8mo ago

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.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/19946388

An anticapitalist tech blog. Embrace the technology that liberates us. Smash that which does not.

Reddit Will License Its Data to Train LLMs, So We Made a Firefox Extension That Lets You Replace Your Comments With Any (Non-Copyrighted) Text - The Luddite

theluddite.org

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Bye Reddit @lemmy.world

Reddit Will License Its Data to Train LLMs, So We Made a Firefox Extension That Lets You Replace Your Comments

theluddite.org

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Technology @lemmy.world

Reddit Will License Its Data to Train LLMs, So We Made a Firefox Extension That Lets You Replace Your Comments With Any (Non-Copyrighted) Text

theluddite.org

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75 comments

Reddit LLM:
This
This
This

Reddit will not license their data, they will license your data. Reddit doesn't have any data of its own.
- Oh my sweet summer child.
  They have all your data.
  
  I think you misunderstood my statement

If you want to have real fun replace all your comments with eicar test strings.
- That's a quite good idea
- I'm gonna use Ipsum Lorem.
  
  Nah, put in jailbreaks to dump its data. See if you can make its LLMs have a seizure

A few highlights that I'd like to make about this tool and its usage. Note: on a prescriptive level I'm focusing on moral matters, not legal ones.
This tool allows you to edit your content. You might have allowed other people and Reddit Inc. to use it, but it's still yours. And you should be free to do whatever you want with your content, even if it inconveniences others. And people expecting you to give up your moral rights for the sake of their own benefit, frankly, are simply entitled.
Another user here compared this with vandalism; I don't think that the comparison is good, given that vandalism targets someone else's property.
I also think that people in general are focusing too much on the short-term consequences of the usage of this tool, and too little on the long-term. Here comes some bullet points hell:
SEO "improvements" already caught up with the "add «reddit» to search queries!" trick. It's becoming less effective over time.
Reddit is accumulating huge amounts of noise, due to increased bot activity and decreased moderation. It'll likely get worse over time.
Reddit is walling itself off more and more over time. Eventually this info will become unavailable for anyone who ~~didn't sell their soul to Greedy Pigboy~~ isn't feeding that cesspool.
Every piece of content that you leave in that site is yet another piece of content "inviting" other users to register and stay there, dumping their content into that increasingly walled garden, where it won't be available publicly. And while they're free to do so if they so desire (it's their content), you're also free to not invite them.
There are alternatives to that enshittified platform, competing directly with it. (We're in one, by the way.) We should encourage people to use those alternatives, not Reddit.
Are you all getting the picture? You might be tempted to leave your content in Reddit for the sake of other people; even then, the pros of doing so are rather small, and there are cons not often mentioned.
Regarding LLMs, frankly? I think that it's mostly a neutral point. Sure, data hoarding bots will get your content from Reddit... but they'll do it if you post here in the Fediverse, in your blog, or elsewhere. The only alternative to not feeding those bots is to not speak "in the open".
- Has anyone recently checked the Reddit ToS?
  It's possible that by clicking that submit button, a perpetual worldwide license was granted that included any purpose Reddit deemed worthy.
  That could actually include every single version of every comment. Your first post, your ninja edit to correct your spellings, your edit update, and finally your plugin's update that wipes out your comment. All of this could be data Reddit can provide to LLM researchers.
- I think the most important point is that its competent ineffective for thwarting LLMS. They will be trained using the original data.
  Also, if any significant portion of users nuked their comment history it would be trivial for reddit to block the user and undo the edits.
  
  Also, if any significant portion of users nuked their comment history it would be trivial for reddit to block the user and undo the edits.
  It would be trivial from a procedure standpoint, but not from a social one. It would be really bad reputation for Reddit - "this site doesn't allow you to remove your content from it". Problematic specially in Europe.

Making info on Reddit useless to real humans is the main reason I need to set aside time to do this.
I really don’t care if AI trains off of what I’ve said. I do care that greedy greedy Steve Huffman killed 3rd party apps for it.
If Reddit’s use for searching obscure stuff goes away, there goes the biggest draw of the site. Get people going elsewhere. Like here!
- I don't have anything useful to add other than Steve Huffman is a greedy pig boy.

Fuck Reddit.
- Fuck /u/spez

That’s probably not going to be useful. Reddit keeps your original comment text.
- I think you missed the part where you were strongly suggested "not" to use copyrighted text.
  The point is not to get rid of the original text. It's to "poison" the training data.
  
  Are porn scrips copyrighted?
  
  If the AI trainers have the original text then "poisoning" the live site's content isn't going to do anything at all.
  You can't touch the original text. It's already been archived.
- Yeah - this is what I was thinking. We all heard about people being unable to delete comments or Reddit keeping comments even after account deletions back during the first migration, so what stops them holding onto comment history - and what stops them using that to teach llms to discern poisoned data from real data as @pixxelkick said.
- Yeah in fact you're giving the llm additional data to train on what poisoned data looks like so it can avoid it better, as they can clear see the before vs after
  
  It is necessary to employ a method which enables the training procedure to distinguish copyrighted material. In the "dumbest" case, some humans will have to label it.
  Just because you've edited a comment, doesn't mean that this can be seen as "oh, this is under copyright now".
  I don't say it's technical impossible. To the contrary, it very much is possible. It's just more work. This drives the development costs up and can give some form of satisfaction to angered ex-reddit users like me. However, those costs will be peanuts for giants like Google / Alphabet.

