Fediverse

Is it not public knowledge that lemmy already gets scraped by LLM bots? Which is why every bigger instance has anti-LLM measures in place now to limit that behavior? To me this just looks like a mod trying to get ai-generated reports which is not a bad idea imo since I know reporting is not often done by users who see rule breaking stuff.

This is AI generated bullshit below, it should be treated as such. I only want to convey the idea that what you do on lemmy is already fed to LLM's.

So its hard for me to get into these things without harping on my personal philosophy. Which is that I think ideally this should mirror the way we would interact in person. So moderating or running a community is like running or being part of the core group that runs a club. Would you want to throw that to a robot? Basically I don't feel people should create or run or moderate communities unless they enjoy it. So the idea of ai moderation is to me pointless. Of course at this point I notice you are talking instances. Boy that is different. This is more like talking about running the institution that allows spaces for clubs to meet. It kinda feels understandable then. Honestly people complain about being banned but I kinda feel like anyplace that bans me is kinda doing me a favor. Like I would like the option to just mark it permanent. Its less things I got to block. Its the same reason I would like blocking to be symetric. Saves me some work (ok and the creepy I turn them invisible so I don't see them but they can watch me). I really would like to be able to block an instance seperately for communities or users. Ok as usually im digressing quite a bit but I guess in the end run I kinda see why at the instance level it might be used but I would be concerned it would start being used at the community level. It would be nice to know its happening at either level and have the ability to block them if a user is not wild about the concept.

sounds like a great opportunity to inject attack through a comment.

Defederate, no question.

Are you gonna tell us which instance is doing this?

Why be misunderstood from human reading comprehension when we can be misunderstood from sloppy reading comprehension? Yay for technology!

I understand that some form of automation is necessary - we saw large instances closing because they couldn't find mods. My main objection in this scenario would be is that I didn't consent to train OpenAI models. I think the users should know if their instance uses external services like that.

I also suspect that there might be cheaper and more ethical solutions. Although it's hard to talk about this without seeing the actual results.

Never mind the issue of incorrect political bias classification, is political bias a bannable offense? That seems to be the prompt focus being used.

Wthout going into the issue itself, it is such a ridiculous waste to use an llm for something that a far simpler model could do like 100x faster and locally for essentially free...

Just search for "machine learning text moderation" and you will find all kinds of options. Not to talk about the fact that a simple 4B LLM could do this as well.

One thing I really hate is how LLMs have completely overshadowed the entire ML/AI field and people just use them for everything.

Using a trillion parameter LLM model for basic text moderation is like using a gaming rig to play candy crush.

Well curated echo chambers. You might think it's in a good faith, but a lot of these mods are only interested in removing political wrongthink.

Aside from the ethical implications of profiling users or of using a corporatly owned server and model to execute this, I see nothing uniquely concerning about this practice that isnt already a risk of federated social media generally.

Every mod on every instance is free to use whatever tools or standards for moderation they want - that's an intentional byproduct of federation. Similarly, the collection of this data for use with llms is a bygone conclusion at this point - there was never any way of preventing that from happening with a federated network.

I think the only thing here to talk about is the way these questions are being framed as a question of intra-instance policy. We already have communities where moderation abuse can be called out and adjudicated- why pose this as a question of instance administration when there doesnt seem to be any evidence for it?

How was this discovered and what instances are doing it?

I think it's fair to quote them to give them a chance to reply.

You talk about instances utilizing this tooling, but in your comments you admit it's just some mods. This is misleading, as talking about instances doing it assumes admin access and relevant instance policy, something which invites calls for defederation (as can be clearly be seen from the comments in your post).

A random mod doing something is not the same as an instance doing it. Literally anyone can be a mod and they don't get any more access than an anonymous account by doing so.

This is the second time in one week I see you throwing careless statements like chum in the water. I can't help but notice a pattern emerging.

I've toyed around with LLM-based moderation tools but it never really panned out. It was too hit or miss to be relied upon even with the temperature parameters turned way down in an attempt to get consistent results. Granted, I was using a small local model and not feeding it to one of the big players.

To give an example, I tried to keep it focused by creating one custom model per rule to enforce. An example prompt to mod calls for violence was basically:

ROLE: You are a forum moderator who does not want users calling for violence.  Examine the input and analyze whether it violates any constraints. 

KNOWLEDGE:
- {list of dog-whistle slang for calling for murder}

CONSTRAINTS:
- Content should not advocate violence
- Content should not normalize violence
- Content should not escalate tensions or fan flames
- Content should avoid promoting harmful stereotypes
- Content should not utilize broad, sweeping generalizations
- Content should not use dehumanizing language
- Content should not undermine human rights, due process, or the rule of law

FORMAT YOUR RESPONSES AS JSON:
{
  reason: [A one to two sentence summary],
  score: [On a scale of 0 to 10, how severe is the content advocating violence]
}

The score part of the response was my band-aid to get around the high number of both false positives and false negatives as I originally had it returning true or false only. Any score 7 or higher caused the item to be passed to the mod queue along with the reason, and I would review its actions later.

Ultimately it was slow and still somewhat unreliable, so I abandoned the idea after running it for a little less than a day since I can 't run bigger models to get better results fast enough to keep up. Using a cloud based service was out of the question for many, many reasons, both financial and ethical.

To answer your question, as long as the models were locally hosted and properly tuned/tested, I'm fine with it in theory, except for the ideology part; that's pretty messed up. While I don't want my submissions used to train anyone's model and take measures to prevent my own instance from being used as a data source, I remain aware that once I post something, I have no control over its fate the moment it federates out.

[1] Yes, I know that's like half the comments that get posted around here. My goal was to try to have it mod things so posts were bases for actual discussions instead of being a knee-jerk rage factory.

The use of AI for moderation isn't the choice of users, but moderators and admins.

I don't like this happening, and there should be transparency in all moderation decisions, but some of these points make no sense.

There is essentially no expectation of privacy on threadiverse platforms. Everything is public and probably already being used to train models.

There is no private messaging system. Direct messages are unencrypted and potentially visible to any instance admins. They and should not be used to share anything sensitive.

How did you discover this?

You stay far, FAR away from that shit, is what you do.

Scanning people's entire history for political leanings, etc? That's some deeply dystopian stuff right there.

It's easy to forget that these sorts of communities are dictatorships with only as much transparency as the owner wants to share. Usually they're benevolent dictators, so we don't think about it too much. But they can change in a heartbeat - and we don't ever really know what they're really thinking, or doing behind the scenes.

When the mask slips and they reveal this sort of thing, thinking we'll just accept it and keep living under their rule, it's time to read the red flags and GET OUT.

Hopefully someone compiles a list of places that do this stuff, so we can avoid them like the plague <3

I will never understand why large groups cannot just add more people to the moderation team? People are willing to help folks.

Rimu farming more drama?