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Ask HN: Does HN have a net stance on AI training on HN user comments?
In lieu of Reddit's training deal with Google I tried to find info on HN's stance. Neither the guidelines nor the FAQ has any info on whether any third-party companies (YC itself, YC companies, or otherwise) are allowed to train AIs on HN user generated data (i.e. comments).
When it's not explicitly stated I don't know what the stance automatically defaults to. Looking at the court cases recently, it seems to be "Try it out, I guess. But don't be surprised if we, YC, sue you somewhere down the line." For the users: without an explicit statement I guess we have to assume YC is silently/privately allowing training by some companies on this data.
I would expect a FAQ question explicitly addressing this issue (and update it accordingly when the situation changes), since I believe users have a right to know if their comments will be used for AI training by some companies with YC's blessing. I also understand why they would want to avoid addressing the issue (fearing a chilling effect on the discourse on the site).
(apologize if this topic has been addressed somewhere earlier. I did a prerequisite search on the topic on the site because I figured someone must have brought it up before. Alas, couldn't find a post on it)
- pvg 3y agoQuestions about HN are better addressed at hn@ycombinator.com
- sinuhe69 3y agoTraining on the contents will require a scraping. Thus, maybe looking up something about using the contents or scrapping it?
- mtmail 3y agoLooking at this court case it seems public data is scrape-able and usable (even sell-able) https://techcrunch.com/2024/02/26/meta-drops-lawsuit-against-web-scraping-firm-bright-data-that-sold-millions-of-instagram-records/ https://techcrunch.com/2024/02/26/meta-drops-lawsuit-against... HN's /robots.txt doesn't disallow scraping. I wouldn't expect a FAQ. What data is collected and how used is usually part of terms-of-service so I'd expect to be a small part of https://www.ycombinator.com/legal/ https://www.ycombinator.com/legal/ The Reddit deal is probably a short-cut to deliver data in structured format and saves both parties money compared to scraping millions (billions?) of pages. Wikipedia has a program to deliver data for such customers, too. https://enterprise.wikimedia.com/ https://enterprise.wikimedia.com/