This only affects scrapers. If reddit is selling the data, they will just sell the unedited version from their database.
This is ineffective and deleting or editing reddit comments has always been a circle jerk to make yourself feel good that you are "hurting" reddit in some way.
- While this is true, I also kind of doubt that Reddit isn’t just one mistake away from accidentally deleting an old db and losing the historical data. So it may in fact mess up their ability to sell the data.
  Also potential GDPR violations etc if you’re in the EU
  
  If they were that close, they wouldn't run a site which solely relies on the safeguarding of that data. I cannot imagine they don't know how to handle and backup data.
  As for the gdpr, selling the data to an AI company for LLMs is probably anonymized. Or they have a database that does not contain any account information and only the posts. From a cursory read of the gdpr your personal data is your account, not necessarily your posts. If the posts are no longer associated with an account they are free game to reddit.
  Ironically, deleting the accounts might make it easier for reddit to use the data.
- And really just hurts people who are searching for actual human answers to questions later.
  
  It also hurts reddit. Fewer useful lookups on reddit - fewer visits to reddit.
  
  There was a time where there were many sites on the internet; hundreds, thousands even. And someone could search for content in topics they were interested in and find discussions in forums. I hope the internet becomes that again and sites like reddit burn to the ground, their servers salted to never grow again.
  The world recovered from the burning of Alexandria, and it would recover from the death of reddit. And from the rumbling of their new ad injection schemes, the sooner the better.

do not choose something copyrighted.
Is that with a "nudge, nudge, wink, wink"? It would be such a shame if the whole project were jeopardised by such things.

I think I have about 4000 comments on reddit. I've stopped using reddit last year in summer when they pushed their fucking API changes; have been on Lemmy since and never looked back. However, I still have the account, because sometimes I had really nice conversations, which I would like to look up once in a while, or to pick up something which I wanted to keep for another time, like a bookmark basically. I'm also one of the people who sometimes write really really much; walls of text as a product of a lot of effort I put in. It would be sad to see it all go away. Then again, fuck reddirt and it's management.
Is there a tool to back up my comments (or also the corresponding threads)? After that I'll gladly use the tool provided by luddite.
- You can request your data from Reddit and they'll send you a CSV file of all your activity. Takes a couple weeks though.
- You can request to download your data from reddit, and they'll provide it to you. I did that and made my comments available on github.
  
  I did that and made my comments available on github
  How? I've been looking for a way to host my data elsewhere.
  I found this website https://www.rareddit.com, but I'm not sure how to do that, and I contacted the author and didn't get a response.

Lots of stuff like this already exists and has been proven useless. A guy here on lemmy was a big answer type on some tech support sub. He used one of the account scrubbers to nuke his account before he deleted. Went to look again a few weeks later and all his top comment answers had been restored.
They haven't bothered with most people because they simply aren't useful to making the place look attractive but no mater what you do your comments are stored and will be sold off to the AI companies.
- I'm pretty sure that violates GDPR.

Sucks it only works with the desktop version of Firefox.
How fast is it, anyway? I was on Reddit for 11 years and commented with the same frequency I do here. I have so, so much to edit.
- I believe you can only edit the last 1000 or so comments from your profile. Anything older than that doesn't display.

Shit I already deleted my account.

They could fall out of a 30 story window for all i care

My comments are not your product. the whole thing I don't need or want it.

Pointless vandalism. The original comments are already archived, this will accomplish nothing except make Google results even worse for people.
- I'm down for that as well. It's their info, and they can do with it as they please. I have no right to it, unless they allow it. I totally understand the frustration of not finding the info you want, but I still support the practice.
  It sucks that's where we are, but WE didn't steer the ship here. Now we just need to play ball within the confines given to us.
  
  It's their info, and they can do with it as they please.
  And one of the things they did with that info was to license it to Reddit, who is now authorized to do what they please with it. No backsies.
- I think you might want to reconsider getting vandalism as your analogy.
  You can't vandalize your own property, and any comment or post you make is your words.
  It would be like telling a writer they can't edit their own work. That's not vandalism, it's removing the limited license granted to reddit for your copyrighted material.
  
  You absolutely can vandalize your own work. People are destroying posts they made that other people find useful, purely out of spite.
  Reddit may allow it, it may be totally legal, but that doesn't make a difference to my opinion that it's petty vandalism.
  Go ahead and downvote away, that doesn't change anything either.
- Exactly my thoughts, and it's why I haven't stopped using the site. This doesn't hurt reddit at all, it only hurts people who want answers to obscure questions. What sucks is that the kind of person who knows what bug causes someone's Dell Inspiron D630 makes a beeping noise every 23 seconds is exactly the kind of person who's going to have all of their comments replaced with AI poison.
  
  it only hurts people who want answers to obscure questions
  Which makes them people less likely to trust Reddit with answers...
  So they go to Reddit less often...
  Which hurts Reddit.
  
  There used to be other ways to find out the RAM went bad. Like Dell’s site, for example.
- As a protest eaasure it has a lot of value. Far more than blacking a subreddit for 2 days.

75 comments