- cross-posted to:
- wolnyinternet@szmer.info
- cross-posted to:
- wolnyinternet@szmer.info
Dropbox removed ability to opt your files out of AI training::undefined
Why does dropbox have the ability to see your files at all? That seems like a pretty bad security flaw in the first place.
Man wait til you hear about Gmail
Email is like the one critical part a lot of people miss when talking about taking control of your data. Imagine how much could be gleaned out of email history? Where you go, what you do, who you talk with, what you buy, what you rent, what media you consume, everything. If you dont have a lot of friends someone with your email account could pretty much just doppelganger you and go on as if nothings happened.
I HATE Dropbox.
I tried to use them recently and their service had some problems.
They have an option to “stream” files when you need them. The only problem is you need an internet connection to access them. I did not trust this kind of system and I actually need to access my files even without internet.
So there is a way to make the files available offline. Great! Problem solves. NOPE! They offer an option to have your files available offline, but they might remove the files and make them only available in the cloud if you local storage gets low.
That is really all they say about it and there is no option to turn this off. I was uncomfortable about their vagueness and my inability to disable this.
Within 24 hours of paying for their service I learned of this and they refused to refund my purchase.
PLEASE NEVER WORK WITH DROPBOX
I’ve used Dropbox since literally their first year of creation and I’ve never experienced a single one of these issues. I use it mostly as a portable library and all I need is 2 mins of any internet connection to download any book(s) I want to read to a local device. Mind you this is on their free plan, so I’ve never paid a cent to them either. Requires me to periodically transfer older books to another long term solution, but that is just a few mouse clicks. I’ve read hundreds if not more ebooks this way. Since I prefer .mobi (which I can even read IN dropbox if I want) I can upload straight to dropbox after converting from .epub.
I mean, it sounds frustrating, but your experience with them sounds extremely weird to me.
At least to me they’ve been the best cloud provider by far, for what it’s worth.
With that said, I don’t especially like that they’re doing this even though my specific content is mostly available in any number of places anyway, given that it’s literature.
Time for dropbox users to upload all kinds of crap for ai to “learn” from, all within tos of course.
I bet there are many kinds of ways to make your files poison the ai learning data. Its going to be fun for those ai guys to sort which files are probably safe and which are not. I think even if ONE user manages to slip something that corrupts the training data and its not noticed soon enough it might cause problems for them. Though someone who actually knows something about the subject might want to tell if i’m talking shit or not.
I’m not against ai in general, but if its trained with data that was obtained from unwilling people, like this, then its makers can fuck off.
It really depends on what the AI training is looking for. You can potentially poison an AI training model, but you’ll likely have to add enough data to be statistically relevant.
enough data as in many different people will have to upload one or two files that contain such data or you have to upload very large file that contains a lot of data that causes problems?
It’s honestly difficult for me to say because there are so many different ways to train AI. It really depends more on what the trainers configure to be a data point. Volume of files vs size of a single file aren’t as important as what the AI believes is a data point and how the data points are weighted.
Just as a simple example, a data point may be considered a row on a spreadsheet without regard for how that data was split up across files. So ten files with 5 rows each might have the same weight as one file with 50 rows. But there’s also a penalty concept in some models, so the trainer can set it so that data that all comes from one file may be penalized. Or the opposite could be true if data coming from the same file is deemed to be more important in some way.
In terms of how AIs make their decisions, that can also vary. But generally speaking, if 1000 pieces of data are used that are all similar in some way and one of them is somewhat different from the others, it is less likely that that one-off data will be used. It’s much more likely to have an effect If 100 of the 1000 pieces of data have that same information. There’s always the possibility of using that 1/1000 data, it’s just less likely to have a noticeable effect.
AIs build confidence in responses based on how much a concept is reinforced, so you’d have to know something about the training algorithm to be able to intentionally impact the results.
thank you, this was the kind of information i was hoping for