Did you know that HN has an API? Technically all your HN posts could be downloaded and used for AI training as well.

I don’t think we’ll be safe anywhere.

HN is hostile to the idea of user control of one's own content, so there was a signal from the start not to use it for more than anonymous throwaway comments. But Reddit allowed editing and deletion of comments so people used it more freely for years before the trust was broken. Now there's little confidence that deleted comments won't continue to be used.

This is exactly aligned with my point. Expectations matter. Social contracts matter.

Legality is always the argument that tyrants hide behind.

>Did you know that HN has an API? Technically all your HN posts could be downloaded and used for AI training as well.

It already has been used by LLMs

dang will get his own layer...

Why are you posting on the permanent public web if you don't want it to be read forever? You put up fliers at the local bar and are mad someone came by, took pictures, and made a scrapbook of it.

Trust me, I'm as annoyed as anyone about AI siphoning our culture to create bland grey replicas but people need to remember what websites are. They are other people's property, filled with cameras and surrounded by windows. When you go there and store your stuff, put up notes on the bulletin board, and whisper secrets to your friends, you're doing that on someone else's property, and they are watching you very closely. You are doing this in public.

Putting up fliers, choosing to be public is vastly, vastly different from using information previously provided under a different pretext for an entirely unwanted and unintended purpose, especially when it is to train digital intelligences that have inherently massive problematic social costs without explicit consent.

Put another way, it’s fine with me if someone wants to use the content that I provided to drive value on a social website.

It’s not OK with me that someone uses the content that I provided to replicate the author of what was written (without permission).

One thing to really understand about artificial intelligence is that it is in someways, essentially a reverse engineering of the person providing the content. I did not authorize a digital twin to be created from the content that I provided. I did not authorize a digital copy of myself, but that is what all of these companies are doing.

A fundamental stripping of the authorship to the point where you can replicate a proxy of the author and not just use the derivatives of that author.

This is a fundamental difference, because no other technology has ever been able to go back up the food chain and replicate the author in a way that allows for not only replication of the content and its relative functions, but a complete photocopying of the ideas and thinking and other mechanisms and patterns of the person that’s creating it.

It’s a profound difference of people have a hard time seeing.n

I gave permission to use the content I provided. I did not give permission for someone to act as me or make a proxy of me based on what I have provided.

I consented for my media to be used, but not me and that’s a huge difference.

While I philosophically agree with you, you're using a lot of words to describe what you felt but not what you actually agreed to.

What you consented to is an ever changing EULA that says something new every few months.

The "pretext" was that you thought you owned what you were posting but in reality you agreed that you didn't.

You don't sign a contract to put up fliers in public. You thought you were posting on the public commons but you were leaving your posts on someone's property after they warned you they were going to use them for whatever they wanted.

I personally hate this reality and scorn and avoid the cloud and SaaS as much as I can in my personal life. I deleted my accounts everywhere, and deleted all my content everywhere. Corporate cloud is shitty now.

We need free, open, peer to peer, opt in, civilian run network infrastructure like yesterday.

The old reddit at least (I don't use the new UI, as it is absolutely horrible) had option "allow my data to be used for research purposes" it wasn't for AI but I would imagine anyone who opted out from it, would also not want to have their data shared to AI.

Doesn't the Reddit TOS give them a license to do basically whatever they want with your submissions?

And this was actually a significant controversy some years back.

A lot of users, including myself - though definitely still a small minority - quit Reddit over the increasingly aggressive monetisation attempts; some of us used automated history editors to prevent our posts from being scraped or searched (though it almost certainly will not remove them from back end databases).

We didn't know that this was the specific way our content was going to be used, but we knew it was probably going to be something we wouldn't like.

We have now been proved right, and if you decided, back then, to stay and keep contributing to the multi-billion-dollar site for free, now you know why the Cassandras were raising such a fuss.

Yea count me the fool on this one.

But like is said earlier, legality is always the argument that tyrants hide behind.

There are scripts to delete all your Reddit posts.

Which is great, assuming you trust that a "delete" actually results in the data being removed from Reddit's possession...

There is right to be forgotten for EU, And probably state by state laws in the US. but it might be too little too late.

After I did this, they just restored all my previous posts!

I thought this too at the time. I ran the scripts, check my profile to make sure they were gone, then deleted my account. Went back the next day an a lot of my posts were back. And I couldn’t delete them anymore since I killed the account.

But I just checked, and they are gone. I can search google for my old username, and just references to my u/ by others is seen.

You might want to check again; I think there was some cache or mirroring that the deletes took a long time to propagate through.

Yea done it twice and both times my account magically was restored

Your sentiments definitely resonate, but what about an alternative path forward:

We collectively agree to abolish all notions of intellectual property in recognition of the fact that everyone is standing on the shoulders of giants.

As it stands, IP law is only used against the average person in favor of the wealthy exploiters in charge.

Obviously this move would lead to cascading fundamental changes to society, but I for one welcome a deviation from this late stage capitalist hellscape which only seems to be getting worse.

AI is a lot older than Reddit.

Deep Learning, as in, "efficiently trained neural networks utilizing gradient descent" really isn't