Nelson's Weblog: culture / apis-for-content-sites-must-be-free
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  • @ZeroEcks@lemmy.blahaj.zone
    8•1 year ago

    I am not sure I agree entirely with this, while I do think there should be third party clients, we have entered the age where allowing API access is giving free reign to very valuable LLMs to train on your data, which also IMO violates your users privacy. I think it’s better to have it be gratis but not libre, perhaps some kind of app approval process or some such.

    • @PenguinTD@lemmy.ca
      5•1 year ago

      I think it’s possible to have a middle ground, just by putting properly formed license terms like foss projects. Ie. Specify that the AI/bot must be following certain rules(ie, fetch the comments but not the user IDs), because if we don’t provide data for open and free alternative, there will be no good AI tools for common folks. And the top dogs are all hoarding data with sneaky ToS.

    • @yuun
      2•1 year ago

      That was wild, yeah. Social media sites shouldn’t lock down APIs because it’s all user generated and LLMs should be given free reign to harvest user content for their own proprietary ends?

      I guess I can agree that these two ideas aren’t fully contradictory, but there’s a lot of friction between these two conceptions of user’s rights to their content/data.

    • RandomBit
      1•1 year ago

      Nothing can stop screen scraping. A nefarious LLM startup could hire an outside group to screen scrape the data and give it to them for training. Charging exorbitant amounts of money for the API hurts users far more than other companies with a profit motive to get the data.