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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It is possible he interpreted the way I phrased my request as rude. I may have said something like "you are selling us as meat".
Truth is rude, I guess?
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@cthos I mean, I don't actually mind being indexed and I'm not necessarily opposed to my posts being processed via bot, I just object to this one tool as designed and want to opt out. I guess at this point a "bot" is likely to be an LLM?
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I wonder what the tool does when it encounters a DM. From his description it seems to just grab the last N posts from your feed, and depending on how the feed is queried (like if his Mastodon client code were written indifferently, or perhaps slopcoded) the feed he queries might well contain DMs intermixed. I wonder if his tool is taking DMs and sending them over the wire to Anthropic and/or Microsoft
@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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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 yeah we have run into seldo in the past actually, in other contexts... we would have been conflicted about a block, but when we're told to... well, we did
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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.
Gross. You should tell @404mediaco , they might want to cover this. They posted an article about a company non-consensually scraping Zoom meetings for AI bullshit today:
https://www.404media.co/this-company-is-secretly-turning-your-zoom-calls-into-ai-podcasts/
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I wonder what the tool does when it encounters a DM. From his description it seems to just grab the last N posts from your feed, and depending on how the feed is queried (like if his Mastodon client code were written indifferently, or perhaps slopcoded) the feed he queries might well contain DMs intermixed. I wonder if his tool is taking DMs and sending them over the wire to Anthropic and/or Microsoft
@mcc oh of course it will do that. @davidrevoy hinted at that in https://www.peppercarrot.com/en/miniFantasyTheater/035__Avian-Intelligence.html already.
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@mcc oh of course it will do that. @davidrevoy hinted at that in https://www.peppercarrot.com/en/miniFantasyTheater/035__Avian-Intelligence.html already.
@mcc it’s so “great” that we now not just have hostile instances to worry about but also hostile clients…
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@cthos I mean, I don't actually mind being indexed and I'm not necessarily opposed to my posts being processed via bot, I just object to this one tool as designed and want to opt out. I guess at this point a "bot" is likely to be an LLM?
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@theorangetheme @cthos Hi— we are referencing a discussion from another thread, where it was proposed potentially the slurper tool would *voluntarily* check for the presence of a particular tag or flag in the profile and *voluntarily* omit the post from the Anthropic POST.
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@theorangetheme @cthos Hi— we are referencing a discussion from another thread, where it was proposed potentially the slurper tool would *voluntarily* check for the presence of a particular tag or flag in the profile and *voluntarily* omit the post from the Anthropic POST.
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@cthos I mean, I don't actually mind being indexed and I'm not necessarily opposed to my posts being processed via bot, I just object to this one tool as designed and want to opt out. I guess at this point a "bot" is likely to be an LLM?
@mcc yeah, odds are very good a scraper project is some sort of LLM trap these days.
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@theorangetheme @mcc the suggestion was made to him around 6 hours ago so he likely hasn't taken any action on it yet.
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Gross. You should tell @404mediaco , they might want to cover this. They posted an article about a company non-consensually scraping Zoom meetings for AI bullshit today:
https://www.404media.co/this-company-is-secretly-turning-your-zoom-calls-into-ai-podcasts/
@funcrunch @404mediaco I don't think that's a good idea at all. I'd be strongly against that. A news article about this subject would make people aware of the project, which would cause people to use the project, which is the opposite of what I want.
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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 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 ?
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Yeah, this prompted me to add #nobot to my profile, which is something I wasn't aware of. It will be interesting to see if he honors that. I'm sure we will hear more about this.
I think I may start setting most of my posts to followers only and have them auto destruct because of garbage like this.
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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 I got suckered.
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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
