It feels like we have a new privacy threat that’s emerged in the past few years, and this year especially. I kind of think of the privacy threats over the past few decades as happening in waves of:

  1. First we were concerned about governments spying on us. The way we fought back (and continue to fight back) was through encrypted and secure protocols.
  2. Then we were concerned about corporations (Big Tech) taking our data and selling it to advertisers to target us with ads, or otherwise manipulate us. This is still a hard battle being fought, but we’re fighting it mostly by avoiding Big Tech (“De-Googling”, switching from social media to communities, etc.).
  3. Now we’re in a new wave. Big Tech is now building massive GPTs (ChatGPT, Google Bard, etc.) and it’s all trained on our data. Our reddit posts and Stack Overflow posts and maybe even our Mastodon or Lemmy posts! Unlike with #2, avoiding Big Tech doesn’t help, since they can access our posts no matter where we post them.

So for that third one…what do we do? Anything that’s online is fair game to be used to train the new crop of GPTs. Is this a battle that you personally care a lot about, or are you okay with GPTs being trained on stuff you’ve provided? If you do care, do you think there’s any reasonable way we can fight back? Can we poison their training data somehow?

  • bpudding@lemmy.one
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    1 year ago

    Regardless of how anyone feels about their writing being used for model training, there’s definitely nothing anyone can do to prevent it other than just not writing anything visitble to the public.

    • Nero@lemmy.one
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      1 year ago

      Not yet, I think. If AI as regulated more strictly, users might get the chance of putting permission on their data. However that well look like. I hope it’s better than the cookie opt-out or do-not-track setting in your browser though.