#data scraping sites

[thatgirlonstage]

The thing about tumblr is that there’s a panic about how the site is dying and falling apart literally every other week so eventually if you’ve been here long enough you just get zen about it. Like if anything specific is your breaking point do whatever you want but personally they’re gonna have to pry me out of the vents like a feral raccoon before I leave. Anyway if you’re new here and you see people talk about how something is the end of tumblr and you’re afraid they’re correct I just want you to know I’ve been here through probably like 300 ends of tumblr. I’m not saying it will never happen for real but statistically I remain skeptical.

[whatlurksbean]

Didnt Instagram/facebook change their policies so by having an account you automatically agree to have your content train their AI with no way to turn it off? Good enough reason to not post there at all if you ask me

i think unfortunately just about all websites are doing this no matter what they say.

[darkwood-sleddog]

you know i think it's really funny (derogatory) that tumblr seemingly has the ability to create popups for ad-free, crabs, anything that will get them money, but when it comes to using popups to guide new users around the website layout they're just like "uww what can we POSSIBLY do?? all these new people only know twitter and they couldn't possibly read a popup explaining how to use the site!! let's just change everything visually appealing about tumblr to cater to our inability to make popups for helpful reasons uwu!!".

like you know what i want? If you're testing a change on me I want a pop up that says so. I don't want to have to rely on the @changes blog to see that. If i'm testing a change I should be given a feedback form that is specifically about that change. I want the results of the feedback forms for changes to be publicly viewable to the userbase. you could learn so much about how this website actually functions for users through that, but no. we can only make popups when it fiscally benefits us! we can't use polls to get a sense of what the userbase is feeling! we can't publicize what % of feedback about a change was positive or negative. we couldn't...possibly...

[an-ev-ent-full-time]

considering posting art n stuff here again. No promises, but thinking about it

[dreaminginmysoup]

Sorry but yall are gonna have to pry me out of this place

[mountmortar]

observation-wise i do think it's interesting how enraged people were about how a giant query that returned pretty much everything ever posted (and unposted. drafts and unanswered asks and whatnot) on the site was done (which. to my knowledge. STILL doesn't have an answer regarding the question of whether or not the data included in that query was already sold) and that tumblr was going to start partnering with AI companies to train their models and then a couple of posts went around like "okie dokie guys NOW after that query was done we implemented an opt-out toggle <3 and we trust in Good Faith that the companies will respect this toggle <3" and then everyone was like Oh Okay <3 Yay <3 and suddenly everyone's fine again. 10/10 example of a collective sunk cost fallacy mentality. at this point it's kind of free entertainment to watch

[wainwrightjakobshammerlock]

[keytarsolo]

went ahead and made a cohost, @visorlights. I don't plan on going anywhere, but might as well cave at this point.

[gracehtml]

just saw a fic writer i liked happily share and thank someone for making ai fan “art” of their oc and i—

[ashendalia]

I think forums and personal websites should make a comeback

[jaybeefoxy]

I am in the process of changing my AO3 settings so that only registered users can access my content. I refuse to allow people to train AI with my work. I recently had a guest request that I unlock the first part of a series on AO3.

I'm sorry, but I'm not unlocking my stuff for you, because AO3 has advised one of the few ways to prevent data scraping is by restricting access. This annoys me because my work's availability has to be limited because of someone else's intrusion. My apologies if this restricts your viewing/reading. Get an AO3 account or try to reset your passwords, please. Authors put their work on AO3 for free, and while we appreciate your comments and love, help us by not supporting AI.

Part of me feels like why should I bother to unlock my work if you can't be bothered to reset your passwords, or reregister on the site? That would make me feel like a bit of an a-hole for saying that though. I do appreciate that passwords are a pain, but if you value the stuff you read for free, I dunno, maybe you should make the effort? At the end of the day, I don't know you, so I'm not going to trust an anonymous 'guest'.

[foxiapp]

Reddit sues Anthropic, accusing the AI company of illegally scraping data from its site

Social media platform Reddit has sued the artificial intelligence company Anthropic, alleging that it is illegally “scraping” the comments of Reddit users to train its chatbot Claude. Reddit claims that Anthropic has used automated bots to access Reddit’s content despite being asked not to do so, and “intentionally trained on the personal data of Reddit users without ever requesting their…

[softgrungeprophet]

lol apparently someone recently ran an LLM as an account on CWS and it proceeded to violate basic site rules by generating nearly 1200 garbage wordlinks that were either duplicates, too specific, or contained information that is not useful site-wide, thus creating a shitload of extra dictionary maintenance work for the unpaid volunteer staff who have been manually merging, deleting or otherwise un-fucking all of these wordlinks

very cool, solving the problem of "hm, i don't think these guys work hard enough" (sarcasm) by bloating the dictionary database with a bunch of crap

[vaspider]

So... apparently the NaNoWriMo organization has been gutted and the people at the top now are fully focused on Getting That AI Money.

I have no reason to say this other than Vibes™️ and the way that every other org who has pivoted to AI has behaved but I wouldn't trust anything shared with or stored on their servers not to be scraped for training LLMs. That includes pasting stuff into the site to verify your word count, if that's still a thing. (I haven't done Nano since 2015).

Also of note:

Age gating has been implemented. If you haven't added your date of birth to your profile or if you're under 18, it's supposed to lock you out of local region pages and the forums. ... It's worth noting that the privacy policy on the webpage doesn't specify how that data is stored and may not be GDPR compliant.

...

Camp events are being run solely by sponsors. Events for LGBTQIA+, disabled writers, and writers of color no longer appear to be a thing at NaNo.

Just... go read the whole thing. It's not that long. Ugh.

[kominfyrirkattarnef]

Made a new sideblog to post some writings on literally the day before the AI news broke, so now I'm feeling real conflicted about actually publishing any writing at all on there. Maybe I should just post a link to an external website on here, rather than crossposting.