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X/Twitter has updated its terms of service to let it use posts for AI training
- m3kw9 3y agoI’m ok with it because it’s public and they own the platform.
- outericky 3y agoWith data going forward? or past data? Because I don't agree with using my past data... (kinda of rhetorical as I long deleted my accounts, though I'm sure the data is still there)
- jamiequint 3y agoTechnically, not deleting your data would be a GDPR violation of the right to be forgotten. They could be ignoring that but it would be very expensive if they were found out. Probably doesn't apply to models that have already been trained, but should apply effectively going forward.
- asu_thomas 3y ago[flagged]
- wahnfrieden 3y agowhat's public? you can't access X data without an account and accepting ToS
- NavinF 3y agoMeh, the ToS is unenforceable and VPNs with residential IPs are not that expensive. Sure it's little harder to scrape than HN for example, but everyone trains on twitter data (along with everything else on the internet)
- superkuh 3y agoOh, it's very enforceable. People have literally been imprisoned for years for using alternate tools, like wget, to access a website. The not being enforced most of the time so that everyone breaks / has broken the CFAA laws covering TOS is a feature of the system. Like other such laws it only gets enforced when you rock the boat and someone rich/powerful enough buys a district attorney to indict you.
- NavinF 3y ago> People have literally been imprisoned for years for using alternate tools, like wget, to access a website Source?
- wahnfrieden 3y agoYou can Google it in a second. Aaron Swartz for instance faced up to 50 years. Weev (regardless of the nazi scum that he is) went to jail for it.
- hedora 3y agoThere's very little chance he would have lost in court. Obviously, there can be extrajudicial consequences though.
- jprete 3y agoHaving to go to court in itself and spend literally months or years with the possibility of being sentenced to most of the rest of your life in prison is itself a very severe punishment.
- NavinF 3y agoI asked because I did google it and I found nothing. Aaron Swartz was not "imprisoned for years". Weev "exposed a flaw in AT&T security in June 2010, which allowed the e-mail addresses of iPad users to be revealed.[39] The flaw was part of a publicly-accessible URL, which allowed the group to collect the e-mails without having to break into AT&T's system.[40] Contrary to what it first claimed,[41] the group revealed the security flaw to Gawker Media before AT&T had been notified,[40] and also exposed the data of 114,000 iPad users, including those of celebrities, the government and the military" That's a pretty silly security breach, but it's still a real security breach. Not comparable to scraping twitter
- belltaco 3y agoI think they're talking about the intention of the user in posting the data. People that post on Twitter and HN understand that the visibility is public, unlike Gmail.
- lynndotpy 3y agoThe terms now also have a class-action waiver clause
- waveBidder 3y agohow the fuck are those legal? frankly more disturbing to me than the AI training one, which I find less objectionable than selling people's attention to advertisers
- cjohnson318 3y agoUnfortunately, "legal" means whatever certain specific people agree that it means.
- LadyCailin 3y agoThat backfired on them when all the Twitter employees they fired sued them in individual lawsuits, so now they have to do the same discovery process and everything else over and over for each case. Lol. That only backfired because enough individuals that had the means to bring a full suit at the same time though. Unlikely to happen normally.
- nostromo 3y agoClass action lawsuits suck for victims. The only people it’s good for are lawyers, who become fabulously wealthy, while the victims get a check for two dollars in the mail. Individual lawsuits are better for everyone.
