this post was submitted on 20 Apr 2024
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[–] PDFuego@lemmy.world 41 points 6 months ago (2 children)

If I'm reading this right, it's a program that users sign up for to donate their processing power (and can opt in or out of adult content), which is then used by client companies to generate their own users' content? It even says that Salad can't view or moderate the images, so what exactly are they doing wrong besides providing service to potentially questionable companies? It makes as much sense as blaming Nvidia or Microsoft, am I missing something?

[–] Cethin@lemmy.zip 24 points 6 months ago (2 children)

Based on the rewards, I'm assuming it's being done by very young people. Presumably the value of rewards is really low, but these kids haven't done the cost-benefit analysis. If I had to guess, for the vast majority it costs more in electricity than they get back, but the parents don't know it's happening.

This could be totally wrong. I haven't looked into it. This is how most of these things work though. They prey on the youth and their desire for these products to take advantage of them.

[–] CheeseNoodle@lemmy.world 5 points 6 months ago

Honestly what roblox kids are willing to do for pitiful pay is scary, if you work in any kind of creative digital medium those kids will do days of your job for a fiver if any real money at all. It won't be industry quality or anything but damn we got a whole digital version of sending kids down the mines. (And some of these roblox games can have unexpectedly big players behind them exploiting kids)

[–] PDFuego@lemmy.world 3 points 6 months ago

Right, so it's not like they're being tricked into generating porn or anything. It's not some option that they would have turned off if they'd known about it, they just don't care what's happening because they only want the reward. Again I'm not saying I agree with it or that Salad's right to do it, but if they say that's potentially what it can be used for (and they do because the opt-out is available) then the focus should be on the client companies using the tool for questionable purposes.

[–] fidodo@lemmy.world 8 points 6 months ago (1 children)

so what exactly are they doing wrong besides providing service to potentially questionable companies?

Well I think that is the main point of what is wrong. I think the big question is whether the mature content toggle is on by default or not. The company says it's off, but some users said otherwise. Dunno why the author didn't install it and check.

[–] PDFuego@lemmy.world 7 points 6 months ago (2 children)

They said they did.

However, by default the software settings opt users into generating adult content. An option exists to "configure workload types manually" which enables users to uncheck the "Adult Content Workloads" option (via 404 media), however this is easily missed in the setup process, which I duly tested for myself to confirm.

Honestly, and I'm not saying I support what's being done here, the way I see it if you're tech savvy enough to be interested in using a program like this you should be looking through all of the options properly anyway. If users don't care what they're doing and are only interested in the rewards that's kind of on them.

I just think the article is focused on the wrong company, Salad is selling a tool that is being potentially misused by users of their client's service. I can certainly see why that can be a problem, but based on the information given in the article I don't think it's really theirs. If that's ALL Salad's used for then that's a different story.

[–] bane_killgrind@lemmy.ml 2 points 6 months ago

It's Roblox stuff you can buy, it's not power users that are the target demographic

[–] fidodo@lemmy.world 1 points 6 months ago

Ah thanks I think I forgot that sentence by the end of the article and thought it was just a user report that it was checked by default. I really don't think that it should be checked by default, depending on where you are it could even get you in trouble. App setup for this kind of stuff isn't necessarily only for power users now, it has gotten very streamlined and tested for conversion.