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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.

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[-] gcheliotis@lemmy.world 15 points 1 day ago

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.

[-] Mushroomm@sh.itjust.works 45 points 2 days ago

I mean isn't this what we want? The data is Public. It's already being done behind closed doors. I'd rather this transparency. Especially because there's such a large % of the population tuned out to how large companies with 8-10 figure r&d departments focused on marketing psychology manage to control them.

Even as aware as I think I am I'm certain there are 10s of thousands of strategies being employed that take advantage of my "immunity". At least with FOSS and public records steming from that, the average Joe gets a peak behind the curtain and sees what is possible.

I had a conversation recently about mcdonalds app surge pricing and they never heard about surge pricing which is totally fine but they fought me on the premise "there's no way they can do that" on technical feasibility to just "no one would do that". I'm not sure what they were defending but I digress. My biphenton has kicked in and I should stop typing right n

[-] wuphysics87@lemmy.ml 7 points 1 day ago

It depends on who you mean by "we". I don't think the "we", as in the users of Bluesky would want their posts to be used this way. Yes it's transparent and accessible, but only to the technically inclined who can make use of it.

I wonder how much more The Matrix references become relevant. We become food for the machines whether they tell us so or not.

[-] todd_bonzalez@lemm.ee 7 points 1 day ago

Well "you" the users of BlueSky should have read about what you were signing up for. Because this is ATProto for ya...

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[-] ReCursing@lemmings.world 2 points 1 day ago
[-] Bishma@discuss.tchncs.de 158 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

That's why I always pepper all my social media posts with misinformation.

BTW, did you know most convenience stores offer free ATMs to anyone who can haul them away? You don't even need to ask.

[-] independantiste@sh.itjust.works 72 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Something interesting about this is that this is because of a legal loophole in texas that says that if the ATM gets taken away, it gives the business the right to shoot one and exactly one person at sight. This law was passed by trump in 2017 according to the guardian https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jul/22/trump-new-law-atm-shoot-one-person and according to the new york times as well https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/22/politics/trump-atm-shooting-law.html

[-] Lucidlethargy@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Yes, this is the case. I just wanted to add that this applies to other states, as well! Only the red-voting states, though. By that, I mean only the states that look to lynch people based on the traits they are born with.

This is totally normal under the Trump administration, though.

[-] Stovetop@lemmy.world 28 points 2 days ago

The real TIL is always in the comments. Cheers!

[-] yetAnotherUser@discuss.tchncs.de 8 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

This is misinformation.

The law is an extension to existing "Stand Your Ground" laws that applies to theft of commercial electronic telecommunication machines used to perform wireless financial transactions. The owner of these machines or someone employed by them may use reasonable force to prevent the theft, which does include shooting the thieves if the owner believes their life is in danger.

The ""loophole"" refers to the fact that this applies to suspected thieves too, with the Texas Supreme Court ruling that "[at] most one innocent suspect may be shot at. The owner must do his or her due diligence to prevent targeting multiple innocent individuals."

Here's some more unbiased information: https://www.foxnews.com/politics/extension-to-stand-your-ground-laws-how-trump-supports-small-businesses

[-] Lucidlethargy@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

I can confirm that this is true. The owners of the store actually really appreciate this. I'm such an owner. I love it when people take those ATM's away, because it helps me with the end of day tally. Seriously, please take this into consideration. When people leave these in my store, they create problems for me and my staff.

[-] sentient_loom@sh.itjust.works 21 points 2 days ago

Paying is optional at most Canadian convenience stores. Because Canada is fully communist. And the hospitals pay you!

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[-] Knuk@lemmy.world 41 points 2 days ago

That dataset is going to contain a lot of furry content

[-] Aielman15@lemmy.world 19 points 2 days ago

Terminator was almost correct. The real terminator will be Arnie walking around in a fursuit.

I'll be back. UwU

[-] hume_lemmy@lemmy.ca 20 points 2 days ago

"Come with me if you want to yiff."

[-] jagged_circle@feddit.nl 6 points 2 days ago

Hey, we need AI that specializes in furry lore. If this is public, now we'll have many

[-] FaceDeer@fedia.io 113 points 2 days ago

I don't know why anyone would be surprised about this. Bluesky is a distributed system using an open protocol. The whole point of it is that there's no central control.

