A machine learning librarian at Hugging Face just released a dataset composed of one million Bluesky posts, complete with when they were posted and who posted them, intended for machine learning research.

Daniel van Strien posted about the dataset on Bluesky on Tuesday:

“This dataset contains 1 million public posts collected from Bluesky Social’s firehose API, intended for machine learning research and experimentation with social media data,” the dataset description says. “Each post contains text content, metadata, and information about media attachments and reply relationships.”

The data isn’t anonymous. In the dataset, each post is listed alongside the users’ decentralized identifier, or DID; van Strien also made a search tool for finding users based on their DID and published it on Hugging Face. A quick skim through the first few hundred of the million posts shows people doing normal types of Bluesky posting—arguing about politics, talking about concerts, saying stuff like “The cat is gay” and “When’s the last time yall had Boston baked beans?”—but the dataset has also swept up a lot of adult content, too.

  • 👍Maximum Derek👍
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    6 months ago

    That’s why I always pepper all my social media posts with misinformation.

    BTW, did you know most convenience stores offer free ATMs to anyone who can haul them away? You don’t even need to ask.

  • foremanguy
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    586 months ago

    If you post something publicly, that thing will be used to train AI. Nevertheless the privacy speaks of the company.

    • Brumefey
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      196 months ago

      I don’t know why social media are used for training. It’s like the worst quality of data ever and it results to answers like « go kill youself » when prompted about something sad…

      • foremanguy
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        76 months ago

        They are used because they are “real life” (not really but you know) conversation example

        • @Pandemanium@lemm.ee
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          46 months ago

          But why do we need to recreate “real life?” Don’t we already do this relatively well in books, TV, and movies? People keep saying we won’t use AI to replace creative writing, but this (and propaganda, making bot conversations seem like real people) are the only use cases for this kind of data. LLMs don’t need to improve their conversation skills. What they really need is to stop hallucinating, and this kind of data won’t help with that.

    • Aeri
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      26 months ago

      Be super fucking foul and un advertiser friendly to make it less useful, OUTLAW COUNTRY

    • @ApatheticCactus@lemmy.world
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      26 months ago

      Yes, it absolutely will. That’s why I fragrance the pandas. Just a little here and there so that some Howard will need to sort through it. The lime really comes through clearly.

  • @Mushroomm@sh.itjust.works
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    376 months ago

    I mean isn’t this what we want? The data is Public. It’s already being done behind closed doors. I’d rather this transparency. Especially because there’s such a large % of the population tuned out to how large companies with 8-10 figure r&d departments focused on marketing psychology manage to control them.

    Even as aware as I think I am I’m certain there are 10s of thousands of strategies being employed that take advantage of my “immunity”. At least with FOSS and public records steming from that, the average Joe gets a peak behind the curtain and sees what is possible.

    I had a conversation recently about mcdonalds app surge pricing and they never heard about surge pricing which is totally fine but they fought me on the premise “there’s no way they can do that” on technical feasibility to just “no one would do that”. I’m not sure what they were defending but I digress. My biphenton has kicked in and I should stop typing right n

    • wuphysics87
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      16 months ago

      It depends on who you mean by “we”. I don’t think the “we”, as in the users of Bluesky would want their posts to be used this way. Yes it’s transparent and accessible, but only to the technically inclined who can make use of it.

      I wonder how much more The Matrix references become relevant. We become food for the machines whether they tell us so or not.

    • @iii@mander.xyz
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      16 months ago

      I wonder if discord sells it’s messages. There the public character isn’t as clear, but it’s still a centralized platform.

      • @Mandy@sh.itjust.works
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        36 months ago

        I’m pretty sure they don’t and aren’t
        But always assume they do, since I count them as social media

    • @Stovetop@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      There are definitely bots mining fediverse content as well. When the Reddit exodus was ongoing, there were entire Lemmy instances with no users but bots. Not posting or reposting, just…watching and waiting, I guess.

      Not that it’s of any consolation, just better to assume that nowhere is safe from being mined for AI training.

      • recursive_recursion they/them
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        66 months ago

        Not that it’s of any consolation, just better to assume that nowhere is safe from being mined for AI training.

        honestly that’s totally fair

      • @Artyom@lemm.ee
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        56 months ago

        The fediverse is an elegant solution. How do you stop people from monetizing your post history? You give it away for free.

        • @Stovetop@lemmy.world
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          16 months ago

          I think the worry is that they are capable of doing to Lemmy what they did to Reddit: regurgitating content or producing astroturfed content while appearing like authentic users.

    • @GhostlyPixel@lemmy.world
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      66 months ago

      Legality hasn’t stopped AI training in the past, I’d say they beg forgiveness instead of ask for permission, but they don’t even do that lol

  • @gcheliotis@lemmy.world
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    116 months ago

    The real question here is why the researcher “librarian” didn’t even attempt to anonymize the dataset before making it available. Full anonymization isn’t a trivial task, but at least removing unique identifiers or replacing them with randomly generated ones would be good practice.

    • paraphrand
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      6 months ago

      I keep noticing situations on social media and wikis were the only way I can frame it now is that it’s just data entry for AI models.

      • @CrowAirbrush@lemmy.world
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        16 months ago

        Modern day life over here requires the internet, our government has taken away options that use paper and replaced it with websites. Same goes for banks.