IMGoph

Question for tech folks (@robpegoraro, @donw, @fedward, @tbridge, @tjl): is actually deleting all one’s old tweets worth doing to keep Musk’s company from being able to do whatever AI training that was announced to be taking place later this month?

I assume they already have all this stuff scraped and stored somewhere, so deleting from public view probably isn’t removing this stuff from the world entirely.

Sep 4, 2023 at 12:16pmWeb
Show threadTom LeeSep 4, 2023

@IMGoph @robpegoraro @donw @fedward @tbridge eh I think the case for deleting is to safeguard against the possibility that you receive an unexpected MacArthur grant but quickly have your old intemperate tweets discovered and are engulfed in scandal. I don’t bother doing this but probably should

Otoh I am not bothered by being part of an AI training dataset so caveat lector

Show threadDon WhitesideSep 4, 2023
@IMGoph @robpegoraro @fedward @tbridge @tjl You’re not wrong, recent legal brouhahas have revealed they do persist deletes stuff behind the scenes. I guess the question is whether they’ll bother/have their shit together enough to actually use anything beyond the public & current materials. If this is a thing you care enough to take the effort to do it’s probably still worth it.
Show threadRob PegoraroSep 4, 2023
@IMGoph @donw @fedward @tbridge @tjl My use of Twitter as a public notebook means things would have to be extremely dire for me to erase that record, and the odds of an AI scraping something that's already public don't get close to that.
Show threadKeith IveySep 4, 2023
@robpegoraro @IMGoph @donw @fedward @tbridge @tjl Deleting is only useful to prevent LLM training if you believe both (1) the content hasn't already been used for training and (2) Musk's ethics would keep him from using it for training after you'd deleted it.
Show threadfedward Sep 4, 2023
@kcivey @robpegoraro @IMGoph @donw @tbridge @tjl Keith said it better than I could. The better reason to delete is to remove the attack surface for people who seek to use your past against you, as Tom pointed out. And there’s a tiny bonus of maybe encouraging laggards to exit the platform, but if they haven’t done that by now it seems unlikely they’d be convinced by one more person wiping their archive.
Show threadIMGophSep 5, 2023

@fedward @robpegoraro @donw @kcivey @tjl @tbridge thank you, everyone, for the responses, I truly appreciate it!

I like the idea that maybe I would convince one more person to stop using the platform, but my ego certainly doesn't need the boost.

The entire ADL thing that has come out in the past 24 hours certainly adds another point to the "even maintaining any kind of relationship to that place is supporting the worst of humanity," and I realize it's hard to avoid that entirely in life. But…

Show threadDon WhitesideSep 5, 2023
@IMGoph @fedward @robpegoraro @kcivey @tjl @tbridge For whatever it’s worth, I opted last year to nuke anything I’d posted that didn’t have 5-10 RTs or faves. An entirely lower-torso-extracted number with the idea that it split the difference on participating in supporting a loathsome platform/people vs something that actual people had gotten some value from. I have no idea if that makes any sense but mostly it was so I could make a decision and leave it in the past.