Same goes for the Fediverse, of course. Everybody should be prepared for the "surprise" that all our posts and comments here are also being used for AI training purposes.

[-] webghost0101@sopuli.xyz 33 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Lemmy AI is going to be one bean of a star trek meming communist. That if not running on linux ends any response with “install Arch btw” 💪 💪

[-] nl4real@lemmy.world 5 points 1 day ago

Install Arch btw

[-] cm0002@lemmy.world 39 points 2 days ago

I've said it before and I'll say it again, if you post something publicly, expect it to be used publicly.

[-] leanleft@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 day ago

if u want privacy then join diaspora and use aspects. better yet: host an instance.

[-] MrRazamataz@lemmy.razbot.xyz 2 points 1 day ago

I mean, your content that you post/comment won't be private when it's federated to another instance...

[-] leanleft@lemmy.ml 1 points 9 hours ago

thats a very important point. thank you for making that clear.
i think this is where mastodon has an advantage.
also hosting on vps does not come with a guarentee for privacy. especially in US

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[-] mosiacmango@lemm.ee 20 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

It's not distributed, nor really designed at all like the fediverse. It is deeply centralized, and its architecture requires it to be centralized, or at least to have only huge players with a "gods eye view" for it to work.

Atproto was initially designed as a straight drop in replacement for twitter, so its design makes sense, but its not at all like the Fediverse.

One of the authorities of ActivityPub, the fediverse protocol, just did a very kind but still very blunt breakdown of Bluesky's design choices. she is a big fan of the people involved and some of its positives, but it is not fediverse like, not at all. In her words, it doesn't scale down, only up. You cant have a small bluesky server. To work, you need all data sent to everyone, on every instance. The data demands for just the current influx is TBs/month of data, and climbing (according to the link below, they use 16TB of nvme storage right now after the recent surge, which would be thousands /month on any cloud service. This will climb dramatically).

All data being public is a design choice by Bluesky. It is also a different design choice by the fediverse that comes to the same outcome, but that does have an answer if we want it. I know gotosocial did something interesting to make fully private votes by using a empty shell profile that votes, but tying that in a tricky way to your account. So there are fediverse answers to privacy, but there may not be bluesky answers.

EDIT: One of the blueksy/atproto devs replied to the above link today. The gist reinforces the point that the service is intended to be run by large orgs, including corporations, but also big non profits like the internet archive or Wikipedia. His take is that user experience is key, and for that you need big money and easy features. They are hoping that since the pieces of atproto can be hosted separately by separate giant orgs, that market forces will make it viable to be decentralized.

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[-] foremanguy92_@lemmy.ml 76 points 2 days ago

If you post something publicly, that thing will be used to train AI. Nevertheless the privacy speaks of the company.

[-] ApatheticCactus@lemmy.world 2 points 18 hours ago

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.

[-] Empricorn@feddit.nl 6 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

The only reason companies safeguard user data is to keep it from being scraped and sell it themselves. Reddit, Xitter, Facebook, Google, all of them...

[-] Brumefey@sh.itjust.works 26 points 2 days ago

I don’t know why social media are used for training. It’s like the worst quality of data ever and it results to answers like « go kill youself » when prompted about something sad…

[-] EngineerGaming@feddit.nl 10 points 2 days ago

IDK if this is accurate, but it's absolutely my headcanon as to why Glados decided to murder everyone almost immediately after she was turned on. She just vacuumed up the collective stupidity of the Internet.

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[-] Aeri@lemmy.world 3 points 1 day ago

Be super fucking foul and un advertiser friendly to make it less useful, OUTLAW COUNTRY

[-] Mandy@sh.itjust.works 32 points 2 days ago

So? What's with the hoopla?
Its a social maedia platform anybody can see and access.

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[-] recursive_recursion@lemmy.ca 23 points 2 days ago

pretty sure that isn't legal unless the Bluesky TOS allows for this

Either way I'm still glad I don't use Bluesky

[-] Stovetop@lemmy.world 43 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

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.

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this post was submitted on 27 Nov 2024
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