"Yesterday, the fediverse celebrated a victory against a head technology executive working on an “#AIpowered#socialnetwork” who decided to “ingested about 1,120,000 posts from Mastodon”. #maven
…a company with an alternative take on social media without likes & followers that just raised $2 millions wanted to join the #fediverse by, in technical terms, adding official #ActivityPub support, much like Meta is doing with Threads." https://stefanbohacek.com/blog/how-to-be-a-good-fediverse-citizen/
Ok, so the #Maven team states that they deleted the posts they INGESTED WITHOUT CONSENT after the huge negative response from the #fediverse#community.
But yet, the question remains, don't 'The Rules' of each server include the fact that #UserContent is not to be stolen (taken without consent) ?
So you’re posting on Mastodon, enjoying your digital life away from most of the tech blunders of integrating AI into everything for no reason. Your words are your own, you’ve got your robots.txt files organized nicely in your root directories, and everything is peaceful.
Life is good when corporations aren’t trying to plagiarize everything everyone’s ever written.
Sometime earlier today, on June 12th, 2024, an OpenAI backed project, or social network with no likes or faves and only people replying, that is also heavily infested with AI generated crap, used some code to ingest the whole ActivityPub fediverse. Just like that. Without mentioning it publicly, without uttering a single word.
Just sucked it all up like a vacuum fed into a garbage disposal.
Except that garbage disposal is the network feed of a website that is definitely not federating over ActivityPub.
In addition to pulling in posts, the import process seems to be running AI sentiment analysis to add tags and relational data after content reaches Maven’s servers. This is a core part of Maven’s product: instead of follows or likes, a model trains itself on its own data in an attempt to surface unique content algorithmically.
It’s worth mentioning that Maven received 2 million dollars in funding from former Twitter CEO Ev Williams and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
Sean Tilley, wedistribute.org
If you can make heads or tails of what exactly this guy’s AI was doing with all of our posts from Mastodon, I applaud you. Because it’s complete gibberish to me.
Taking out the dopamine feeding parts of a social network is already kind of a weird decision, but building one based around violating consent, I mean, I guess we all saw this coming. As I’ve said before, a lot of the tech world hates consent.
The people behind this have since halted ingestion and deleted everything that was scraped, for now. They haven’t said they weren’t going to do it again the second nobody’s looking.
It’s clear from the feedback on this thread that even our experiments with the tech were confusing to users and didn’t fit with other people’s expectations of how it should work.
We are currently pausing this integration, at least until we can better understand how Maven can fit in as a good citizen of the Fediverse.
Jimmy Secretan, CTO, heymaven.com
It takes a special kind of AI-muddled thought process to, instead of spending five minutes investigating how ActivityPub works, you just hook up some AI and download the whole damn thing. And then act surprised when people rightfully tell you that’s not how it works, and you can’t just shove an AI into an open space and expect a “Thank you.”
But this isn’t really a surprise, since they advertise AI-scraped sludge directly on their homepage.
You mean, a great way to get started being a pariah that everyone hates. Sure. You put that on your main page as a focal point.
I can’t emphasize enough how much I would love if all the data centers containing the code running these things, across every network, just suddenly exploded. Take it all back to zero, and then put up a digital wall, like in Cyberpunk 2077 when they built a whole new internet that isn’t infested with garbage.
But it seems, this will just continue to be a constant fight against greed, the death of creativity, and Sam Altman.
Maven, a new social network backed by OpenAI's Sam Altman, found itself in a controversy today when it imported a huge amount of posts and profiles from the Fediverse, and then ran AI analysis to alter the content.
"Happy to remove any of your posts from Maven and cease ingestion from those servers going forward"
So, after the fact, individuals on Mastodon have to contact you personally and ask you to stop?
Is that your position?
Reminds me of Byron Miller (@Supernovae@universeodon.com) and his since-deleted "In four months of having full text seach [we haven't heard from anyone who has be directly harmed]..."
That last is a paraphrase because Supernovae has pretty much removed any mention of himself from the Fediverse, right down to deleting his involvement with Mastodon on Github, causing renchap to opine:
"I suspect that @Supernovae closed it because they do not want to be involved with Mastodon anymore."
"CEO Ken Stanley is an expert on open-ended discovery in both AI and human systems and ... (most recently leading the Open-Endedness Team at #OpenAI )."
At: "Is Maven part of a larger company?"
"No, Maven is an independent startup."
But
"Here are a few of our investors, who also commented on their reasons for supporting Maven:
-- Ev Williams, co-founder of #Twitter: “Maven lets you follow your deepest curiosities instead of the trends of the day.”
-- Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI: ”In Maven, there is a chance for AI to play a role in fixing much that is broken in our online discourse.”
In which I argue that #Maven, a new social media site, is not only breaking norms of the #fediverse by #scraping without consent -- they're ironically violating their own stated reason for existing in the first place.
[Responses to this will appear as comments on my blog, unless you set privacy to followers-only or stronger. CWs will work]
Heads-up: The CTO of an "AI-powered social network" startup Maven, Jimmy Secretan, confirming that his app has "ingested about 1,120,000 posts from Mastodon".
Maven Imported 1.12 Million Fediverse Posts ( wedistribute.org )
Maven, a new social network backed by OpenAI's Sam Altman, found itself in a controversy today when it imported a huge amount of posts and profiles from the Fediverse, and then ran AI analysis to alter the content.