this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2023
73 points (94.0% liked)

News

22890 readers
3619 users here now

Welcome to the News community!

Rules:

1. Be civil


Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.


2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.


Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.


3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.


Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.


4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.


Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.


5. Only recent news is allowed.


Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.


6. All posts must be news articles.


No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.


7. No duplicate posts.


If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.


8. Misinformation is prohibited.


Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.


9. No link shorteners.


The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.


10. Don't copy entire article in your post body


For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/446751

Alternative title: Musk sues data scrapers, blames them for Twitter’s “impaired user experience”

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Scrapers aren't ever going to use an API, but Twitter could have just blocked unrecognized traffic if they wanted. I'm sure it's covered by the TOS.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (1 children)

i think what the previous dude said is, people wouldn't not have resorted to use scrapping if there was a good api. one of the major reason people/organisations choose scrapping is because it's better than paying insane amounts of money for insane(ly low)amount of api calls.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (1 children)

There was a good API before Elon essentially shut it down. But that is irrelevant.

The reason mass data scraping like OpenAI does would not rely on an API is because they are getting data from the entire Internet (and other sources that aren't online). They want raw data and they want as much and as varied as possible. It's much easier, cheaper and practical to build tools that scrape websites generically than to integrate with thousands of completely independent and different APIs.

It's the same reason that Reddit complaining about "AI taking all of our data" is bullshit. "AI" is just a convenient excuse and the most recent tech buzzword.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

They are largely mad because of how effective the AI is. If data was being used just to improve Swype for texting people would care less. I care more about artists' complaints about getting replaced than big tech companies complaining that content they didn't create is being used to create things.

Also I decided to read openAI's GPT2 paper and they were pretty clear about their created dataset:

"Instead, we created a new web scrape which emphasizes document quality. To do this we only scraped web pages which have been curated/filtered by humans. Manually filtering a full web scrape would be exceptionally expensive so as a starting point, we scraped all outbound links from Reddit, a social media platform, which received at least 3 karma. This can be thought of as a heuristic indicator for whether other users found the link interesting, educational, or just funny.

The resulting dataset, WebText, contains the text subset of these 45 million links."

That's a nice sized dataset from real people that's already somewhat filtered by quality. They were totally scraping Reddit very specifically and now that people see it's effective, anyone else who wants to make their own chatgpt or wants to improve their models will do the same.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Very interesting, thanks for sharing!

It's worth noting here for context that:

  • scraping the outbound links is very different than all of the user comments, which would put more load on Reddit's servers and also be easier to claim "belongs" to Reddit (it doesn't but they argue otherwise)
  • this shows that OpenAI was not using, let alone abusing, Reddit's API as claimed
[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (3 children)

How exactly do you expect them to do that? It's not inherently a trivial problem.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Twitter can remove their servers from the public facing internet if they don't want the traffic.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Best solution imho

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Twitter very much does not want that to happen. Remember two weeks ago when Musk reversed his decision to block anyone but registered users from seeing tweets because Google started removing links to Twitter since they were dead?

Right-wingers don't just want to be bigoted assholes with megaphones, they want to make sure decent people have to hear them too.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Yeah, people think this is like trying to stop drive by bots that are looking for PHP vulnerabilities, it isn't.

Usually you are attempting to stop someone who is spending their entire day trying to scrape your site. It's a full time job trying to stop them and even then it's a cat and mouse game at best.

Still don't think Elon is going to get anywhere with this though.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

The same way any large web service would identify a sudden increase in traffic, whether malicious or not. For the servers I manage, we end up dealing with more unintentionally out-of-control bots than we do legitimate hack or DDoS attempts.