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Graber replied that generative AI companies are “already scraping public data from across the web,” including from Bluesky, since “everything on Bluesky is public like a website is public.” So she said Bluesky is trying to create a “new standard” to govern that scraping, similar to the robots.txt file that websites use to communicate their permissions to web crawlers.
Yeah these people are just stupid.
“Oh, hell no!” the user Sketchette wrote. “The beauty of this platform was the NOT sharing of information. Especially gen AI. Don’t you cave now.”
No you fucking idiot, it has a open API, anyone has been able to extract as much data as they want for any purpose and thats good. Same as all the actual fediverse platforms. The thing that should get people worried is that Bluesky has the power to universally make and enforce this and any decision they want because its a shitty centralized platform like any other social media site.
It's that interoperability of unique instances that makes the Fediverse resistant to scraping. The posts are all public, but crawling it all and categorizing everything is probably like untangling a cotton ball.
Or you can host your own instance and let the servers send you all their data (instances can still defederate)
Don't really see the problem. If you pick up the content while web crawling, you will end up with a lot of duplicates, but that's normal. If you wanted to scrape the Fediverse in particular, you'd know the structure of the data.
I wonder why Bluesky bothers. The reaction was predictable.
Outside of rate limiting and sending detected bad bots to poisoned static data, yeah not much you can really do without harming valid use cases.
In the federated world people can just set up relays or listener instances, which are far better than hammering hobbyist instances with the additional bandwidth.
Molly White, who writes the Citation Needed newsletter and Web3 is Going Just Great blog, described this as “a good proposal,” and said it was “weird to see people flaming BlueSky for it,” since it’s not so much “welcoming in AI scraping” but rather “trying to add a consent signal to allow users to communicate preferences for the scraping that is already happening.”
That being said, yes, not great
We probably can't escape Ai everywhere, let's face it But most people won't care like they didn't care about their data in general before AI
I'm already using Mastodon in parallel, but I must admit I couldn't find a lot of people to follow...maybe gotta look harder, but I have to admit it doesn't seem as easy as it does on BS
I would think that a system could be built to detect and stop AI scraping on a website. Bluesky saying "everybody already does it" is hardly a satisfactory response to users wanting privacy. Especially after many of us went to Bluesky specificaly because they said they would not allow our content to be used in AI.
