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.
Enter: Technology Worker Dude # 4,104,210, or, Maven.
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.
“I believe that Midjourney is a great way to get started learning about generative art.”
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.
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