A machine learning librarian at Hugging Face just released a dataset composed of one million Bluesky posts, complete with when they were posted and who posted them, intended for machine learning research.
Daniel van Strien posted about the dataset on Bluesky on Tuesday:
“This dataset contains 1 million public posts collected from Bluesky Social’s firehose API, intended for machine learning research and experimentation with social media data,” the dataset description says. “Each post contains text content, metadata, and information about media attachments and reply relationships.”
The data isn’t anonymous. In the dataset, each post is listed alongside the users’ decentralized identifier, or DID; van Strien also made a search tool for finding users based on their DID and published it on Hugging Face. A quick skim through the first few hundred of the million posts shows people doing normal types of Bluesky posting—arguing about politics, talking about concerts, saying stuff like “The cat is gay” and “When’s the last time yall had Boston baked beans?”—but the dataset has also swept up a lot of adult content, too.
If you post something publicly, that thing will be used to train AI. Nevertheless the privacy speaks of the company.
Be super fucking foul and un advertiser friendly to make it less useful, OUTLAW COUNTRY
Yes, it absolutely will. That’s why I fragrance the pandas. Just a little here and there so that some Howard will need to sort through it. The lime really comes through clearly.
That dataset is going to contain a lot of furry content
Terminator was almost correct. The real terminator will be Arnie walking around in a fursuit.
I’ll be back. UwU
“Come with me if you want to yiff.”
pretty sure that isn’t legal unless the Bluesky TOS allows for this
Either way I’m still glad I don’t use Bluesky
There are definitely bots mining fediverse content as well. When the Reddit exodus was ongoing, there were entire Lemmy instances with no users but bots. Not posting or reposting, just…watching and waiting, I guess.
Not that it’s of any consolation, just better to assume that nowhere is safe from being mined for AI training.
Not that it’s of any consolation, just better to assume that nowhere is safe from being mined for AI training.
honestly that’s totally fair
The fediverse is an elegant solution. How do you stop people from monetizing your post history? You give it away for free.
GDPR has entered the chat
But why would you need bots to scrape data? Wouldn’t a script just do fine?
I think the worry is that they are capable of doing to Lemmy what they did to Reddit: regurgitating content or producing astroturfed content while appearing like authentic users.
Legality hasn’t stopped AI training in the past, I’d say they beg forgiveness instead of ask for permission, but they don’t even do that lol
The real question here is why the researcher “librarian” didn’t even attempt to anonymize the dataset before making it available. Full anonymization isn’t a trivial task, but at least removing unique identifiers or replacing them with randomly generated ones would be good practice.
This type of news makes me want to step away from the interner entirely.
I keep noticing situations on social media and wikis were the only way I can frame it now is that it’s just data entry for AI models.
Wish I could. My job has me knee deep in it everyday trying to keep up with all this.
Modern day life over here requires the internet, our government has taken away options that use paper and replaced it with websites. Same goes for banks.
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Good
