There have been multiple accounts created with the sole purpose of posting advertisement posts or replies containing unsolicited advertising.

Accounts which solely post advertisements, or persistently post them may be terminated.

moon ,

Wow I’m shocked! Just like how OpenAI preached for “privacy and ethics” and went deafly silent on data hoarding and scraping, then privatizes their stolen scraped data. If they insist their data collection to be private, then it needs regular external audits by strict data privacy firms just like they do with security.

Sorgan71 ,

good. robots.txt was always a bad idea

Reddfugee42 ,

Like so many terrible ideas, it worked flawlessly for generations

Yoz ,

No laws to govern so they can do anything they want. Blame boomer politicians not the companies.

itsralC ,

¿Por qué no los dos?

Yoz ,

Fhdj glgllf d’‘’‘’'×÷π•=|¶ fkssb

trashgirlfriend ,

No Idea why you’re getting downvotes, in my opinion it was very eloquently said

gian ,

Why not blame the companies ? After all they are the ones that are doing it, not the boomer politicians.

And in the long term they are the ones that risk to be “punished”, just imagine people getting tired of this shit and starting to block them at a firewall level…

WeirdGoesPro ,
@WeirdGoesPro@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

Because the politicians also created the precedent that anything you can get away with, goes. They made the game, defined the objective, and then didn’t adapt quickly so that they and their friends would have a shot at cheating.

There is absolutely no narrative of “what can you do for your country” anymore. It’s been replaced by the mottos of “every man for himself” and “get while the getting’s good”.

Dr_Satan ,

I think that good behavior is implicitly mandated even if there’s nobody to punish you if you don’t.

Yoz ,

Lol

masonlee ,

Also, by the way, violating a basic social contract to not work towards triggering an intelligence explosion that will likely replace all biological life on Earth with computronium, but who’s counting? :)

Gullible ,

If it makes you feel any better, my bet is still on nuclear holocaust or complete ecological collapse resulting from global warming to be our undoing. Given a choice, I’d prefer nuclear holocaust. Feels less protracted. Worst option is weaponized microbes or antibiotic resistant bacteria. That’ll take foreeeever.

masonlee ,

100%. Autopoietic computronium would be a “best case” outcome, if Earth is lucky! More likely we don’t even get that before something fizzles. “The Vulnerable World Hypothesis” is a good paper to read.

glukoza ,

Ah, AI doesn’t pose as danger in that way. It’s danger is in replacing jobs, people getting fired bc of ai, etc.

Crikeste ,

Those are dangers of capitalism, not AI.

glukoza ,

Fair point, but AI is part of it, I mean it exists in capitalist system. This AI Singularity apocalypse is like not gonna happen in 99%, AI within capitalism will affect us badly.

masonlee ,

Your worry at least has possible solutions, such as a global VAT funding UBI.

glukoza ,

Yeah I’m not for UBI that much, and don’t see anyone working towards global VAT. I was comparing that worry about AI that is gonna destroy humanity is not possible, it’s just scifi.

masonlee ,

Seven years ago I would have told you that GPT-4 was sci fi, and I expect you would have said the same, as would have most every AI researcher. The deep learning revolution came as a shock to most. We don’t know when the next breakthrough will be towards agentification, but given the funding now, we should expect soon. Anyways, if you’re ever interested to learn more about unsolved fundamental AI safety problems, the book “Human Compatible” by Stewart Russell is excellent. Also “Uncontrollable” by Darren McKee just came out (I haven’t read it yet) and is said to be a great introduction to the bigger fundamental risks. A lot to think about; just saying I wouldn’t be quick to dismiss it. Cheers.

Umbraveil ,

Seems relevant.

notebookcheck.net/UPS-lays-off-12-000-managers-as…

lunarul , (edited )

All progress comes with old jobs becoming obsolete and new jobs being created. It’s just natural.

But AI is not going to replace any skilled professionals soon. It’s a great tool to add to professionals’ arsenal, but non-professionals who use it to completely replace hiring a professional will get what they pay for (and those people would have never actually paid for a skilled professional in the first place; they’d have hired the cheapest outsourced wannabe they could find; after first trying to convince a professional that exposure is worth more than money)

glukoza ,

It replaced content writers, replacing digital artists, replacing programmers. In a sense they fire unexeprieced ones because ai speeds up those with more experience.

lunarul ,

Any type of content generated by AI should be reviewed and polished by a professional. If you’re putting raw AI output out there directly then you don’t care enough about the quality of your product.

