Enshittification protests beget more enshittification
Like many others, I am frustrated by corporations that have ingested immense amounts of user generated content and are using/selling it to train LLMs1. However, deleting the content now is counter productive, let’s protest more effectively by building a better web.
I’m seeing many influential people on the Fediverse urging others to go register their displeasure by deleting the knowledge they contributed via answers and comments. This is especially puzzling in the case of the current Stack Overflow and OpenAI partnership announcement that has caused blowback on Mastodon2 because these folks are tech savvy and should understand that deleting their contribution from showing up on the front-end does not delete the data. It’s a bit crazy making because I feel like I’m missing something here, am I?
Please don’t advise people to delete their existing answers. Not contributing new answers and not logging in/deleting your account are great ways to register protest but deleting data is self-defeating. These companies already have the data backed up and will use it anyway, deleting answers only hurts humans who are searching for the answers through traditional searches. Removing the information by deleting it or issuing GDPR requests only locks up the knowledge and makes it exclusive to the “AI”.
