Maven, a new social network backed by OpenAI’s Sam Altman, found itself in a controversy today when it imported a huge amount of posts and profiles from the Fediverse, and then ran AI analysis to alter the content.
To be honest, the extreme negative reaction was a surprise to me, as I thought interaction between disparate systems was the entire point, but clearly we didn’t navigate the culture correctly.
Noooo fucking shit? If they spent more than a minute on a proper instance and not milquetoast mastodon dot social, they would have realised that a good number of fedi users despise shenanigans like this?
Been looking into #Maven all morning
Just going to copy-paste two posts
The head admin/dev @jsecretan claims:
“Happy to remove any of your posts from Maven and cease ingestion from those servers going forward”
So, after the fact, individuals on Mastodon have to contact you personally and ask you to stop?
Is that your position?
Reminds me of Byron Miller (@Supernovae @universeodon.com) and his since-deleted “In four months of having full text seach [we haven’t heard from anyone who has be directly harmed]…”
That last is a paraphrase because Supernovae has pretty much removed any mention of himself from the Fediverse, right down to deleting his involvement with Mastodon on Github, causing renchap to opine:
“I suspect that @Supernovae closed it because they do not want to be involved with Mastodon anymore.”
here: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/21398#issuecomment-2145321855
Executive summary: there are a lot of people On Here™ who don’t appreciated every new idea all you bright-eyed young creatives can come up with
Instructive to read #Maven’s #About page and see who’s behind it.
Here: https://www.heymaven.com/about
Selected excerpts from “Who is behind Maven?”
“CEO Ken Stanley is an expert on open-ended discovery in both AI and human systems and … (most recently leading the Open-Endedness Team at #OpenAI ).”
At: “Is Maven part of a larger company?”
“No, Maven is an independent startup.”
But
"Here are a few of our investors, who also commented on their reasons for supporting Maven:
-- Ev Williams, co-founder of #Twitter: “Maven lets you follow your deepest curiosities instead of the trends of the day.”
-- Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI: ”In Maven, there is a chance for AI to play a role in fixing much that is broken in our online discourse.”
-- Rana El Kaliouby, co-founder of Affectiva…"
Sam Altman
Where have I heard that name before?
A short while ago, Jimmy Secretan posted this response on everything that happened today:
“We have paused everything related to our Fediverse ingestion for now and we are removing everything ingested.
To be honest, the extreme negative reaction was a surprise to me, as I thought interaction between disparate systems was the entire point, but clearly we didn’t navigate the culture correctly.”
Make the world a better place, bully your local tech bro today!
Hmmm it was even able to pull in private DMs.
Maybe private DMs on Mastadon aren’t as private as everyone thinks… that, or the open nature of Activity Pub is leaking them somehow?
Edit - From the article:
Even more shocking is the revelation that somehow, even private DMs from Mastodon were mirrored on their public site and searchable. How this is even possible is beyond me, as DM’s are ostensibly only between two parties, and the message itself was sent from two hackers.town users.
From what @delirious_owl@discuss.online mentioned below, it sounds like this shouldn’t be very shocking at all.
PM never implied any form of end to end encryption. It only ever meant people couldn’t see it apart from site operators. I genuinely don’t believe people thought it meant otherwise.
But on a federated system, everyone can see all messages. That’s expected.
They’re called DMs not PMs
? Did you mean that the other way around? And if you did… forgive me, I don’t really use Mastodon. I was never much of a twitter fan. I don’t really like how all of my likes are public (although I guess I have had to get used to that with Lemmy).
The shocking part was less about Maven’s methods or lack of ethics, and more along the lines of “How the fuck did they do that?!”
What @delirious_owl@discuss.online seemed to be implying is that direct messages on Mastodon should be considered “public” rather than “private”.
I’m assuming that’s along the same lines of how Lemmy users generally think that their upvotes/downvotes are private when in reality, if you know how to look for them, you can see them.
And there were people on here saying that licensing your comments CC was stupid…
Have those but been harvested? Did the users get compensation?
The day that has any effect aside from bloating the thread, I’ll accept they are not stupid.
Nobody said to get rid of the laws. I’m telling to enforce them. Posting that and not following through is why people thinks they are stupid.
I’ll root hard for anybody suing them. If they don’t because they think it’s impossible to win it because it’s hard, then, they are the ones de-facto giving away the law.
Maybe Lemmy should start adding NoAI meta tags to posts and comments like some other websites have started doing for images? Though I doubt it helps that much.
I think it is more important to have a non-commercial tag/license added.