For example, there are tons of nonsensical articles on the internet that were obviously generated by AI and their sole purpose is to crowd search results and generate traffic. The content writers those replaced were paid $1/article or less (I work in the freelancing business and I know these types of jobs). Not people with any actual training in content writing.

But besides the tons of prompt crafting and other similar AI support jobs now flooding the market, there’s also huge investment in hiring highly skilled engineers to launch various AI related product while the hype is high.

So overall a ton of badly paid jobs were lost and a lot of better paid jobs were created.

The worst part will be when the hype dies and the new trend comes along. Entire AI teams will be laid off to make room for others.

tiltinyall ,

I remember early Zuckerberg comments that put me onto just how douchey corporations could be about exploiting a new resource.

frostysauce ,

I don’t think glorified predictive text is posing any real danger to all life on Earth.

MataVatnik ,
@MataVatnik@lemmy.world avatar

Until we weave consciousness with machines we should be good.

lunarul ,

That would be a danger if real AI existed. We are very far away from that and what is being called “AI” today (which is advanced ML) is not the path to actual AI. So don’t worry, we’re not heading for the singularity.

masonlee ,

I request sources :)

lunarul ,

www.lifewire.com/strong-ai-vs-weak-ai-7508012

Strong AI, also called artificial general intelligence (AGI), possesses the full range of human capabilities, including talking, reasoning, and emoting. So far, strong AI examples exist in sci-fi movies

Weak AI is easily identified by its limitations, but strong AI remains theoretical since it should have few (if any) limitations.

…wikipedia.org/…/Artificial_general_intelligence

As of 2023, complete forms of AGI remain speculative.

Boucher, Philip (March 2019). How artificial intelligence works

Today’s AI is powerful and useful, but remains far from speculated AGI or ASI.

www.itu.int/en/journal/001/…/itu2018-9.pdf

AGI represents a level of power that remains firmly in the realm of speculative fiction as on date

masonlee ,

Ah, I understand you now. You don’t believe we’re close to AGI. I don’t know what to tell you. We’re moving at an incredible clip; AGI is the stated goal of the big AI players. Many experts think we are probably just one or two breakthroughs away. You’ve seen the surveys on timelines? Years to decades. Seems wise to think ahead to its implications rather than dismiss its possibility.

lunarul ,

See the sources above and many more. We don’t need one or two breakthroughs, we need a complete paradigm shift. We don’t even know where to start with for AGI. There’s a bunch of research, but nothing really came out of it yet. Weak AI has made impressive bounds in the past few years, but the only connection between weak and strong AI is the name. Weak AI will not become strong AI as it continues to evolve. The two are completely separate avenues of research. Weak AI is still advanced algorithms. You can’t get AGI with just code. We’ll need a completely new type of hardware for it.

masonlee ,

Before Deep Learning recently shifted the AI computing paradigm, I would have written exactly what you wrote. But as of late, the opinion that we need yet another type of hardware to surpass human intelligence seems increasingly rare. Multimodal generative AI is already pretty general. To count as AGI for you, you would like to see the addition of continuous learning and agentification? (Or are you looking for “consciousness”?)

That said, I’m all for a new paradigm, and favor Russell’s “provably beneficial AI” approach!

lunarul ,

Deep learning did not shift any paradigm. It’s just more advanced programming. But gen AI is not intelligence. It’s just really well trained ML. ChatGPT can generate text that looks true and relevant. And that’s its goal. It doesn’t have to be true or relevant, it just has to look convincing. And it does. But there’s no form of intelligence at play there. It’s just advanced ML models taking an input and guessing the most likely output.

