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What do you even charge for that? We might never make a repository of human made content with no Ai postings in it ever again. Seems like selling the golden goo

What do you even charge for that? We might never make a repository of human made content with no Ai postings in it ever again. Seems like selling the golden goose to me

zapdrive 3y ago
> We might never make a repository of human made content with no Ai postings in it ever again. Wow, never thought of it that way before. Kinda hit me hard for some reason.
- thatguy0900 3y ago
  Honestly I think that's why reddit is closing itself up too. Everyone sitting on a website like this might be sitting on a Ai training goldmine that can never be replicated.
  - yuuuuuuuu 3y ago
    One that's slowly ageing away though.
  - TeMPOraL 3y ago
    Too little too late. Anything pre-ChatGPT is already scrapped, packaged and mirrored around the Internet; anything post ChatGPT launch is increasingly mixed up with LLM-generated output. And it's not that the most recent data has any extra value. You don't need most recent knowledge to train LLMs. They're not good for reproducing facts anyway. Training up their "cognitive abilities" doesn't need fresh data, it needs just human-generated data.
    - KnobbleMcKnees 3y ago
      Precisely, which brings us back around to the question: why are social media companies really doing this? I think "AI is takin' ooor contents!" is a convenient excuse to tighten the screws further. Having a Boogeyman in the form of technology that's already under worried discussion by press and politicians is a great way to convince users how super-super-serious the problem must be, and to blow a dog whistle at other companies to indicate they should so the same. It's no coincidence that the first two companies to do this so actively and recently are both overvalued, not profitable, and don't actually directly produce any of the content on their platforms.
- echelon 3y ago
  Synthetic data fed into training isn't necessarily a bad thing. It can produce great results in many cases.
  - ricardobayes 3y ago
    I've seen that work with self-driving cars. Simulating driving data is actually better since you can introduce black swan events that might not happen often in real world.
AnthonyMouse 3y ago
It's already public information. The point isn't to extract rents, it's to remove the incentive for server-melting mass scraping.
- eusto 3y ago
  I think this action from Twitter showed that it isn't public information. It is pretty much twitter's to do whatever they want with it.
  - phatskat 3y ago
    I think that’s always been known, but the tacit agreement between users and Twitter has always been “I’ll post my content and anyone can see it, if they want to engage they make an account”. From a business perspective this feels like a big negative to me for Twitter. I’ve followed several links the last few days and been prompted to login, and nothing about those links felt valuable enough to do so.
- jacobolus 3y ago
  Substantially higher loads than Twitter gets today were not "melting the servers" until Musk summarily fired most of the engineers, stopped paying data center (etc.) bills, and then started demanding miscellaneous code changes on tight deadlines with few if any people left who understood the consequences or how to debug resulting problems. In other words, the root problem is incompetent management, not any technical issue. Don't worry though, the legal system is still coming for Musk, and he will be forced to cough up the additional billions (?) he has unlawfully cheated out of a wide assortment of counterparties in violation of his various contracts. And as employee attrition continues, whatever technical problems Twitter has today will only get worse, with or without "scraping".
  - marvin 3y ago
    Twitter feels more stable today, with less spam, than one year ago. There's of course parts that have been deliberately shut down, but that's not an argument about the core product.
lozenge 3y ago
Do you think twitter has no AI postings?
ricardobayes 3y ago
It doesn't matter all that much. Smaller but better data is better for training than a large, but garbage dataset.
joshvm 3y ago
It's about $1 per thousand tweets and access to 0.3% of the total volume. I think the subscription is 50M "new" tweets each month? There are other providers who continually scrape Twitter and sell their back catalogue. https://www.wired.com/story/twitter-data-api-prices-out-nearly-everyone/ https://www.wired.com/story/twitter-data-api-prices-out-near... Researchers are complaining that it's far too high for academic grants. Probably true, but that's no different from other obscenely priced subscriptions like access to satellite imagery (can easily be $1k for a single image which you have no right to distribute). I'm less convinced that it's impossible for them to do research with 50 million tweets a month, or with what data there is available. Most researchers can't afford any of the AI SAAS company subscriptions anyway. Data labelling platforms - without the workers - can cost 10-20k a year. I spoke to one company that wouldn't get out of bed for a contract less than 100k. Most offer a free tier a la Matlab in the hope that students will spin out companies and then sign up. I don't have an opinion on what archival tweets should cost, but I do think it's an opportunity to explore more efficient analyses.

