit.nl 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.

[–] lemmyvore@feddit.nl 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.

[–] Murdoc@sh.itjust.works 2 points 8 months ago

I'm guessing, the AI? Seems like a job it'd be good at.

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[–] chalupapocalypse@lemmy.world 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.

[–] lvxferre@mander.xyz 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.

[–] Limeey@lemmy.world 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.

[–] abhibeckert@lemmy.world 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.

[–] magic_lobster_party@kbin.run 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.

[–] T156@lemmy.world 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.

[–] SorteKanin@feddit.dk 15 points 8 months ago

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

[–] Limeey@lemmy.world 8 points 8 months ago

I assure you that’s not the case anymore

[–] ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de 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.

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

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[–] Olap@lemmy.world 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

[–] SorteKanin@feddit.dk 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.

[–] tabular@lemmy.world 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).

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[–] kernelle@lemmy.world 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

[–] TORFdot0@lemmy.world 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

[–] maegul@lemmy.ml 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.

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[–] OutrageousUmpire@lemmy.world 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.

[–] ramble81@lemm.ee 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.

[–] PlexSheep@feddit.de 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.

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[–] SirSamuel@lemmy.world 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

[–] sigmaklimgrindset@sopuli.xyz 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 :,) )

[–] SirSamuel@lemmy.world 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

[–] TORFdot0@lemmy.world 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

[–] SirSamuel@lemmy.world 2 points 8 months ago

Jokes on you, i don't own a house, can't have a pet in my apartment, and my knees are already bad.

I love this timeline

[–] rtxn@lemmy.world 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?

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[–] Zstom6IP@lemmy.world 10 points 8 months ago

So they are using redditors as human guinea pigs

[–] BreakDecks@lemmy.ml 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. 🍿

[–] Kory@lemmy.ml 2 points 8 months ago

It was irony. The tool is even more clear on that with providing you a link you should NOT use because it's copyrighted (!!!!).

[–] execia 7 points 8 months ago (2 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?

[–] Confound4082@lemmy.ml 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.

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[–] solrize@lemmy.world 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.

[–] Olap@lemmy.world 20 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Someone didn't read the TOS

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[–] FoxBJK@midwest.social 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.

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