Here’s another interesting article about this debate: ourworldindata.org/ai-timelines

What we have today does not exhibit even the faintest signs of actual intelligence. Gen AI models don’t actually understand the output they are providing, that’s why they so often produce self-contradictory results. And the algorithms will continue to be fine-tuned to produce fewer such mistakes, but that won’t change the core of what gen AI really is. You can’t teach ChatGPT how to play chess or a new language or music. The same model can be trained to do one of those tasks instead of chatting, but that’s not how intelligence works.

masonlee ,

Hi! Thanks for the conversation. I’m aware of the 2022 survey referenced in the article. Notably, in only one year’s time, expected timelines have advanced significantly. Here is that survey author’s latest update: arxiv.org/abs/2401.02843 (click on PDF in the sidebar)

I consider Deep Learning to be new and a paradigm shift because only recently have we had the compute to prove its effectiveness. And the Transformer paradigm enabling LLMs is from 2017. I don’t know what counts as new for you. (Also I wouldn’t myself call it “programming” in the traditional sense— with neural nets we’re more “growing” AI, but you probably know this.)

If you are reading me as saying that generative AI alone scales to AGI, we are talking past each other. But I do disagree with you and think Hinton and others are correct where they show there is already some form of reasoning and understanding in these models. (See youtu.be/iHCeAotHZa4 for a recent Hinton talk.) I don’t doubt that additional systems will be developed to improve/add additional reasoning and planning to AI processes—and I have no reason to doubt your earlier assertion that it will be a different additional system or paradigm. We don’t know when the breakthroughs will come. Maybe it’s “Tree of Thoughts”, maybe it’s something else. Things are moving fast. (And we’re already at the point where AI is used to improve next gen AI.)

At any rate, I believe my initial point remains regardless of one’s timelines: it is the goal of the top AI labs to create AGI. To me, this is fundamentally a dangerous mission because of concerns raised in papers such as Natural Selection Favors AIs over Humans. (Not to mention the concerns raised in An Overview of Catastrophic AI Risks, many of which apply to even today’s systems.)

Cheers and wish us luck!

Rhaedas ,
@Rhaedas@kbin.social avatar

There are two dangers in the current race to get to AGI and in developing the inevitable ANI products along the way. One is that advancement and profit are the goals while the concern for AI safety and alignment in case of success has taken a back seat (if it's even considered anymore). Then there is number two - we don't even have to succeed in AGI for there to be disastrous consequences. Look at the damage early LLM usage has already done, and it's still not good enough to fool anyone who looks closely. Imagine a non-reasoning LLM able to manipulate any media well enough to be believable even with other AI testing tools. We're just getting to that point - the latest AI Explained video discussed Gemini and Sora and one of them (I think Sora) fooled some text generation testers into thinking its stories were 100% human created. In short, we don't need full general AI to end up with catastrophe, we'll easily use the "lesser" ones ourselves. Which will really fuel things if AGI comes along and sees what we've done.

conciselyverbose ,

This is like saying putting logs on a fire is "one or two breakthroughs away" from nuclear fusion.

LLMs do not have anything in common with intelligence. They do not resemble intelligence. There is no path from that nonsense to intelligence. It's a dead end, and a bad one.

ytg ,

We need laws mandating respect of robots.txt. This is what happens when you don’t codify stuff

echodot ,

It’s a bad solution to a problem anyway. If we are going to legally mandate a solution I want to take the opportunity to come up with an actually better fix than the hacky solution that is robots.txt

General_Effort ,

Why? What would you like to achieve and how would that help?

wabafee ,
@wabafee@lemmy.world avatar

I hope not, laws tend to get outdated real fast. Who knows robots.txt might not even be used in the future and it just there adding space because of law reasons.

Tyfud ,

You can describe the law in a similar way to a specification, and you can make it as broad as needed. Something like the file name shouldn’t ever come up as an issue.

GhostMatter ,

The law can be broad with allowances to define specifics by decree, executive order or the equivalent.

echodot ,

We don’t need new laws we just need enforcement of existing laws. It is already illegal to copy copyrighted content, it’s just that the AI companies do it anyway and no one does anything about it.

Enforcing respect for robots.txt doesn’t matter because the AI companies are already breaking the law.

BreakDecks ,

I think the issue is that existing laws don’t clearly draw a line that AI can cross. New laws may very well be necessary if you want any chance at enforcement.

