I think helpful bots, like this one, are generally a good thing. However I also think there should be a way for a community, either an instance as a whole or a community/magazine, can register their dislike of particular bots and/or have a setting to block them. Right now, I really want to block the lemmit bot. I don't need or want my feed gummed up w/ Reddit reposts.
The suggestion from a user in the linked post to put #nobot in the user profile is good though. It gives a way out for some folks. I personally don't mind, but if someone does, put this in your description. It could become a standard on lemmy/kbin.
first of all I'd like to say that i'm very concerned about my online privacy. However what you ask is, with all due respect, delusional.
The only way to prevent this is by moving in closed gate environment where you know the participants. It is impossible to stop all the scrappers or the AIs by posting #nobots. This game is already over and you just consume your mental energy fighting a lost war.
The moment you are posting something online publicly it will be scrapped by unlimited companies. Consider it a fact. Even if lets say the biggest of companies due to public relations reasons, respect such tag, there are unlimited other smaller companies/entities/whatever that will give no fuck at all. If they scrap it, then they can even sell it to the larger companies and your data is again there. It is unpreventable. It is like going in from of other people and telling them "don't look, look away". Ok so what, they have already looked and they look again when you turn away.
Well, speak for yourself. I don’t have an issue at all with a bot that summarizes publicly available posts and comments.
Meanwhile votes and favorites by username are publicly accessible. I consider that an actual threat to privacy. This here seems more like somewhat pointless anti-AI rhetoric that anyway hardly affects OpenAI‘s ability to collect the publicly available data we post here.
I'm sorry, but I don't think your opinion is coherent. Why is one public activity ok for harvesting for corporate interests, and another not ok for people to even know?
The space is public, or it is not. If expecting to have your data scraped by strangers because it exists is something we just have to accept to speak online, why treat a specific kind of speech differently?
because by collecting votes and favorites one can create a full spectrum profile of a user. However, if I decide to write a couple of sentences publicly I already know that it will be scrapped by unlimited companies and I agree that we have to just accept that it will be happening.
If you walk around outside, in a public space, you're gonna get recorded by security cameras that the local market has pointed towards the sidewalk (and likely don't care), but you would definitely care if someone pulled down your pants to take a pic of your underwear. Is that incoherent?
EDIT: The data can and will be scraped anyway. If they want, they can just start their own instance, federate with everything they can, and they won't even need to scrape it. At least we can get some use out of data harvesting with bots like these.
Is upvoting something the equivalent of choosing your underwear, though? I don't think it is. It's a public action.
It's complaining that someone recorded your dick in those security cameras because you whipped it out to piss on the sidewalk.
It's speech, and its effects are public. Wanting an activity where the consequences are public but the actors are not is just saying you don't want there to be consequences for your actions.
Moreover, it's an activity that is federated, which means if I want to know who's upvoting posts, I can just spin up my own instance and see who's doing it that way, just like with the other form of speech here. When you upvote something on Lemmy or kbin, when you favourite something on Mastodon, or when you use an emote reaction on other fediverse platforms, those are all sent as individual activities to following servers.
It's all public, even if it's not surfaced.
On the other side: Just because something is publicly viewable doesn't mean you should have the right -- ethical or legal -- to do whatever you want with it. If you publish a book, should I have the right to scrape it for my AI projects? If so, where is the line that I cannot cross? Can I put it to music and record the whole thing as an album? Can I include the entirety of its text in an ad for toilet seats? It's out there in the public, so clearly that means you've lost all rights to control what people do with it, right?
Where's the line, and why do you think it's at "updoots"?
Yeah I just don’t want people to completely ban any kind of automation on here because there’s good examples. Unit converters from freedom units to metric is another good example. And personally I enjoyed the fake bots like BobbyB and elonbot that made jokes all the time, but I’m not gonna die on that hill if the community at large wants to keep them away.
There's lots of useful bots besides just summarizers. Reminder bots can be great. Some linkifying bots are also useful (like Marv in r/SCP). Bots can detect malicious spam bots. Subs like AITA use bots to tally up user votes. There's bots for moderation actions, too.
But we really could use a way to get rid of the absolutely useless bots. We don't need terrible spelling correcting bots, a bot whose sole purpose is to tell people not to put "the" in front of "Ukraine", or a bot that lectures people on AMP links.
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