- danans 3y agoIANAL. According to [1] they are legal per Supreme Court precedent, but it also says: "Contract formation is increasingly scrutinised. Following Concepcion and its progeny, some courts have focused on issues of contract formation to determine whether the consumer in fact agreed to arbitration and the class action waiver. This inquiry is largely confined to online transactions, where a consumer is deemed to have consented to arbitration by using the business's website to purchase goods or services. These contracts fall within the rubric of "clickwrap," "browsewrap," or "webwrap" agreements and their enforceability is beyond the scope of this article. However, it is important to note that the courts will refuse to enforce class action waivers and arbitration agreements in such agreements when the arbitration provisions were insufficiently conspicuous to ensure the consumer objectively agreed to their terms." The article also mentions that non-negotiable consumer contracts are viewed with more suspicion by some courts. 1. https://content.next.westlaw.com/practical-law/document/I9f163d1a04d111e798dc8b09b4f043e0/The-use-and-enforceability-of-class-action-waivers-in-arbitration-agreements-in-the-United-States?viewType=FullText&transitionType=Default&contextData=(sc.Default)#:~:text=Class%20waivers%20in%20both%20consumer,when%20correctly%20structured%20and%20implemented https://content.next.westlaw.com/practical-law/document/I9f1....
- ilamont 3y agoIt's not a change confined to Twitter; it's a glimpse into what could be the new normal for the internet. You can bet Google/Gmail/YouTube, Amazon, Microsoft, TikTok, and every other Internet platform that works with user-generated content will soon do the same ... if they haven't done so already.
- manuelabeledo 3y agoThe absolute irony of Google doing this.
- frob 3y agoThey've been doing it for years. Everything you put on their servers is a source for them to train on. At FB Messenger in the mid to late teens, the suggestion and auto-reply models were trained on the entire corpus of unencrypted messages sent between users.
- GoofballJones 3y ago[flagged]
- frank_nitti 3y agoI interpret this as more of a call to greater action, lest people thinking boycotting Twitter is going to address this problem, while happily continuing their use of instagram, google search, tiktok et al.
- dayvid 3y agoGMail's already been using your data for classification, data mining, etc. other AI purposes. I would be legitimately surprised if they're NOT using processed GMail data (potentially removing sensitive data, etc.) in training their LLMs or other AI projects.
- crazygringo 3y agoYup. To be clear, that's with the free version though. If you pay, corporate versions of Google Workspace won't train on your data. That's very much by design, since companies don't want anything internal ever being exposed. But with the free version, that's part of what you're "paying" for it to remain free.
- zamalek 3y agoSo that they can train a chatbot? I thought Elon set out to eliminate bots.
- djbusby 3y agoYou've become the very thing you swore to destroy!
- HumblyTossed 3y agoDid anyone actually believe him?
- serf 3y agoElon has the superpower that makes it so that regardless of the question asked/answered, the audience is 40-40 "always believe" and "never believe", the rest being skeptics or 'don't cares'. This often works to his advantages; the 'always believe' are loud.
- Eisenstein 3y agoThe thing is that almost everyone believed him until it became known that many times he either: 1. didn't know what he was talking about 2. was over-optimistic about timelines to the point that there would be very little difference if it were a lie 3. objectively lied on purpose in order to further self interests 4. exaggerated or over-promised more than could be attributed to salesmanship 5. flip-flopped and refused to acknowledge the change in stance 6. stated things entirely to be vindictive, and let the truth of the statements be irrelevant The problem isn't that people 'never believe', the problem is 'whatever is said should be suspect to the point that if it is actually true then that is entirely a side-effect of the statement and not the point of it'.
- brandonagr2 3y agoEveryone believed what? You seem to be unaware or Elon time or how Elon has made predictions in the past, generally not that "this will happen by date X" but that "this cannot possibly happen _before_ date X". Which are very different statements. There is a contingent of people who want to retcon any statement ever to paint Elon as a fraud, when reality is much too subtle for trivial blanket labels like you want to apply.
- notsahil 3y agoIs it a new trend now? Zoom then Microsoft, the list keeps on going.
- 0xDEF 3y agoOff-topic but I thought Elon Musk wanted to make X into a WeChat-like everything app where twitter would make up the social media part. Is he instead renaming twitter to X?
