AI Data Scrapers: How do you feel about them?
AI Data Scrapers: How do you feel about them?
I created this account two days ago, but one of my posts ended up in the (metaphorical) hands of an AI powered search engine that has scraping capabilities. What do you guys think about this? How do you feel about your posts/content getting scraped off of the web and potentially being used by AI models and/or AI powered tools? Curious to hear your experiences and thoughts on this.
Edit¹: This is Perplexity. Perplexity AI employs data scraping techniques to gather information from various online sources, which it then utilizes to feed its large language models (LLMs) for generating responses to user queries. The scraping process involves automated crawlers that index and extract content from websites, including articles, summaries, and other relevant data. It is an advanced conversational search engine that enhances the research experience by providing concise, sourced answers to user queries. It operates by leveraging AI language models, such as GPT-4, to analyze information from various sources on the web.
Edit²: One could argue that data scraping by services like Perplexity may raise privacy concerns because it collects and processes vast amounts of online information without explicit user consent, potentially including personal data, comments, or content that individuals may have posted without expecting it to be aggregated and/or analyzed by AI systems. One could also argue that this indiscriminate collection raise questions about data ownership, proper attribution, and the right to control how one's digital footprint is used in training AI models.
So long as they don't increase the server load massively I don't care.
My knee-jerk reaction is that I'm generally against it. I'm all for AI in a variety of applications, but I don't participate in discussion in online places to give free training days to corporate LLM's. If somehow it could be guaranteed that it was only used in open models I suppose I would feel a little better, but the second issue in my mind is that even careful people leave a trail of identifying breadcrumbs sprinkled across their posting history. A human having to sift through thousands of posts and comments will have a much harder time putting pieces together than an AI will. So I see it as a privacy concern mostly.
Yeah. I totally get what you're saying.
However, as you pointed out, AI can deal with more information than a human possibly could. I don't think it would be unrealistic to assume that in the near future it will be possible to track someone cross accounts based on things such as their interests, the way they type, etc. Then it will be a major privacy concern. I can totally see three letter agencies using this technique to identify potential people of interest.