Considering a Change

P

Politburo

Administrator
Comrades,

In the past, it was the policy of the Politburo that the board is readable by anyone. It says so in the FAQ. Having a login gave you extras -- search, posting, the Jeebus board, RSS (whatever that is), messages, and so on -- but it was not required.

Nowadays, AI bots are constantly scavenging the internet for new texts. The "Members Online" panel shows hundreds of them, at all hours of the day and night. This feels more invasive than the search engine spiders of days gone by.

The question for you is: Do you care?

We had no protections in the old place; but here we have the option to lock-down the forum... logged-in members only. But perhaps there are comrades who prefer to lurk, or who use their phones casually and have a tablet that is logged in. We would rather not slam the window shut on fellow travelers.

We will briefly entertain your thoughts, feedback, gossip, and secrets.

-P.
 
I hadn't noticed. Now that I know, I find it annoying too. Ultimately, though, what's the harm? Unless a specific harm is argued, rather than privacy for its own sake, I vote for I don't care.
 
Under the rubric that "Even paranoids have enemies," I am generally opposed to letting AI bots scan our site, and then regurgitate it somewhere else.
 
Complete Luddite here . . .

“Nowadays, AI bots are constantly scavenging the internet for new texts. The "Members Online" panel shows hundreds of them, at all hours of the day and night.”

What does this actually mean? What are new texts? I thought the members on line panel showed who was viewing; I’ve never seen it with hundreds of viewers - what am I missing?
 
Florida Jim said:
Complete Luddite here . . .

“Nowadays, AI bots are constantly scavenging the internet for new texts. The "Members Online" panel shows hundreds of them, at all hours of the day and night.”

What does this actually mean? What are new texts? I thought the members on line panel showed who was viewing; I’ve never seen it with hundreds of viewers - what am I missing?
Click to expand...
Click on Members, then click on Current Visitors. You'll see a huge list of "Guests." The new texts are not only available to us, only to the bots' readers.
 
Florida Jim said:
What is “new texts?”
Click to expand...
Jim, I'll try.

Using ChatGPT as an example, the previous version (3.5) read about 300 billion words during its training cycle. That is a lot of words. (For comparison... the Encyclopedia Britannica is 44 million words; the US Tax Code, with advisories, is about 15 million words; neither the bible nor Shakespeare cracks 1 million words.)

In order to keep growing, it has to keep finding new things to read. New texts. We humans are their mules: we drag words out of our unconscious and it gobbles them up to tweak its interior settings.
 
Okay.
What we write is data for an AI network somewhere. Training, as you say. And little by little (or a billion words here or there) it learns. Sorta.
If I’m close let me know. If not, I’ll wonder in the garden for a while . . .
But to Pete’s point - how do we know if it’s broke or not? It sounds like we have no idea where this leads; and even if we do, what comes next.
I doubt wine notes will enable “Skynet,” But I’m not sure it won’t.
So your concern is well taken.
And maybe we should think a little more about this - your instincts maybe better than you know.
 
I think another concern for a forum like this is that the jocular nature of the posts become public record. But it's probably too late to do anything about that, given the ubiquity of internet info. And I agree that (human) lurkers are valuable.

Still, I've always appreciated that this forum doesn't get indexed by search and is not likely to emerge unless someone is looking for it. I believe that is still true?
 
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