- aero-glide2 3y agoThis was done because Elon's other company xAI needs this data.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- rvz 3y agoOk. So What is the problem? X and other social networks will do with anyway and you're just waiting for all the other social networks, like Facebook, Instagram, Threads, LinkedIn, Reddit, TikTok etc to follow suit and train their AIs on your data. The solution? If you have a problem with it and you haven't done so already, just delete your accounts on ALL social networks.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- gorbachev 3y agoIncluding the biometric data they also said they're going to start collecting?
- transformi 3y agoThat was escalated quickly. :O Any ideas how we, the users of the internet, should act to prevent those steps? or building a much better connected and not controlled by mega-corporates INTERNET social platform?
- HumblyTossed 3y ago> Any ideas how we, the users of the internet, should act to prevent those steps? Don't use services with ToS you don't agree with.
- mandevil 3y agoWhat about when someone else buys a company and changes the ToS, taking possession of work we've already contributed under a different ToS that you were okay with?
- heavyset_go 3y agoClearly you should live under a rock if you don't want anyone to cross their fingers behind their backs or take advantage of the fact that you didn't say "no backsies".
- thefurdrake 3y agoAssign no loyalty to any company that forces you into a TOS. Understand that nothing is more sacred than the Holy Dollar to an entity whose only purpose is to extract money from its customers. Always assume you'll be betrayed by corporations and store your possessions (data in this case) accordingly. Diversify your interests and hobbies such that a betrayal by a corporation doesn't significantly impact your life. At this point, trusting corporations without putting any mitigations in place seems like begging desperately for trouble.
- transformi 3y agoYea that's the first step... but I think that as a group of users we can do much more and build a better internet. This is like Cold-war between companies, that we as users are the cannon fodder...
- londons_explore 3y agoNearly all terms allow them to use data to improve the product... "Replacing some shoddy heuristics with a massive AI model" seems like product improvement to me. Therefore, they were already allowed to train AI models with your data.
- dagaci 3y agoThese terms are probably needed to cover public usage scenarios where someone could claim ownership or privacy violations even over a public forum.
- ulkesh 3y agoI love how this is justified by "everyone is doing it so it's okay." That's the bandwagon fallacy and I don't buy it. Twitter (I will not call it X, because that's just stupid), is free to attempt to change their Terms of Service, policies, etc, but we do not have to accept it or agree with it or be resigned to it. Also, it should not be retroactively applied to past content, and it should be an opt-in consent -- but that is pie-in-the-sky wishing at this point given the garbage heap Musk, and others, has made of Twitter.
- jamiequint 3y agoYou're free to delete your content and your account if you're unhappy. There's nothing it "should" be, it's not your company. Also, it's pretty obvious that everyone was training on Twitter data already before they cracked down on scraping. It is, after all, a public forum.
- ianferrel 3y agoGiven how many "deleted" posts recently resurfaced, you are in fact not free to delete your content, because it won't be deleted, just hidden.
- jamiequint 3y agoGo through the GDPR deletion process if you care that much, will very likely be deleted because the fines are massive (4% of annual worldwide turnover)
- squarefoot 3y agoI'm not sure the GDPR can be enforced outside of the EU, therefore one can't be absolutely certain the posts will not appear if accessed from elsewhere.
- fzeindl 3y agoIt is enforced internationally just like copyright law. It is a law for EU users no matter where their data resides. Meta was fined 1.3 billion dollars in spring for GDPR violation.
- asu_thomas 3y ago[flagged]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- llanowarelves 3y agoAs with any business/product, consumers are also free to say what they think to the business, other users, competitors, and anyone else.
- thesuperbigfrog 3y agoX wants your biometric data, your job history, and your education history for 'safety, security, and identification purposes'. Those items along with your posts and social network will be used for advertising, monetization, tracking, selling services to government agencies, and training their machine learning bots. Not for your benefit, but for X's uses and benefits. You are the product and X wants to sell your info and attention so Elon can earn his money back.
- hedora 3y agoMicrosoft (and others) beat them to the punch on this by at least a decade.
