I disagree with the base premise that being opt out needs to be a right. That implies that having data be harvested for companies to make profits should be the default.
We should have the right to not have our data harvested by default. Requiring companies to have an opt in process with no coercion or other methods of making people feel obligated to opt in is our right.
being opt out needs to be a right. That implies that having data be harvested for companies to make profits should be the default.
As the years have passed, it has become the acceptable consensus for all of your personal information, thoughts, and opinions, to become freely available to anyone, at anytime, for any reason in order for companies to profit from it.
People keep believing this is normal and companies keep taking more. Unless everyone is willing to stand firm and say enough, I only see it declining further, unfortunately.
I’m there with you, and I’d join in a protest to get it.
We should have the right to not have our data harvested by default.
I would maybe not go quite that far but at the very least this should apply to commercial interests and living people.
I think there are some causes where it should be acceptable to have your data usable by default, e.g. statistical analysis of health threats (think those studies about the danger of living near a coal power plant or similar things).
That implies that having data be harvested for companies to make profits should be the default.
I sure hope those studies are not being done by for profit companies!
I disagree. Yes, there are benefits to a lot of invasions of privacy, but that doesn’t make it okay. If an entity wants my information, they can ask me for it.
One potential exception is for dead people, I think it makes sense for a of information to be released on death and preventing that should be opt in by the estate/survivors, depending on the will.
But they literally can’t ask you for it if it is about high volumes of data that only become useful if you have all or close to all of it like statistical analysis of rare events. It would be prohibitively expensive if you had to ask hundreds of thousands of people just to figure out that there is an increase in e.g. cancer or some lung disease near coal power plants.
They don’t need most of the date, they need a statistically significant sample to have a high confidence in the result. And that’s a small percentage of the total population.
And you could have something on file where you opt in to such things, just like you can opt in to being an organ donor. Maybe make it opt out if numbers are important. But it cannot be publicly available without a way to say no.
Exactly. The focus should be on data privacy, not on what technologies a service chooses to use.
We should have the right to not have our data harvested by default.
How would that benefit the average person?
Send me your name, birthdate, web browsing history, online spending history, real time location, and a list of people you know and I will explain it to you.
I doubt we’ll ever be offered a real opt-out option.
Instead I’m encouraged by the development of poison pills for the AI that are non-consensually harvesting human art (Glaze and Nightshade) and music (HarmonyCloak).
But do Glaze, Nightshade, and HarmonyCloak really work to prevent that information from being used? Because at first, it may be effective. But then they’ll find ways around those barriers, and that software will have to be updated, but only the one with the most money will win.
AI is a venture capital money pit, and they are struggling to monetize before the hype dies out.
If the poison pills work as intended, investors will stop investing “creative” AI when the new models stop getting better (and sometimes get worse) because they’re running out of clean content to steal.
AI has been around for many years, dating back to the 1960s. It’s had its AI winters and AI summers, but now it seems we’re in an AI spring.
But the amount of poisoned data is minuscule compared to the data that isn’t poisoned. As for data, what data are we referring to: everything in general or just data that a human can understand?
Remind me in 3 days.
Although poison pills are only so effective since it’s a cat and mouse game, and they only really work for a specific version of a model, with other models working around it.
Is it really though? I haven’t touched it since the very early days of slop ai. That was before I learned of how awful it is to real people
They don’t mean directly, i guarantee that companies, service providers, etc that you are with do indeed use Ai. That’s what I took the headline to mean. Some facet of everyone’s life uses Ai now
If AI is going to be crammed down our throats can we at least be able to hold it (aka the companies pushing it) liable for providing blatantly false information? At least then they’d have incentive to provide accurate information instead of just authoritative information.
As much as you can hold a computer manufacturer responsible for buggy software.
I very much understand wanting to have a say against our data being freely harvested for AI training. But this article’s call for a general opt-out of interacting with AI seems a bit regressive. Many aspects of this and other discussions about the “AI revolution” remind me about the Mitchell and Web skit on the start of the bronze age: https://youtu.be/nyu4u3VZYaQ
If there was an ai to detect ai would you use it?
Yes. That is actually an ideal function of ethical AI. I’m not against AI in regards to things that is is actually beneficial towards and where it can be used as a tool for understanding, I just don’t like it being used as a thief’s tool pretending to be a paintbrush or a typewriter. There are good and ethical uses for AI, art is not one of them.
AI is everywhere now, but having the choice to opt out matters. Sometimes, using tools lik Instant Ink isn’t about AI it’s just about saving time and making printing easier.