And without a law that defines documents like robots.txt as binding, enforcing respect for it isn’t “unnecessary”, it is impossible.

I see no logic in complaining about lack of enforcement while actively opposing the ability to meaningfully enforce.

echodot ,

Copyright law in general needs changing though that’s the real problem. I don’t see the advantage of legally mandating that a hacky workaround solution becomes a legally mandated requirement.

Especially because there are many many legitimate reasons to ignore robots.txt including it being misconfigured or it just been set up for search engines when your bot isn’t a search engine crawler.

BreakDecks ,

robots.txt is a 30 year old standard. If we can write common sense laws around things like email and VoIP, we can do it for web standards too.

KingThrillgore ,
@KingThrillgore@lemmy.ml avatar

robots.txt has been an unofficial standard for 30 years and its augmented with sitemap.xml to help index uncrawlable pages, and Schema.org to expose contents for Semantic Web. I’m not stating it shouldn’t not be a law, but to suggest changing norms as a reason is a pretty weak counterargument, man.

ArmokGoB ,

Sounds like the type of thing that would either be unenforceable or profitable to violate compared to the fines.

XTornado ,

All my scrapping scripts go to shit…please no, I need automation to live…

nutsack ,

you can’t really make laws in the united states it’s too hard

SPRUNT ,

The battle cry of conservatives everywhere: It’s too hard!

Except if it involves oppressing minorities and women. Then it’s a moral imperative worth all the time and money you can shovel at it regardless of whether the desired outcome is realistic or not.

Silentiea ,

Seriously, could the party of “small government” get out of my business, please?

JasonDJ ,

Sure as long as the party of law and order respects law. And order.

Silentiea ,

I just wish the push and pull of politics didn’t have to be played as a zero sum game. I wish someone could take the initiative and just…

I think both parties in America sing pretty loud about “law and order.” I haven’t heard that cry particularly loudly from either side over the other. I don’t think I’ve heard anyone who claims to be a Democrat saying the end goal is “small government” but I have heard it from Republican voices.

Honestly, I would really prefer if we were in a system that enabled more parties, so we didn’t have “parties” that did such contradictory things as the current ones…

JasonDJ ,

The GOP has historically been the party of law and order. Hence why they implied that blue lives matter more than black lives.

thatsthejoke.png

Just like how one party impeached a president of the other for obstruction and abuse of power, and the other impeached a president for checks notes lying about a blowjob.

patatahooligan ,
@patatahooligan@lemmy.world avatar

AI companies will probably get a free pass to ignore robots.txt even if it were enforced by law. That’s what they’re trying to do with copyright and it looks likely that they’ll get away with it.

AA5B ,

Turning that into a law is ridiculous - you really can’t consider that more than advisory unless you enforce it with technical means. For example, maybe put it behind a login or captcha if you want only humans to see it

LodeMike ,

Are you aware of what “unlisted” means?

AA5B , (edited )

Yes, and there’s also no law against calling an unlisted phone number

Also we already had this battle with robots.txt. In the beginning, search engines wouldn’t honor it either because they wanted the competitive advantage of more info, and websites trusted it too much and tried to wall off too much info that way.

There were complaints, bad pr, lawsuits, call for a law

It’s no longer the Wild West:

  • search engines are mature and generally honor robots.txt
  • websites use rate limiting to conserve resources and user logins to fence off data there’s a reason to fence off
  • truce: neither side is as greedy
  • there is no such law nor is that reasonable
LodeMike ,

There’s also no law against visiting an unlisted webpage? What?

Ascend910 ,

This is a very interesting read. It is very rarely people on the internet agree to follow 1 thing without being forced

echodot ,

Loads of crawlers don’t follow it, i’m not quite sure why AI companies not following it is anything special. Really it’s just to stop Google indexing random internal pages that mess with your SEO.

It barely even works for all search providers.

General_Effort ,

The Internet Archive does not make a useful villain and it doesn’t have money, anyway. There’s no reason to fight that battle and it’s harder to win.

KillingTimeItself ,

hmm, i though websites just blocked crawler traffic directly? I know one site in particular has rules about it, and will even go so far as to ban you permanently if you continually ignore them.