- GoofballJones 3y ago[flagged]
- m3kw9 3y agoYou are free not to give it, if it tells you to jump off a cliff you don’t have to
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- hedora 3y agoSweet. So, if I don’t log in ever again, or otherwise don’t agree to the new terms, they’ll delete my account for me?
- dalbasal 3y ago"Consumer action," whether organized or individual has 0% chance of affecting what happens next here. It's all down to ip law and it's adjacents. No real reason to expect intentional actions here.
- taneq 3y agoConsumers can stop consuming... ex-Twitter, or whatever we're calling it.
- rsync 3y agoIs that true? What if the consumer action was poisoning the dataset ?
- dalbasal 3y agoThink of all the consumer action efforts, and (especially) talk on one hand. Think of the successes on the other... basically none but a few minor symbolic wins.
- skykooler 3y agoX gon’ take it from ya.
- greedylizard 3y agoI approve.
- KingOfCoders 3y agoSo I get paid for using X now?
- nailer 3y agoYou have been for a few months. The payouts are better than many other platforms too.
- foderking 3y agoyeah
- m3kw9 3y agoNo, you use X for free.
- pests 3y agoIt has been this way for awhile now, yes. You buy their premium subscription and then you get part of your ad revenue.
- thefurdrake 3y agoNo, you've been freely and happily giving your content to them for their own use for as long as you've been using the platform. Why would they start paying you for something you've provided for free since the beginning?
- aiwerawj 3y ago[flagged]
- 13years 3y agoWe are all going to be consumed in the AI machines. "All capabilities are built from data analysis and the data they are analyzing is you. Whether by direct intent or not, all advancements are encroaching on consuming every knowable fact and inference about you. Your soul must be sacrificed to the machine to grant the powers it manifests." https://www.mindprison.cc/p/ai-end-of-privacy-end-of-sanity https://www.mindprison.cc/p/ai-end-of-privacy-end-of-sanity
- a-dub 3y agoi mean, haven't they been doing it forever for antispam, antiabuse, ads and discovery systems anyway? ai hype is exhaustingly stupid.
- jslakro 3y agoI can see the future of platforms like twitter https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:1100/format:webp/1*bnUVhOW-yWtXqSefJYbIzQ.png https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:1100/format:webp/1*bnU...
- musha68k 3y agoI might be taking this as the final cue to archive my own history with the service. Wanted to do that for a long time already.
- notimetorelax 3y agoAs far as I know Twitter always did ML on the data, and they resold it so that others did ML on it.
- yowzadave 3y agoMusk has been fixated on this idea that Twitter is a huge treasure trove of data for AI training, often complaining about AI companies using its data for training purposes. I had just assumed that companies like OpenAI were just crawling the web, which included Twitter, rather than targeting Twitter in particular. Is the Twitter data really that valuable for training AIs? What particular qualities does it have that make it particularly useful compared to any other freely available data set?
- adtac 3y ago(1) Twitter's data is accurately timestamped, (2) there's new data constantly flowing in talking about recent events. There's no other source like that in English other than Reddit. AFAIU neither of those are relevant to GPT-like architectures but it's not inconceivable to think there might be a model architecture in the future that takes advantage of those. Purely from a information theoretic POV, there's non-zero bits of information in the timestamp and relative ordering of tweets.
- berkes 3y ago> there's new data constantly flowing in talking about recent events. In which the distinction between "data" and "information" is crucial. Especially now that the "floodgates" have been re-opened regarding misinformation, bots, impersonators and the likes. Data is crucial when in need of training body. But information is crucial when the training must be tuned, limited or just verified.
- mejutoco 3y agoWire news services come to mind as an alternative.
- Wowfunhappy 3y agoPerhaps, but the quantity of data is comparatively miniscule.