What do you even charge for that? We might never make a repository of human made content with no Ai postings in it ever again. Seems like selling the golden goose to me

zapdrive 3y ago

> We might never make a repository of human made content with no Ai postings in it ever again. Wow, never thought of it that way before. Kinda hit me hard for some reason.

thatguy0900 3y ago
Honestly I think that's why reddit is closing itself up too. Everyone sitting on a website like this might be sitting on a Ai training goldmine that can never be replicated.
- yuuuuuuuu 3y ago
  One that's slowly ageing away though.
- TeMPOraL 3y ago
  Too little too late. Anything pre-ChatGPT is already scrapped, packaged and mirrored around the Internet; anything post ChatGPT launch is increasingly mixed up with LLM-generated output. And it's not that the most recent data has any extra value. You don't need most recent knowledge to train LLMs. They're not good for reproducing facts anyway. Training up their "cognitive abilities" doesn't need fresh data, it needs just human-generated data.
  - KnobbleMcKnees 3y ago
    Precisely, which brings us back around to the question: why are social media companies really doing this? I think "AI is takin' ooor contents!" is a convenient excuse to tighten the screws further. Having a Boogeyman in the form of technology that's already under worried discussion by press and politicians is a great way to convince users how super-super-serious the problem must be, and to blow a dog whistle at other companies to indicate they should so the same. It's no coincidence that the first two companies to do this so actively and recently are both overvalued, not profitable, and don't actually directly produce any of the content on their platforms.
echelon 3y ago
Synthetic data fed into training isn't necessarily a bad thing. It can produce great results in many cases.
- ricardobayes 3y ago
  I've seen that work with self-driving cars. Simulating driving data is actually better since you can introduce black swan events that might not happen often in real world.

AnthonyMouse 3y ago

It's already public information. The point isn't to extract rents, it's to remove the incentive for server-melting mass scraping.

eusto 3y ago
I think this action from Twitter showed that it isn't public information. It is pretty much twitter's to do whatever they want with it.
- phatskat 3y ago
  I think that’s always been known, but the tacit agreement between users and Twitter has always been “I’ll post my content and anyone can see it, if they want to engage they make an account”. From a business perspective this feels like a big negative to me for Twitter. I’ve followed several links the last few days and been prompted to login, and nothing about those links felt valuable enough to do so.
jacobolus 3y ago
Substantially higher loads than Twitter gets today were not "melting the servers" until Musk summarily fired most of the engineers, stopped paying data center (etc.) bills, and then started demanding miscellaneous code changes on tight deadlines with few if any people left who understood the consequences or how to debug resulting problems. In other words, the root problem is incompetent management, not any technical issue. Don't worry though, the legal system is still coming for Musk, and he will be forced to cough up the additional billions (?) he has unlawfully cheated out of a wide assortment of counterparties in violation of his various contracts. And as employee attrition continues, whatever technical problems Twitter has today will only get worse, with or without "scraping".
- marvin 3y ago
  Twitter feels more stable today, with less spam, than one year ago. There's of course parts that have been deliberately shut down, but that's not an argument about the core product.

lozenge 3y ago

Do you think twitter has no AI postings?

ricardobayes 3y ago

It doesn't matter all that much. Smaller but better data is better for training than a large, but garbage dataset.

joshvm 3y ago

It's about $1 per thousand tweets and access to 0.3% of the total volume. I think the subscription is 50M "new" tweets each month? There are other providers who continually scrape Twitter and sell their back catalogue. https://www.wired.com/story/twitter-data-api-prices-out-nearly-everyone/ https://www.wired.com/story/twitter-data-api-prices-out-near... Researchers are complaining that it's far too high for academic grants. Probably true, but that's no different from other obscenely priced subscriptions like access to satellite imagery (can easily be $1k for a single image which you have no right to distribute). I'm less convinced that it's impossible for them to do research with 50 million tweets a month, or with what data there is available. Most researchers can't afford any of the AI SAAS company subscriptions anyway. Data labelling platforms - without the workers - can cost 10-20k a year. I spoke to one company that wouldn't get out of bed for a contract less than 100k. Most offer a free tier a la Matlab in the hope that students will spin out companies and then sign up. I don't have an opinion on what archival tweets should cost, but I do think it's an opportunity to explore more efficient analyses.