Bogasse ,
@Bogasse@lemmy.ml avatar

Detecting crawlers can be easier said than done 🙁

KillingTimeItself ,

i mean yeah, but at a certain point you just have to accept that it’s going to be crawled. The obviously negligent ones are easy to block.

ricdeh ,
@ricdeh@lemmy.world avatar

You cannot simply block crawlers lol

echodot ,

Well you can if you know the IPs that come in from but that’s of course the trick.

bigMouthCommie ,
@bigMouthCommie@kolektiva.social avatar

hide a link no one would ever click. if an ip requests the link, it's a ban

oatscoop ,

If it weren’t so difficult and require so much effort, I’d rather clicking the link cause the server to switch to serving up poisoned data – stuff that will ruin a LLM.

HelloHotel , (edited )

Visiting /enter_spoopmode.html will choose a theme and mangle the text for any page you next go to accordingly (think search&replace with swear words or santa clause)

It will also show a banner letting the user know they are in spoop mode, with a javascript button to exit the mode, where the AJAX request URL is ofuscated (think base64) The banner is at the bottom of the html document (not nesisarly the screen itself) and/or inside unusual/normally ignored tags. <script type=“spoop/text” style='display:block">you are in spoop mode</script>

Or have a secret second page that is only followed if you ignore robots.txt /spoop_post/yvlhcigcigc is a clone of /post/yvlhcigcigc in ‘spoop mode’

T156 , (edited )

Would that be effective? A lot of poisoning seems targeted to a specific version of an LLM, rather than being general.

Like how the image poisoning programs only work for some image generators and not others.

T156 ,

Except that it’d also catch out people who use accessibility devices might see the link anyways, or use the keyboard to navigate a site instead of a mouse.

bigMouthCommie ,
@bigMouthCommie@kolektiva.social avatar

i don't know, maybe there's a canvas trick. i'm not a webdev so i am a bit out of my depth and mostly guessing and remembering 20-year-old technology

KillingTimeItself ,

last i checked humans dont access every page on a website nearly simultaneously…

And if you imitate a human then honestly who cares.

KingThrillgore , (edited )
@KingThrillgore@lemmy.ml avatar

There are more crawlers than I have fucks to give, you’ll be in a pissing match forever. robots.txt was supposed to be the norm to tell crawlers what they can and cannot access. Its not on you to block them. Its on them, and its sadly a legislative issues at this point.

I wish it wasn’t, but legislative fixes are always the most robust and complied against.

KillingTimeItself ,

yes but also there’s a point where it’s blatantly obvious. And i can’t imagine it’s hard to get rid of the obviously offending ones. Respectful crawlers are going to be imitating humans, so who cares, disrespectful crawlers will ddos your site, that can’t be that hard to implement.

Though if we’re talking “hey please dont scrape this particular data” Yeah nobody was ever respecting that lol.

Reddfugee42 ,

Both paragraphs demonstrate gross ignorance

spez_ ,

Why should I care about a text file lol

Tlaloc_Temporal ,

All laws are just words on peices of paper. Why should you care?

mark ,
@mark@programming.dev avatar

This seems to interestingly prove the point made by the person this is in reply to. Breaking laws come with consequences. Not caring about a robots.txt file doesn’t. But maybe it should.

Tlaloc_Temporal ,

My angle was more about all rules being social contructs, and said rules being important for the continued operation of society, but that’s a good angle too.

Lots of laws don’t come with real punishments either, especially if you have money. We can change this too.

TexMexBazooka ,

A config* file 😉

FrankTheHealer ,

TIL that robots.txt is a thing

i_have_no_enemies ,

what is it?

wise_pancake ,

robots.txt is a file available in a standard location on web servers (example.com/robots.txt) which set guidelines for how scrapers should behave.

That can range from saying “don’t bother indexing the login page” to “Googlebot go away”.

IT’s also in the first paragraph of the article.

mrnarwall ,

Robots.txt is a file that is is accessible as part of an http request. It’s a backend configuration file that sets rules for what automatically running web crawlers are allowed. It can set both who is and who isn’t allowed. Google is usually the most widely allowed domain for bots just because their crawler is how they find websites for search results. But it’s basically the honor system. You could write a scraper today that goes to websites that it is being told it doesn’t have permission to view this page, ignore it, and still get the information

echodot ,

I do not think it is even part of the HTTP protocol I think it’s just a pseudo add-on. It’s barely even a protocol it’s basically just a page that bots can look at with no really pre-agreed syntax.