- 3y ago
- greatNespresso 3y agoMy 2 cents, no source, but training AI out of public data will eventually stop, due to the lack of transparency and potential legal issues associated with copyright. AI needs clean, diverse and also specialized data to offer an incentive for companies to build on it, beyond just conversational chatbots. Shameless plug, still early but I am trying to build this with faie.io
- soniman 3y agoIf training data is so valuable, then 4chan should be really valuable, right?
- foderking 3y agowho in thier right minds wants to train data on 4.....chan
- px43 3y agoOldie but goodie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=efPrtcLdcdM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=efPrtcLdcdM
- thefurdrake 3y agoWhat if you want to make a chatbot that just argues and disrupts topics ad nauseum? I'd go right for /b/. Perfect.
- marcusverus 3y agoRelevant Andy Weir short story: http://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/twarrior.html http://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/twarrior.html
- dboreham 3y agoOh, I see. For a few seconds I was wondering how a windowing system uses data for AI...
- butz 3y agoOther big companies should also shorten names of their premiere services, just to add to confusion.
- AnthonyMouse 3y agoIf anyone is wondering, Netflix is now x.net, Amazon is a.com, Apple is a.us, Android is a.tv and Azure is a.mov. Facebook will be known as y.us.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- ChatGTP 3y agoGoing to be one stupid, stubborn, opinionated LLM
- dralley 3y agoWhy the heck is Bluesky still invite only? Truly I do not understand why they are not even attempting to advantage of their competition actively driving people away. And they have history of Google+ to reflect on! But they're making the same mistake.
- jatins 3y agoHonestly Bluesky is more obsessed with Twitter and Musk than probably Twitter itself. I spend a few days on there after getting the invite and didn't enjoy the experience. Every other post was making fun of Twitter/Musk and for some reason there's a lot of furry porn there.
- dralley 3y agoI wouldn't know, because Bluesky doesn't let anyone just sign up. I'm sure the invite-only nature produces a lot of interest bubbles.
- berkes 3y agoBluesky and also the Fediverse are Open Platforms¹. That means your toot or post reaches anyone including those who want to train AI. An open platform and open protocol makes it harder to prohibit AI bots from ingesting your published thoughts than when on a private, centralised service. Mastodon, the fediverse, Bluesky, are really enabling AI learning more than prohibiting it. ¹ well, BSKY is really still just a single server.
- m3kw9 3y agoYou on a platform for content or just there because their system is nice?
- dralley 3y agoNeither, I just want a usable alternative to Twitter that isn't Facebook and has a chance of not being used only by techies.
- davidbarker 3y ago
- LikelyABurner 3y agoI would love to know how the people blotivating about this think Twitter worked before. Of course they’re doing ML training on user data! Every major tech company has been doing ML training on user data for over a decade at this point! Twitter used to have official tutorials on how to do ML on data you pulled from their APIs! Seriously, how the f** do you all think their moderation algorithms worked before? Unicorn farts? Some guys in a room that could read tweets really fast? The only thing that’s changed is that they feel the need to put it in their terms of service. And no, this isn’t a defense of Twitter or Musk. If you actually give a shit about this and don’t just want to perform slacktivism on social media, get off ALL of these platforms. Migrate away from Gmail. Close your Facebook. Use paid services from trusted privacy-focused vendors.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Lolaccount 3y agoElon can take his Twitter data and stick it up his big fat jacksie ... Train your AI on that ... Respectfully speaking, fully in accordance with HN terms, conditions and guidelines.
- naillo 3y agoOpenAI had access to the twitter database since forever ago anyway with the old terms of service.
- rsynnott 3y agoAh, yes, the most annoying AI. (In fairness, the AI trained on LinkedIn data might be worse.)
- 01100011 3y agoIs there a python interface to Twitter that can use password auth and doesn't require an API key? Is there some existing piece of software I can run that doesn't require paying anything to mass delete my tweets(or xeets or whatever they're called now)? Not that I'm particularly worried but this is a good reminder that I need to blank my twitter history.
