Not looking to debate or stir up anything. But, I will say despite anyone’s thoughts the anti-meta fedi pact at least allowed people to have some information on where instances and people stood on federation with Threads. Some decisions were able to be made based on that information. I think if it doesn’t exist there should be one also regarding AI, which is a polarizing topic especially on fedi. I believe similar to the Threads issue it would allow people to make somewhat informed decisions one way or the other. Are there current lists, sites dedicated to this? If not what are you guys thoughts?
It’s tough to know where to stand when it comes to AI. I don’t think anybody here is hoping that the fediverse be overrun with LLMs and bring about the dead internet theory.
A large part of why people join the fediverse (and the threadiverse, too) is to get away from corporatization, and AI is definitely part of that too.
I just don’t think we need to go to extremes to ban AI-generated content, but more importantly, this is not a decision that can be made globally. It must be done (and enforced, however we do that) instance by instance.
I think that it is usefull to ban pure AI generated content created as main information, but allow as contrasted additional information or summary when correct with sources, which can be usefull in scientific documents or long texts. As said before, AI is here and is to us to use it (or not) as tool and with common sense.
Not federating with meta was a choice that could be made by the admins, just changing a setting in the instance. Slop can be posted to any instance by anyone with an account. If an admin decided to sign an anti-AI pact there’s no way they could realistically abide / enforce it.
Not trying to use AI as a moderation tool is definitely up to the admins & mods.
As for a content policy, it could work just the same as any other. Instances have rules against all sorts of content whether it’s bigotry, espousal of certain ideologies, abuse, and so on. User posts these things, they get banned by the instance. I don’t see how this is different in a technical sense.
They could make a rule saying:
First hand posting of slop is not allowed. Second hand posting is allowed as long as it is sufficiently relevant.
The Threads issue was not polarizing at all, almost everyone here was clearly on the side that Meta can fuck right off
AI on the other hand does have serious arguments on both sides. What would the resulting decisions even be?
It’s totally possible that in your corner of the fediverse it wasn’t controversial to defederate Meta/Threads, but it definitely wasn’t a consensus position overall.
For example, the largest Mastodon instance didn’t defederate, and a lot of prominent voices on the rest of the microblogging fedi argued against defederating. I was pretty shocked about it tbh!
You’re going to have a pretty tough time with DB0. I don’t think any of us want AI bots posting fake posts or lazy slop bullshit, but many of us just see LLMs as a tool. It’s not the technology’s fault that a bunch of rich assholes want to drive the economy to the ground over it.
Yeah the criticism tends to go to extremes here sometimes. I remember one open source project being criticized just because some AI assisted commits were added and people were saying that it should be forked and shit just because of that.
I’m definitely very against the way companies try to shove it down our throats and make use of it in ridiculous ways and destroy the environment by putting no limits to its use, but the problem as usual is the socioeconomic system behind the tool and not the tool itself.
