#enshittification

So, in Australia, there's no easy way to opt out of #MetaAI's new #enshittification move of training its #AI on all your words and images, a policy which takes effect from 26th June.

Or is there?

I asked Meta AI's chat bot how to do this, and here's how the conversation went:

> Tell me how to opt out of my data being used to train AI

META AI RESPONSE:

To opt out of your data being used to train AI, you can submit a request through the Meta Privacy Center. Here's how:

1. Go to (link unavailable)
2. Click on "Settings" (icon) in the top right corner
3. Click on "Meta's use of AI and machine learning"
4. Scroll down to "Control how your data is used to improve Meta's products and services"
5. Select "Submit a request" under "Use of data for AI and machine learning"
6. Fill out the form with your name, email address, and a brief description of your request (e.g., "Opt out of AI training data usage")
7. Submit the form

Alternatively, you can also send a request via email to mailto:privacy@meta.com with the subject "Opt out of AI training data usage" and include your name and email address.

Please note that you may need to verify your identity to process the request. Meta will review your request and respond to your email address with a decision.

Let me know if you have any further questions or concerns!

> How long does it take Meta to review my request and to respond?

META AI RESPONSE:

Meta aims to review and respond to privacy requests, including opt-out requests for AI training data usage, within a reasonable time frame, typically:

- 30 days from the date of receipt for requests made through the Privacy Center
- 30 days from the date of verification (if required) for requests made via email

Please note that the review process may take longer if:

- The request is complex or requires additional information
- Meta needs to verify your identity or confirm your request
- There are technical issues or high volumes of requests

If you have submitted a request, you can expect an email response from Meta once your request has been reviewed and processed. If you have any concerns or questions, feel free to ask!

---

I have sent the email to privacy@meta.com with the appropriate subject line, requesting to be opted out of training.

I'll let y'all know how the request goes.

I mean, if their own #chatbot tells you how to opt out, it must be true, right?!

More:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-06-10/instagram-facebook-train-meta-ai-tools-no-opt-out-australia/103958308?utm_source=mastodon

(I am adding utm_source=mastodon to links I post so that Mastodon shows up as the source, to encourage folks like the ABC to get on to #Mastodon)

Like many other technologists, I gave my time and expertise for free to #StackOverflow because the content was licensed CC-BY-SA - meaning that it was a public good. It brought me joy to help people figure out why their #ASR code wasn't working, or assist with a #CUDA bug.

Now that a deal has been struck with #OpenAI to scrape all the questions and answers in Stack Overflow, to train #GenerativeAI models, like #LLMs, without attribution to authors (as required under the CC-BY-SA license under which Stack Overflow content is licensed), to be sold back to us (the SA clause requires derivative works to be shared under the same license), I have issued a Data Deletion request to Stack Overflow to disassociate my username from my Stack Overflow username, and am closing my account, just like I did with Reddit, Inc.

https://policies.stackoverflow.co/data-request/

The data I helped create is going to be bundled in an #LLM and sold back to me.

In a single move, Stack Overflow has alienated its community - which is also its main source of competitive advantage, in exchange for token lucre.

Stack Exchange, Stack Overflow's former instantiation, used to fulfill a psychological contract - help others out when you can, for the expectation that others may in turn assist you in the future. Now it's not an exchange, it's #enshittification.

Programmers now join artists and copywriters, whose works have been snaffled up to create #GenAI solutions.

The silver lining I see is that once OpenAI creates LLMs that generate code - like Microsoft has done with Copilot on GitHub - where will they go to get help with the bugs that the generative AI models introduce, particularly, given the recent GitClear report, of the "downward pressure on code quality" caused by these tools?

While this is just one more example of #enshittification, it's also a salient lesson for #DevRel folks - if your community is your source of advantage, don't upset them.

offf, this story about how Google made google search into a pile of seagull shit hits me hard:

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/

Around the time of this story, I was living through a similar situation in my work life (on a much smaller scope, of course, WordPress.com first, Tumblr later).

Back in 2019, working on WordPress, I started finding myself, almost weekly, arguing against people who wanted to take the product we were working at and made it worse if that mean they could squeeze 0.1% more revenue from it

The 0.1% figure is not even a random number: I remember this speciffic A/B test on WordPress.com that was declared a success and shipped to 100% of the users because it increased the free-to-paid conversion by 0.1%. Soon after it was released, I found out that as a side effect, it increased the churn of free users by 20 something %,so I called for an urgent rollback and removal of the change. So I was promptly explained that we didn't care about free-users churn, because finance had calculated the average long-term value of the free users to be something like $2 per year, and the increase in conversion was bigger than what we could get from them.

Everything became about growth hacking. Everything became thinly-veiled dark patterns. In our private dev slack channels, we joked that since it was impossible to make it smaller or less conspicuous, the next thing the growth team was going to ask us to do was to make the 'free plan' button flee away from the mouse pointer when the user tried to click it. We kept making our product worse, we kept consciously crippling the cheaper versions so we could force people to move to the more expensive options.

Back then I was the lead of one of the two dev divisions working on WordPress.com, so my job was mainly to discuss what we were going to be doing, when and how. And I was getting drained by a constant state of fight against a constant wave of shit they wanted us to build. So much than by the end of 2020, the CEO quietly told me to follow the growth team plans and shut up or step down.

So I requested to move to tumblr, because I thought the pastures were greener over there. But it was all the same: Adding login walls to what we were pretending to be "the last bastion of the free internet", cramping in embarrasingly obvious money-making schemes disguised as features, and making them silently opt-out instead of opt-in so the less people the possible would deactivate them, having to fend off the pressure from the CEO to make everything algorithmic timelines because, you know, tiktok makes a lot of money and why aren't we, etc etc.

I found myself in a place where building something good that people enjoy using was no longer a priority, but tricking people into generating more money for the company was. And when I looked around me, I could see that happening everywhere else, not only in my company. Experiencing the start of the enshittification years from inside wasn't easy.

And, as in the article, the people who decided to turn the shit-metter up to 200%, have a name, in every case. And these people, no matter if they are called Sundar and Prabhakar or Matt and Mark, are destroying the internet. These people are milllionaires, or billionaries, and are destroying our shared, common spaces to squeeze some extra cash from us.

That's why the fediverse and its principles are important. Because that's how we take back internet from their dirty hands. That's how we make internet resilient against them. That's how we build the commons.