Technology

So I assume they added any necessary stuff to the TOS to allow this.

Never read it but I assume it already was. Pretty much every platform has a clause that says something along the lines of "we own all the content you submit to our service".

My question is if there’s any legal mechanism to prevent this on other platforms? Pixelfed for example.

Good question!

I’ve been saying for a while that the fediverse is blind to this issue as everything here is completely scrapable through either the public web or by running federated servers. On top of that, being culturally inclined toward more “serious” conversation and providing content warnings and alt-text for images, we’re probably generating relatively valuable training data.

And yet everything is public as though it’s still 2012.

There are alternatives. BlueSky for instance is basically private to members only. They recently announced that content would be made public to the web and a number of users were upset.

Group chats and Discord servers are probably similar, and from what I can tell “new” popular places for social activity online.

A major issue the fediverse has, IMO, is that it’s kinda stuck trying to fight Twitter and Facebook circa 2012, when that battle was lost and we’re on to new battle fronts now.

I think in order to fight against these composite using our data for AI training we souks have to do something like watermarking our images explicitly stating that they are not for AI training. Or we create some type of counter measure that messes up the training.

You're never going to get rights over the training data your pictures that are freely available for anything to scan creates. By being on the internet your pictures basically have the right to be viewed by anyone or anything even an AI. You have never gotten to control who looks at your content after you post it.

You're trying to make the same argument the "don't copy my nft" bros tried to make.

Imagine going into court and saying you should get paid for all the stuff u gave away for free on the Internet willingly.

I wonder how they worked around user violations of copyright... Imagine all the content uploaded to Instagram/Facebook that the poster didn't create but simply uploaded their download/screenshot.

It's mostly bias in the training data. Most people aren't posting mediocre images of themselves online so models rarely see that. Most are also finetuned to specifically avoid outputting that kind of stuff because people don't want it.

Out of focus is easy for most base models but getting an average looking person is harder.

you can do that with stable diffusion and loras, yes

On the focus part, I've seen some impressive results from people who input a specific camera, lens, and focal distance.

The models are deliberately engineered to create "good" images, just like cameras get autofocus, anti-shake and stuff. There are many tools that will auto-prettify people, not so many for the reverse.

There are enough imperfect images around for the model to know what that looks like.

I assumed this was because it's making an average. Human attraction is highly sensitive to symmetry so this creates that symmerty by the way it works.

Thing is they have the original data aswell to train on, so the machine knows what the average of someone looks like and the average to which they change it so they could in theory have a good grasp of the uncanny valley or at least nó the gap the scale back to am original look.

you can 'see' almost anything you can type out descriptively enough

A significant fraction of the population can't! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia

The upside of generative AI better be no less than an end to toil because in the short run, they’re going to ruin the internet and prompt several genocides.