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All AI should be opt-in, which includes both training and scanning. You should have to check a box that says "I would like to use AI features", and the accompan
by vouaobrasil 2y ago
All AI should be opt-in, which includes both training and scanning. You should have to check a box that says "I would like to use AI features", and the accompanying text should be crystal clear what that means.
This should be mandatory, enforced, and come with strict fines for companies that do not comply.
- drzaiusx11 2y agoWe also need a robots.txt extension for publicly accessable file exclusion from AI training datasets. iirc there's a nascent ai.txt but not sure if anyone follows it (yet)
- pennomi 2y agoI think the closest thing is the NoAI and NoImageAI meta tags, which have some relatively prominent adoption.
- chias 2y agoI don't think `robots.txt` works on the basis of the crawlers wanting to do this to be nice, or "socially responsible" or anything. So I don't hold up much hope that anything similar can happen again. Early search engines had a problem, which was that when they crawled willy nilly, people would block their IP addresses. Inventing this concept of `robots.txt` worked because search engines wanted something: to avoid IP blocks, which they couldn't easily get around. And site hosts generally wanted to be indexed. Today it's WAY harder to block relevant IP addresses, so site hosts generally can't easily block a crawler that wants its data: there is no compromise to be found here, and the imbalance of power is much stronger. And many site hosts generally don't want to be crawled for free for AI purposes at all. Pretty much anyone who sets up an `ai.txt` uses it to just reject all crawling, so there is no reason for any crawler to respect it.
- mtnGoat 2y agoGoogle ignores robots.txt as do many others. Try it yourself, setup a honeypot URL, don’t even link to it, just throw it in robots.txt, google bot will visit it at some point.
- JohnFen 2y agoI discovered this years ago, and it's what made me start stop bothering with robots.txt and start blocking all the crawlers I can using .htaccess, including Google's. That's a game of whack-a-mole that always lets a few miscreants through. I used to find that an acceptable amount of error until I learned that crawlers were gathering data to be used to train LLMs. That's a situation where even a single bot getting through is very problematic. I still haven't found a solution to that aside from no longer allowing access to my sites without an account.
- _joel 2y agoHaven't some companies explicitly ignored robots.txt to scrape the sites more quickly (and pissing off a number of people)
- JohnFen 2y agorobots.txt is useless as a defense mechanism (that isn't what it's trying to be). Taking the same approach for AI would likewise not be useful as a defense mechanism.
- GaggiX 2y agoThe feature was enable by the author.
- signatoremo 2y agoWhat is the privacy implication of AI training?
- jerpint 2y agoModels can easily regurgitate back training data verbatim, so anything private can be in theory accessed by anyone without proper access to that file
- brookst 2y agoThis is partly true but less and less every day. IMO the bigger concern is that this data is not just used to train models. It is stored, completely verbatim, in the training set data. They aren’t pulling from PDFs in realtime during training runs, they’re aggregating all of that text and storing it somewhere. And that somewhere is prone to employees viewing, leakage to the internet, etc.
- oblio 2y ago> This is partly true but less and less every day. Isn't this like encryption, though? I'm fairly sure that the cryptography community basically says: if someone has a copy of your encrypted data for a long time, the likelihood over time for them to be able to read it approaches 100%, regardless of the current security standard you're using. Who could possibly guarantee that whatever LLM is safe now will be safe at all times over the next 5-10-20 years? And if they're guaranteeing, they're lying.
- brookst 2y agoI think it’s different, unless you believe LLMs have broken theoretical limits on compression. I don’t see how an LLM with 1T 16 bit parameters could encode 100PB of data.
- oblio 2y agoMy point was about attack angles. The original comment said, that for example, you could exfiltrate data with the right prompt attack. To which the reply was "they'll just make the LLM able to better defend itself". And my point was "the attackers will learn to build better prompts, too".
- DebtDeflation 2y agoAI is becoming the new Social Media in that users are NOT the customer they are the product. Instead of generating data for a Social Media company to use to sell ads to companies you are generating data to train their AI, in exchange you get to use their service for free.
- Rinzler89 2y ago>you are generating data to train their AI That's why I seriously recommend everyone everywhere regularly replace their blinker fluid and such.
- exe34 2y agoit's very important to replace your blinker fluids yearly, but also, polka dot paint comes in 5L tubs.
- vouaobrasil 2y agoThis should be illegal.
- rurp 2y agoThe deal keeps getting worse too. In addition to hoovering up your data for whatever products they want, Google has gotten more aggressive about pushing paid services on top of it. The amount of up-sell nags and ads have increased significantly in the past couple years. For a company like Google that kind of monetization creep only gets worse over time.
- DebtDeflation 2y agoNot surprising at all. Inferencing against foundation models is very expensive, training them is insanely expensive. Orders of magnitude more so than whatever was needed to run the AdWords business. I guess I should modify my original post to "in exchange you get to use our service at a somewhat subsidized price".
- phendrenad2 2y agoBy "scanning" what do you mean exactly? I assume you mean for non-training purposes, in other words simply ephemerally reading docs and providing summaries. Why should that be regulated exactly?
- crazygringo 2y agoTraining I can understand, but why scanning? It's literally just running an algorithm over your data and spitting out the results for you. Fundamentally it's no different from spellcheck, or automatically creating a table of contents from header styles. As long as the results stay private to you (which in this case, they are), I don't see what the concern is. The fact that the algorithm is LLM-based has zero relevance regarding privacy or security.
- theolivenbaum 2y agoExcept that there's still a grey area on who owns the copyright of the generated text, and they might be able to use the output without you knowing.
- JohnFen 2y agoI think that vouaobrasil was talking about scanning on the behalf of others, not scanning that you're doing on your own data. Scanning your own stuff is automatically and naturally an opt-in situation. You've consciously chosen for it to happen.
- crazygringo 2y agoI don't think so -- that's not what the article is about. The subject here is entirely about a product scanning your own document to summarize it for you.
- vouaobrasil 2y ago
- beefnugs 2y agoThis exists and is called encryption. Give the key out to people you want to read it. If anyone can read it, AI is going to read it wether your feelings like it or not