If you want to make a bot that doesn’t respect robots.txt you don’t even need to do anything complicated, you just need to not include the requirement to look at the page. It’s not enforceable at all.

glukoza ,

just wait until you hear about humans.txt, it really exitst here

moitoi ,

Alternative title: Capitalism doesn’t care about morals and contracts. It wants to make more money.

AutistoMephisto ,
@AutistoMephisto@lemmy.world avatar

Exactly. Capitalism spits in the face of the concept of a social contract, especially if companies themselves didn’t write it.

WoodenBleachers ,
@WoodenBleachers@lemmy.world avatar

Capitalism, at least, in a lassie-faire marketplace, operates on a social contract, fiat money is an example of this. The market decides, the people decide. Are there ways to amass a certain amount of money to make people turn blind eyes? For sure, but all systems have their ways to amass power, no matter what

nickwitha_k ,

I’d say that historical evidence directly contradicts your thesis. Were it factual, times of minimal regulation would be times of universal prosperity. Instead, they are the time of robber-barons, company scrip that must be spent in company stores, workers being massacred by hired thugs, and extremely disparate distribution of wealth.

No. Laissez-faire capitalism has only ever consistently benefitted the already wealthy and sociopaths happy to ignore social contact for their own benefit.

WoodenBleachers ,
@WoodenBleachers@lemmy.world avatar

You said “a social contract”. Capitalism operates on one. “The social contract” as you presumably intend to use it here is different. Yes, capitalism allows those with money to generate money, but a disproportionate distribution of wealth is not violation of a social contract. I’m not arguing for deregulation, FAR from it, but the social contract is there. If a corporation is doing something too unpopular then people don’t work for them and they cease to exist.

nickwitha_k ,

If a corporation is doing something too unpopular then people don’t work for them and they cease to exist.

Unfortunately, this is not generally the case. In the US, for example, the corporation merely engages in legalized bribery to ensure that people are dependent upon it (ex. limiting healthcare access, erosion of social safety nets) and don’t have a choice but to work for them or die. Disproportionate distribution of wealth may not by itself be a violation of social contact but if gives the wealthy extreme leverage to use in coercing those who are not wealthy and further eroding protections against bad actors. This has been shown historically to be a self-reinforcing cycle that requires that the wealthy be forced to stop.

WoodenBleachers ,
@WoodenBleachers@lemmy.world avatar

Yes, regulations should be in place, but the “legalized bribery” isn’t forcing people, it’s just easier to stick with the status quo than change it. They aren’t forced to die, it’s just a lot of work to not. The social contract is there, it’s just one we don’t like

gapbetweenus ,

Capitalism is a concept, it can’t care if it wanted and it even can’t want to begin with. It’s the humans. You will find greedy, immoral ones in every system and they will make it miserable for everyone else.

Aceticon ,

Capitalism is the widelly accepted self-serving justification of those people for their acts.

The real problem is in the “widelly accepted” part: a sociopath killing an old lady and justifying it because “she looked funny at me” wouldn’t be “widelly accepted” and Society would react in a suitable way, but if said sociopath scammed the old lady’s pension fund because (and this is a typical justification in Investment Banking) “the opportunity was there and if I didn’t do it somebody else would’ve, so better be me and get the profit”, it’s deemed “acceptable” and Society does not react in a suitable way.

Mind you, Society (as in, most people) might actually want to react in a suitable way, but the structures in our society are such that the Official Power Of Force in our countries is controlled by a handful of people who got there with crafty marketing and backroom plays, and those deem it “acceptable”.

gapbetweenus ,

People will always find justification to be asholes. Capitalism tried to harvest that energy and unleashed it’s full potential, with rather devastating consequences.

