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Meta’s new AI image generator was trained on 1.1 billion Instagram and Facebook photos
(arstechnica.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
So I assume they added any necessary stuff to the TOS to allow this.
My question is if there's any legal mechanism to prevent this on other platforms? Pixelfed for example.
Companies will likely federate and pull images regardless, but can we go after them when they're caught? Nothing prevents them from taking the images for internal R&D, but at least we can stop them from selling products with that training data
Good question!
I’ve been saying for a while that the fediverse is blind to this issue as everything here is completely scrapable through either the public web or by running federated servers. On top of that, being culturally inclined toward more “serious” conversation and providing content warnings and alt-text for images, we’re probably generating relatively valuable training data.
And yet everything is public as though it’s still 2012.
There are alternatives. BlueSky for instance is basically private to members only. They recently announced that content would be made public to the web and a number of users were upset.
Group chats and Discord servers are probably similar, and from what I can tell “new” popular places for social activity online.
A major issue the fediverse has, IMO, is that it’s kinda stuck trying to fight Twitter and Facebook circa 2012, when that battle was lost and we’re on to new battle fronts now.
afaik activitypub/fediverse doesn’t have to be fully open… there’s private messages and followers only profiles on mastodon… sure, any server admins of your followed would be able to see anything you post (and thus in this case for threads for example, if you accept any follower from threads then meta can see your stuff) but this also doesn’t grant them a license to use the content
also, bluesky will eventually be the same: it only doesn’t have those issues now because they haven’t opened up their software… it’ll have federation in the future, which means it has to be somewhat programmatically open to others