Reddit Will License Its Data to Train LLMs, So We Made a Firefox Extension That Lets You Replace Your Comments
An anticapitalist tech blog. Embrace the technology that liberates us. Smash that which does not.
An anticapitalist tech blog. Embrace the technology that liberates us. Smash that which does not.
Ok but Reddit absolutely saves the old comments though
You are polluting the data set. Do it a few times with different text sources and the scrubbers won't know what part of your comment history is good. Replace, don't delete.
I'm pretty sure they'll know that the first version of each comment is almost certainly the good one. People sometimes edit a comment to add new information or fix a typo, but they almost never replace nonsense with a good comment, rather than the other way around.
Edit: fixed typos, also replaced excerpt from Moby Dick with this post.
Edit 2: the comments you post here are totally available for machine learning, so I don't see much of a point in deleting my Reddit comments as long as I'm participating in Lemmy.
Not in a meaningful way. It’s easy to detect and revert a change like this. Instead of bulk changing all your comments, you should slowly change them over time.
Even then, users don’t usually edit most of their comments. Sure Reddit might be naive and just take the current comments, but it’s pretty trivial to reverse this kind of thing.
Probably good to do it to make this process harder and more error prone for Reddit but I would not be under the impression that this has an impact beyond being annoying.
Over a long period sure. If they see a spike where say, 25% of a user's comments are changed in a day, then they'll just use day -1
Reddit has a copy of every comment and edit, they probably have copies of things users type but don't actually end up posting.
It is brutally trivial to notice mass edits like this.
The only thing this is doing is making it harder for people scraping it without paying, making what reddit is selling actually valuable.
Every edited or deleted comment is more money in their pocket.
Let this be a lesson on generating content for a business and not getting paid for it.
With that said, I’m sure the frog posts are exactly the kind of quality content needed to train an AI.
are there copyrighted texts that have such distinctive patterns that they would be particularly easy to spot in an LLM's output? say, would replacing every comment with a page from moby dick or wuthering heights be more or less infringing than using harry potter? hypothetically.
Well, I'm pretty sure Moby Dick is in the public domain by now. If I were you I'd go for something from Disney which is mathematically certain to get somebody sued although I can't predict who.
i personally think the value of the comments are worth leaving for people to find later even if Reddit does use them in an underhanded way.
i recognize this may not be popular.
Yup. Reddit gives zero fucks about any form or protest or the degredation of the quality of content. They already have the metric the traffic originally created.
The only people negatively impacted are the people trying to find information that are pushed there by search engines when trying to find stuff.
You are entitled to your opinion.
As someone else brilliantly pointed out, leaving the comments hurts Reddit more than delete/edit.
Deleting/editing comments only hides the posts from the public. Reddit has the original posts, is ignoring all edits made to posts, and selling that original data.
Privately owned social media platforms are a dead end.
Libraries should host the peoples internet. Municipal mastodon has a ring to it I think.
I left my comments there, thinking some day I might go back. But it's been months and I haven't missed it.
I think giving their AI my depression is punishment enough.
Ai be like “stfu regard”
And my axe!
I got banned from /r/AFL because I used Redact to scrub my comments. My how the turntables have turned and they turned out to be the real thin skinned pansy cunts. Not /r/sports during the kerfuffle.