So there's this guy who made a tool where someone punches in their bluesky or mastodon credentials to his website, and it auto-crawls their feeds and produces an LLM summary of everyone it finds posting there.
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@mcc I have 96k toots. I wonder how much compute resources it would cost him to process it all. Can you share the username of this idiot so we too can block him ?
@quixoticgeek @mcc Large documents got fed easily into an LLM, thus 96k is a gravy shoemaker.
Rather, the quantity serves as additional chances to poison. Only need 250 samples that misuse a word to make an LLM erratic.
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So there's this guy who made a tool where someone punches in their bluesky or mastodon credentials to his website, and it auto-crawls their feeds and produces an LLM summary of everyone it finds posting there. He was asked what people should do if we don't want to be mulched as content for his summary feeds. He said we should block him. I replied, I can do that, but that only stops *you* from running the tool on me, how do I prevent *your other users* from running your tool on me? He blocked me.
@mcc well, it was a matter of time, wasn't it?
I just found an example of something I wrote flattened by Gemini, which oddly enough proves the point of the original post.
It's not just invasive. It misrepresent as well.
They won't understand until it happens to them.
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So there's this guy who made a tool where someone punches in their bluesky or mastodon credentials to his website, and it auto-crawls their feeds and produces an LLM summary of everyone it finds posting there. He was asked what people should do if we don't want to be mulched as content for his summary feeds. He said we should block him. I replied, I can do that, but that only stops *you* from running the tool on me, how do I prevent *your other users* from running your tool on me? He blocked me.
@mcc This sounds familiar. The last guy tried to do this similar attempt, it starts with M but forget his complete name lol
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Anyway, the fact he's blocked me *partially* solves my problem, in that now he cannot LLM summarize me anymore, but the problem that possibly eventually a *second* person would use his tool remains unresolved.
Honestly, it's baffling that he added Mastodon support at all given that he's been here for years and thus saw some of the MANY YEARS of conflict and debate about the idea of people merely *archiving* or *indexing* Mastodon posts. And then he goes an uploads an auto-LLM-mulcher tool. IDK.
@mcc I think one of the big stories of the decade is the slow realisation that when folks say they are releasing things for everyone to do anything with, and used licences that encode that utterance, we don't in fact mean anyone, and we don't in fact mean anything
a lot of people are also realising, myself included, that the parties who can exploit and profit disproportionately more from free stuff is are the parties who are highly experienced at exploitation and profiteering. and the parties most immune from the social checks we have on harmful behaviour are sociopaths who can do the most harm.
it's a bummer
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@mcc ...okay, THIS finally convinced me to set my toots to auto-expire.
What a nightmare.
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So there's this guy who made a tool where someone punches in their bluesky or mastodon credentials to his website, and it auto-crawls their feeds and produces an LLM summary of everyone it finds posting there. He was asked what people should do if we don't want to be mulched as content for his summary feeds. He said we should block him. I replied, I can do that, but that only stops *you* from running the tool on me, how do I prevent *your other users* from running your tool on me? He blocked me.
@mcc What a shitty little creep. Thanks for the heads up. Not sure what I can do besides auto deleting posts, blocking said creep and his server but at least glad I've done that
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So there's this guy who made a tool where someone punches in their bluesky or mastodon credentials to his website, and it auto-crawls their feeds and produces an LLM summary of everyone it finds posting there. He was asked what people should do if we don't want to be mulched as content for his summary feeds. He said we should block him. I replied, I can do that, but that only stops *you* from running the tool on me, how do I prevent *your other users* from running your tool on me? He blocked me.
@mcc he said you should block the people using the tool too, but you might have been blocked already for that
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Anyway, the fact he's blocked me *partially* solves my problem, in that now he cannot LLM summarize me anymore, but the problem that possibly eventually a *second* person would use his tool remains unresolved.
Honestly, it's baffling that he added Mastodon support at all given that he's been here for years and thus saw some of the MANY YEARS of conflict and debate about the idea of people merely *archiving* or *indexing* Mastodon posts. And then he goes an uploads an auto-LLM-mulcher tool. IDK.
@mcc it was bound to happen
though I believe servers could mitigate this by placing limits on number of querries given user/ip/subnet/userahent could perform. Thoyhg that would impact people behind NAT, thoes who want to scroll and read bit longer, and probably bots would just go around it by adding longer sleeps between querries.Still, in the end if your client can display toots or other activities, so can bots.
