Technology

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

They'll use old comments either way, using an up-to-date dataset means using a dataset already tainted by LLM-generated content. Training a model on its own output is not great.

Incidentally this also makes Lemmy data less valuable, most of Lemmy's popularity came after the rise of LLMs so there's no significant untainted data from before LLMs.

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.

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 :,) )

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.

Someone didn't read the TOS

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.