this post was submitted on 08 Aug 2023
1024 points (97.8% liked)

Privacy

29869 readers
1638 users here now

A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.

Some Rules

Related communities

Chat rooms

much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)

founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
 

Source: https://front-end.social/@fox/110846484782705013

Text in the screenshot from Grammarly says:

We develop data sets to train our algorithms so that we can improve the services we provide to customers like you. We have devoted significant time and resources to developing methods to ensure that these data sets are anonymized and de-identified.

To develop these data sets, we sample snippets of text at random, disassociate them from a user's account, and then use a variety of different methods to strip the text of identifying information (such as identifiers, contact details, addresses, etc.). Only then do we use the snippets to train our algorithms-and the original text is deleted. In other words, we don't store any text in a manner that can be associated with your account or used to identify you or anyone else.

We currently offer a feature that permits customers to opt out of this use for Grammarly Business teams of 500 users or more. Please let me know if you might be interested in a license of this size, and I'II forward your request to the corresponding team.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 23 points 11 months ago (15 children)

Even as someone who declines all cookies where possible on every site, I have to ask. How do you think they are going to be able to improve their language based services without using language learning models or other algorithmic evaluation of user data?

I get that the combo of AI and privacy have huge consequences, and that grammarly's opt-out limits are genuinely shit. But it seems like everyone is so scared of the concept of AI that we're harming research on tools that can help us while the tools which hurt us are developed with no consequence, because they don't bother with any transparency or announcement.

Not that I'm any fan of grammarly, I don't use it. I think that might be self-evident though.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 11 months ago (14 children)

Framing this solely as fear is extremely disingenuous. Speaking only for myself: I'm not against the development of AI or LLMs in general. I'm against the trained models being used for profit with no credit or cut given to the humans who trained it, willing or unwilling.

It's not even a matter of "if you aren't the paying customer, you're the product" - massive swaths of text used to train AIs were scraped without permission from sources whose platforms never sought to profit from users' submissions, like AO3. Until this is righted (which is likely never, I admit, because the LLM owners have no incentive whatsoever to change this behavior), I refuse to work with any site that intends to use my work to train LLMs.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I'm against the trained models being used for profit with no credit or cut given to the humans who trained it.

Sorry mate, hell's gonna get cold before this happens. We're talking about the biggest moth******ers on earth since always. Do you think Meta/[insert big tech company name here] will start to behave all of the sudden? These people literally KILL people everyday for a profit (looking at you Instagram).

The only way to get something from these scumbags is fining them something like 100k per hour, until they start respecting people's privacy

[–] [email protected] 7 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

I did already say I don't expect this to ever change, so "sorry mate," but you're not exactly telling me anything I don't know here.

But I suspect this was a knee-jerk rant typed before bothering to read past what you quoted. Oh well. Good thing I can still stand against something even if I don't expect it to change much.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Sorry if it sounded rude (and yeah, it was kind of a rant, sorry). What I'm trying to say is: these people do much worse things and don't bother to say "sorry" publicly. The only way to make them behave is to fine them by a huge amount, just like Norway did.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago

Well, we can agree on that! Make paying contributors the cheaper option.

I won't hold my breath though. :')

load more comments (12 replies)
load more comments (12 replies)