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@mcc he said you should block the people using the tool too, but you might have been blocked already for that
@leberschnitzel A proposal I made before the block was that he could add everyone who uses the tool (as the tool does involve ingesting your login info) to a Bluesky list, so we could subscribe to that as a blocklist. His response to that seemed to be that the thing I wanted was inherently unreasonable. So should I block these folks or not block them? Strange.
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@mcc it was bound to happen
though I believe servers could mitigate this by placing limits on number of querries given user/ip/subnet/userahent could perform. Thoyhg that would impact people behind NAT, thoes who want to scroll and read bit longer, and probably bots would just go around it by adding longer sleeps between querries.Still, in the end if your client can display toots or other activities, so can bots.
@jablkoziemne The fact that anyone could have done this does not make doing it okay
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@leberschnitzel A proposal I made before the block was that he could add everyone who uses the tool (as the tool does involve ingesting your login info) to a Bluesky list, so we could subscribe to that as a blocklist. His response to that seemed to be that the thing I wanted was inherently unreasonable. So should I block these folks or not block them? Strange.
@mcc it's very clear that he doesn't care about consent
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@mcc it would appear to do no filtering of DMs https://github.com/seldo/zeitgeist/blob/main/app/api/mastodon/timeline/route.ts#L49
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@mcc it would appear to do no filtering of DMs https://github.com/seldo/zeitgeist/blob/main/app/api/mastodon/timeline/route.ts#L49
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@mcc Yeah. There's a thing going on here where that hits people in a sore spot (LLMs) that is in many ways out of bounds (you can't actually control other people's tools); the place it gets dicy is when you're running a service so you're promoting the use of the tools.
But in general, I'd be real mad at anyone who tried to control what I used to read with.
@aredridel @mcc I had a similar response to quote permissions: what good is turning off quoting for a public post when others can still use their "tools" to link to it? Someone explained to me that it's about making it easy to respect other people's wishes, for those who are inclined to do so.
Maybe it would be nice if this person added a more effective opt out mechanism? Or made their bot opt in? You'd still be free to implement your own LLM reading tool if you really want to.
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@GroupNebula563 @cass I am fairly certain if an instance wanted to do this it would be possible. Go to Preferences->Account->Authorized Apps. It knows the names of all the clients you've used. An instance surely could not prevent someone from downloading the source and running their own instance with a changed client name, but I feel confident the instance *could* prevent users from using the main version of the app uploaded by its original author.
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@GroupNebula563 @cass I am fairly certain if an instance wanted to do this it would be possible. Go to Preferences->Account->Authorized Apps. It knows the names of all the clients you've used. An instance surely could not prevent someone from downloading the source and running their own instance with a changed client name, but I feel confident the instance *could* prevent users from using the main version of the app uploaded by its original author.
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Anyway, the fact he's blocked me *partially* solves my problem, in that now he cannot LLM summarize me anymore, but the problem that possibly eventually a *second* person would use his tool remains unresolved.
Honestly, it's baffling that he added Mastodon support at all given that he's been here for years and thus saw some of the MANY YEARS of conflict and debate about the idea of people merely *archiving* or *indexing* Mastodon posts. And then he goes an uploads an auto-LLM-mulcher tool. IDK.
@mcc I don’t know who this person is, so maybe it’s obvious that they participated in those debates, but it’s fully possible for a person to be on Mastodon for a long time and read a completely different set of posts than me.
There are very many people on Mastodon, and there are bound to be many different ”communities”. Even though we post in this huge undifferentiated heap without any ”forums” or ”groups”, we choose who to follow, and we get posts from exactly them.
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@mcc it would appear to do no filtering of DMs https://github.com/seldo/zeitgeist/blob/main/app/api/mastodon/timeline/route.ts#L49
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@mcc I don’t know who this person is, so maybe it’s obvious that they participated in those debates, but it’s fully possible for a person to be on Mastodon for a long time and read a completely different set of posts than me.
There are very many people on Mastodon, and there are bound to be many different ”communities”. Even though we post in this huge undifferentiated heap without any ”forums” or ”groups”, we choose who to follow, and we get posts from exactly them.
@ahltorp Well, that's true. It would have been more appropriate if I'd said "he would have had the opportunity to have seen" instead of saying "he thus saw". However, this was already a long and wordy post, and Mastodon.social has a character limit
