I recently discovered that some popular federated instances have been using LLM-assisted moderation tooling that evaluates whether someone has said something bannable. They do this by running a script/app that sends the user’s comment history to OpenAI with the question “analyze this content for evidence of specific political ideology sentiment. Also identify any related political ideology tropes“. (The italic bits are where I've redacted the ideology they're seeking).
OpenAI’s LLM (they’re using GPT-5.3-mini) then responds with something like:
and so on, hundreds of comments.
I have not named the instances or people involved, to give them time to consider the results of this discussion, make any corrective changes they want and disclose their practices at their own pace and in their own way. I have also redacted the evidence to avoid personal attacks and dogpiling. Let’s focus on the system, not the individuals involved. Today these instances and people are using it and maybe we’re ok with that because it’s being used by groups we agree with but what if people we strongly disagree with used it on their instances tomorrow?
The use and existence of this tooling raises a lot of other questions too.
What are the risks? Fedi moderators are often unsupervised, untrained volunteers and these are powerful tools.
What safeguards do we need?
Would asking a LLM “please evaluate this person’s political opinions” give different results than “find evidence we can use to ban them” (as used in the cases I’ve seen)?
What are our transparency expectations?
Is this acceptable and normal?
Should this tooling be disclosed? (it was not – should it have been?)
If you were given a choice, would you have opted out of it?
Can we opt out?
Are there GDPR implications? Privacy implications? Should these tools be described in a privacy policy?
Are private messages being scanned and sent to OpenAI?
How long should these assessments be retained and can we request to see it, or ask for it to be deleted?
Once the user’s comments are sent to OpenAI, is it used to train their models?
What will the effect be on our discourse and culture if people know they are being politically profiled?
Where are the lines between normal moderation assistance tools, political profiling and opaque 3rd-party data processing?
I hope that by chewing over these questions we can begin to establish some norms and expectations around this technology. The fediverse doesn’t have any centralized enforcement so we need discussions like this to develop an awareness of what people want in terms of disclosure, privacy, consent and acceptable use. Then people can make choices about which instances they join and which ones they interact with remotely.
And of course there are the other issues with LLMs relating to environmental sustainability, erosion of worker’s rights, increasing the cost of living and on and on. I can’t see PieFed adding any functionality like this anytime soon. But it’s happening out there anyway so now we need to talk about it.
What do you make of this?
While you are technically correct, you're implying that the "natural" state is a good enough state and nothing should be done about it.
My house has walls and a door; it doesn't mean anyone can do anything they want with this. Even if the windows are clear, you're not supposed to install a camera that watches my bedroom. Even if the door is open, you're not supposed to open. A a society it has been decided that we should respect each other, respect each other's privacy. We have created rules, some written down and some implicit, for how to interact with each other.
That is the point of OP. The "natural" state of whatever exists with the technical means, but that doesn't mean it's ok (or not ok): do we want to respect each other ? To take care of each other ? I very much want that, because the technical means should be only a means to an end, and in that end I want respect. The technical means, to me, must adapt to the end, not the other way around.
I mean with the fediverse your house becomes more like a library, more still, everyone gets a copy of what you have that they never have to return. You can ask people not to do x or y with the text but at the end of the day there is nothing you can do to enforce it, sans defederation of course. But the main sticking point, data being fed to a 3rd party LLM, is moot if we're talking about openAI which already crawls lemmy.world. Or in fact any website intended to be found via search engines (and then some). Anything you post on lemmy.world (the instance hosting this thread e.g.) will already be added to the chatGPT training set.