Fediverse

Radical and altogether stupid idea (but a fun thought) is this:

Were lemmy to have a certain percentage of AI content seamlessly incorporated into its corpus of text, it would become useless for training LLMs on (see this paper for more technical details on the effects of training LLMs on their own outputs, a phenomenon called "model collapse").

In effect this would sort of "poison the well", though given that we all drink the water, the hope would be that our tolerance for a mild amount of AI corruption would be higher than an LLM creator's.

This poisoning approach amusingly benefits from being a thing that could be advertised heavily, basically saying "lemmy is useless for training LLMs, don't bother with it".

Now I must say personally I think that I don't really think this is a sensible or viable strategy, and that I think the well is already poisoned in this regard (as I think there is already a non-negligible amount of LLM-sourced content on lemmy). But yes, a fun approach to consider: trading integrity for privacy.

They can put a robots.txt file in their root structure which can tell robots (AI scrapers) to ignore that website. However that only works on robots which follow that rule, it's self enforced so it's a crap shoot of it'll be followed. Otherwise to be honest there isn't a lot a public facing website can do to avoid being scraped. Maybe put up a captcha on every page?

They're a lot more resistant to it than the centralized softwares.

Stuff you post here has some small chance of remaining un-stored-forever. Obviously people can read it and store it, but it's not systematically indexed and processed like Facebook Reddit etc. Bots go around indexing the big instances, and it's fairly likely that they'll hold onto the data. Aside from that it doesn't get "centralized" anywhere. It might not be a bad idea to delete your comments after a week or two if you care about long term privacy, not that that's bulletproof, but not a bad idea.

Voting, weirdly enough, is basically public. If you're upvoting or downvoting things, more or less anyone on the network who's tech savvy can dig out the information of who voted on what. Subscriptions are also basically public.

"Reading" actions you take on Lemmy sites -- searches or viewing things -- is probably completely private. The only people who can see it are the individual instance operators, and it's legitimately unlikely that they'll ever look at it, much less hold onto the data once the logs get rotated or do anything with it aside from delete it.

So the TL;DR is it's way better here (mostly because the servers are privately operated by people who at worst, don't give a shit what you're doing, and at best would actively want to defend your privacy most likely).

What are you wanting to protect? I think you should hold a bit of anonymity overall to where it doesn’t matter a whole lot. The thrill of these platforms are the more anonymous characters willing to share what’s on their mind without huge out-lash/cancelling in my opinion.

Is there a way to protect data/user contents in Lemmy/Mastodon against now rapidly rising AI s?

yes:

Don't publish it there. It's that simple.