Meta won't train AI on Euro posts after all, as watchdogs put their paws down

I feel like they're at best paying lipservice to my interests considering that they're planning on scanning every single message that I send to "protect the children".

> the internet and cultural hegemony of the US will go into overdrive with all models churning out only US-centric views

I saw a fascinating outcome of this at a conference recently. Polish speaker made an IRS joke to a room full of Europeans at a conference in Europe. Everyone got it.

Nah, China already sealed of their internet as did Russia and to a degree India. If we have, in the end, a dead US-centric internet, well, as soon as people start ignoring that it wpuldn't be a real loss to humankind. Until we reach that point so, we are in deep shit. And LLM spam and crap content being US centric is least of our problems.

I don't see Europeans not wanting to use the AI products build with US data.

IMHO when the gap is too wide it sticks differently, it creates a caricature or an utopia in a similar way how Hollywood created an imaginary US utopia everywhere in the world or how the Anime culture created a caricature of Japanese people.

I don't know if it is good or bad thing in total. I remember idealising the USA as a teenager, not only its technological might but imagining that everybody lives in large detached homes only later to find out that Americans who live like that can't do anything without a car, don't have groceries, restaurants, cafes, museums, cinemas in walking distance.

My bet is that it will simply stick differently and will create an image of America through which Europeans will reflect on themselves and have conversations about how things can be done differently.

I don't believe that hearing different viewpoints automatically makes you to subscribe to them and that's why I'm very ant-censorship and I think it's a mistake to block or remove content from the internet. Real people don't get influenced the way priests influence villagers in Age of Empires 2.

Actually, I think a bit of cultural decoupling from the US will have positive effects as the US itself is in cultural crisis.

That can be an issue, although - I think - the European approach will be to block private and semi-private data (like fb posts), but allow public data (articles etc).

In Poland we have a team of people who work on SpeakLeash which is 1TB of polish texts freely available for anyone to train their models on - http://speakleash.org/en/speakleash-a-k-a-spichlerz-english/

I can imagine models getting their knowledge and intelligence by getting trained on global - english and chinese - data, and then learning country specific languages and viewpoints from way smaller datasets.

You can see that already - gpt was trained on way less Polish language material than english, but it’s almkst just as smart and fluent in both.

As for cultural quirks - here it’s more about who does hrlf and alignment than the source material.

The EU level problem isn't that LLMs are trained on your publicly scrapable reddit or HN posts since you're not getting paid for your contributions either way.

The way I understand it is, the laws are made to cover cases of LLMs being trained on work of authors and artists who normally make a living from the content they create such as articles, books, music, images, videos, etc. whose work is normally copyrighted but LLMs don't give a shit and can just scrape and "learn" your content, style and patterns and then regurgitate it with slight alterations without the original authors getting paid.

It's no secret that some LLMs have been trained on pirated books off libgen.

A) Copyright laws exist for a reason, even big tech should respect them (considering their utter disregard for anything but money, well...) B) Especially Meta knows aleeady too much about everyone, now they can add AI trained on all of that (but what could possibly go wrong with that, right? C) I don't want AI to be trained on my stuff, to the point I don't share anything publicly anymore and only use encrypted clouds for back-up (and not even sure I'll do so any longer)

By the way, not everything is about money. Convincing people it is, is even a better trick than the devil convincing people he doesn't exist (that is assuming one believes in such things, and then considers the devil to be evil instead of the people ending up in hell, but I digress).

Privacy is another, if they are training with chat messages in a sense it "knows" the information in your chat. Data exfiltration would be really interesting in this space, a weird blend of tech and social engineering.

I don't really care about the money but as a society we should care a lot about such a blatant heist of personal effort. For many their words online are their works of the day, it's not at all fair for a company to take that and use it, and even more insidious that it will be used to replace the people who created those works.

>The only argument I can understand is that a megacorp makes money from content I created

for professional content creators, that is exactly the biggest problem. That's why the artist community is getting a huge brunt of the pushback. You don't want your content production tools like the Adobe suite to retroactively say "yeah, by the way we are scanning your content as its produced and using that to make more money".

Even if you as a person don't mind, that's a huge NDA breach for a companyu. You don't want AI training to produce assets similar to the in-production media that isn't even out yet. It'd be a huge leak at best and a DOA at worst. And I'm sure you've seen the year+ of debate on copyright issues.

Let’s say I tweet that I hate cats bc I’m allergic to them.

I would be ok with that tweet being findable through search, but if a model is trained on the information and starts spitting out that I’m a cat hater period (without context), then that’s a different thing.

Also, there is an expectation of privacy on platforms like FB or Insta, because the posts require at least login to be read. Because of that people may be posting things that they expect only their friends to read, and friends of friends - not to become a part of a world knowledge canon.

For me personally - on platforms like HN and Reddit, I have no issue with models getting trained on. Fb/insta I treat as an extended group chat and out of limits for cralwers and ml datasets.

That solution doesn't work for Meta. Who on earth would choose to opt-in?

Given the level of the discourse on social media, I think this ban will actually rise the quality of the output.

So what you're saying is absolutely nothing would change?

It speaks EU languages well enough without this data already.

Surprise, English is a European language.

Those are two oddly juxtaposed sentences.

Meta: "Privacy is dead, we own your data now." EU: "No you don't." Meta: "Uh, ok."

Yes

The AI will be very good at that it seems