Also your dignity and sense of purpose, I would add. I think the consequences of these shenanigans are going to be way more wide reaching than what we can currently comprehend. I pray for us all.

This IMO is the real importance of deepseek, GLM, and other free weight models. You might not have the hardware to run something decent locally, but at least with hundreds of API providers they can all compete on whether they are reading the logs.

It’s incredible really that the big providers are hoovering up all the plain text of people describing every situation they find themselves in, at depth, not in googles wildest dreams did they have such detailed dossiers on every individua.

The population metrics of how people were thinking (to what propaganda are they most susceptible to?)

to control people you must have feedback on how effective your campaigning is, how many minds are you changing?

So opting out of OpenAI/Anthropic/Zuckerbucks’ data mining is all well and good but it is a population level problem of centralized data collection by the state, lest we forget room 641A!

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If only we had a technology that could classify the topic, tone, and sophistication of arbitrary natural-language conversations; you know, to sort the proofs from the furries…

Training the LLM on logs might make little sense, but that doesn't mean the LLM can't get access to those logs outside of training. Companies have been gobbling up your data left and right, why wouldn't these companies do the same and then feed it to their LLM for a specific use case?

I think Anthropic et al. would have very little difficulty determining exactly who their users are, so it would probably be trivial to focus any training of this sort on individuals known to be doing cutting edge research, as well as their colleagues, postdocs, grad students etc. Not saying it is happening, but they certainly have the capacity to make a system to skip all the prompts they don’t care about and leave just the prompts they do care about.

Are you kidding? It's clear that frontier labs are desperate to ingest any human text they can find. They're paying people to find rare books and digitize them. They're vacuuming up Reddit threads. And in their own products, they make it difficult to turn off conversation logging unless you pay.

I have zero difficulty accepting that they're using conversation logs, probably anonymized and then chopped so that they can claim it's no longer user data and that it can't be tracked back to a specific chat. And yes, sometimes, a single piece of text is enough to move the needle, especially when it comes to some exotic, sparse topics.

Your final paragraph refers to something that's about to be published on the web. So the AI will train on it anyway.

The goal of NSF grants aren't really to fund research into things that cure cancer, they're primarily to fund the education pipeline needed to train young scientists. When those students graduate, they tend to get jobs in the industry where they can advance commercial solutions that often have significant societal benefit.

AI saves data in its network from which it can be (partially) recovered. It's lossy compression at its core. So I think you are the one who got it wrong, confusing people's work and ideas with the output of an LLM.

They will not say who they stole it from, and more importantly they will not pay them. Do you seriously think that scientists should work unpaid?