Chee_Koala ,

Sure, but think-structures matter. We could have a system that doesn’t reward psychopathic business choices (as much), while still improving our lives bit by bit. If the system helps a bit with making the right choices, that would matter a lot.

gapbetweenus ,

That’s basically what I wrote, (free) market economy especially in combination with credit based capitalism gives those people a perfect combination of a system to thrive in. This seems to result in very fast progress and immense wealth, which is not distributed very equally. Than again, I prefer Besos and Zuckerberg as CEOs rather than politicians or warlords. Dudes with big Egos and Ambitions need something productive to work on.

Katana314 ,

It’s deemed “acceptable”? A sociopath scamming an old lady’s pension is basically the “John Wick’s dog” moment that leads to the insane death-filled warpath in recent movie The Beekeeper.

This is the kind of edgelord take that routinely expects worse than the worst of society with no proof to their claims.

Aceticon ,

This is the kind of shit I saw from the inside in Investment Banking before and after the 2008 Crash.

None of those assholes ever gets prison time for the various ways in which they abuse markets and even insider info for swindeling amongst other Pension Funds, so de facto the Society we have with the power structures it has, accepts it.

mo_lave ,

Strong “the constitution is a piece of paper” energy right there

KingThrillgore ,
@KingThrillgore@lemmy.ml avatar

I explicitly have my robots.txt set to block out AI crawlers, but I don’t know if anyone else will observe the protocol. They should have tools I can submit a sitemap.xml against to know if i’ve been parsed. Until they bother to address this, I can only assume their intent is hostile and if anyone is serious about building a honeypot and exposing the tooling for us to deploy at large, my options are limited.

phx ,

The funny (in an “wtf” not “haha” sense) thing is, individuals such as security researchers have been charged under digital trespassing laws for stuff like accessing publicly available ststems and changing a number in the URL in order to get access to data that normally wouldn’t, even after doing responsible disclosure.

Meanwhile, companies completely ignore the standard mentions to say “you are not allowed to scape this data” and then use OUR content/data to build up THEIR datasets, including AI etc.

That’s not a “violation of a social contract” in my book, that’s violating the terms of service for the site and essentially infringement on copyright etc.

No consequences for them though. Shit is fucked.

Pretzilla ,

Just thought of a nasty hack the browser makers (or hackers) could use to scrape unlisted sites - by surreptitiously logging user browser history for a crawl list

brbposting ,

Perhaps some web extensions already do this and phone home about it.

Spotlight7573 ,

While there are some extensions that do this, last I saw Google didn’t use Chrome for populating Search:

…perficient.com/…/does-google-use-chrome-to-disco…

FartsWithAnAccent ,
@FartsWithAnAccent@lemmy.world avatar

Remember Aaron Swartz

jkrtn ,

Corporations are people except when it comes to liability. Compare the consequences of stealing several thousand dollars from someone by fraud vs. stealing several thousand dollars from someone by fraud as an LLC.

CosmicCleric ,
@CosmicCleric@lemmy.world avatar

As unscrupulous AI companies crawl for more and more data, the basic social contract of the web is falling apart.

Honestly it seems like in all aspects of society the social contract is being ignored these days, that’s why things seem so much worse now.

maness300 ,

It’s abuse, plain and simple.

TheObviousSolution ,

Governments could do something about it, if they weren’t overwhelmed by bullshit from bullshit generators instead and lead by people driven by their personal wealth.

PatMustard ,

these days

When, at any point in history, have people acknowledged that there was no social change or disruption and everyone was happy?

maynarkh ,

They didn’t violate the social contact, they disrupted it.

lando55 ,

True innovation. So brave.

MonsiuerPatEBrown , (edited )

The open and free web is long dead.

just thinking about robots.txt as a working solution to people that literally broker in people’s entire digital lives for hundreds of billions of dollars is so … quaint.

bigMouthCommie ,
@bigMouthCommie@kolektiva.social avatar

you're jaded. me, too. but you're jaded.

MonsiuerPatEBrown ,

i prefer “antiqued” but yes

lightnegative ,

It’s up there with Do-Not-Track.

Completely pointless because it’s not enforced

Emerald ,

I bet at least one site I’ve visited in my lifetime has enforced it

jkrtn ,

Do-Not-Track, AKA, “I’ve made my browser fingerprint more unique for you, please sell my data”

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