- Raed667 3y agoI used https://tweetdelete.net https://tweetdelete.net some time ago. Not sure if it still works today.
- superhumanuser 3y agoI use Redact[0] to delete all my Tweets, replies, retweets, and likes. It works with over 30 different sites too. [0]: https://redact.dev/ https://redact.dev/
- p0w3n3d 3y agoX/Twitter, Meta/Facebook, Ąćęńś/Microsoft, who's next? If you need to write X/Twitter to make people understand what are you writing about, this means the rebranding was not good
- mteam88 3y agoI disagree. The change is recent and a rebrand isn't necessarily a failure if people take time to switch. In twitter's case, they built a lot of culture around "tweeting" and the bird theming. The fact is that none of those are going to change soon.
- teddyh 3y agoFor a moment I thought the headline said XTerm would be updated to use AI training, and was confused.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- skymast 3y ago[dead]
- api 3y agoAny data you send to the cloud will be used to train AI unless you have a binding TOS or contract that says otherwise and that contract cannot be unilaterally amended this way.
- Denote6737 3y ago[flagged]
- spaceguillotine 3y agowell that pushes me from not using my account to deactivating it for good. What a shame how he trashed that site in so little time.
- Sommer 3y agoThis makes sense if you consider the new API price gouging. Much easier to attract those interested in training on twitter data if it is explicititly allowed.
- Robdel12 3y agoI can’t imagine anything worse for the world than an AI trained on whatever Twitter users are tweeting.
- laylomo2 3y agoCan't wait to add all the thought leader hot takes bots to my ban lists.
- jdjdjdjdjduuuu 3y ago[flagged]
- lossolo 3y agoIt's time to regulate these social media companies as utilities. If a platform has more than N million users, and its main feature is communication between humans, then it should be subject to regulation.
- rglover 3y agoCalled it [1]. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31397703 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31397703
- bogwog 3y agoIs it possible to opt-out and not allow them to use my account’s data?
- nologic01 3y agoI kinda like those "titans of industry" rubbing it in. It casts the dismal level of governance and regulation of online life in the unforgiving light of an X-ray. Let those skeletons be clear to all.
- tensor 3y agoWell, this is one easy way to to create the hate filled alt-right LLM, sorry, "based AI" that Musk want's to build. https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/robots/a43126181/elon-musk-anti-woke-artificial-intelligence/ https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/robots/a43126181...
- jackmott42 3y agoThreads is really nice, has a web version now, and text search coming very soon. No need to help fund insurrection at twitter.
- r053bud 3y agoYou really don't think the same thing is going to happen there? I'd trust Facebook even less with my data.
- satvikpendem 3y agoThat's all well and good but the content is, in my usage, trash. Their algorithm simply doesn't work to surface posts I like and the people I want to follow aren't on there.
- ok123456 3y agoTextbooks and reference books are much more useful for training a LLM than twitter. Both reddit and he are vastly overestimating the value of their content for training corpus data.
- jabradoodle 3y agoDepends on your use case, twitter is pretty good if you want a bot for astroturfing, artificially boosting content and engagement,slipping adverts into comments that look like they come from real people, etc
- JambalayaJim 3y agoThey are two completely different use cases. You can’t learn cultural memes and the best taco spots in X city from textbooks.
- FirstLvR 3y agoAm surprised that are surprised with this, am pretty sure AI is already trained with internet data… Reddit and other sites are very easy to scrap
- type0 3y agoWould they like to resurrect Tay?
- Decker87 3y agoHow does this work for old tweets if a person doesn't accept the new terms?
- lunarimiso 3y agoI am not surprised at all. All major tech companies are at an arms race at the moment. Everyone wants to create the new thing and AI is the hip thing right now, with good reason. X, isn't necessary a tech company in the same ballpark as Amazon, Google and Meta. But have significant backing to able to create something. I wouldn't be surprised if other companies start changing their terms to allow them to phish data for AI training.