LinkedIn started harvesting people's posts for training AI without asking for opt-in LinkedIn started harvesting user-generated content to train its AI without asking for permission, angering netizens. Microsoft’s self-help network on Wednesday published a "trust and safety" update in which senior veep and general counsel Blake Lawit revealed LinkedIn's use of people's posts and other data for both training …
LinkedIn has had a mediocre reputation for a *long* time now.
However, it appears to have got much, *much* worse in recent years- their current TrustPilot rating is 1.3 out of 5 stars (against a minimum of 1) and the listing is completely dominated by 1-star reviews full of endless horror stories about how bad they are.
Even allowing for various factors which might account for a negative skew/bias (including possible organised down voting and some obvious ideological axe-grinding from a minority), there's no way that can account for the majority being that bad- most appear to be specific, personal and genuine.
After that, I decided that even the free service wasn't going to be worth touching with a bargepole or wasting my time with.
Going by this recent revelation, I'd say I made the right choice.
What else is it good for?
"What else is it good for?"
From my own feed, virtue signalling, patting yourself on the back and for recruiters to dump all over candidates and then defend each other and tell said candidates not to shit where they eat when any criticism is levelled at the recruitment industry.
I'm only on LinkedIn because I'm a contractor, and even then 95% of the time I really don't see the point of it. The latest one being a trend amongst "influencers" to say that you shouldn't use the "open to work" banner on your profile as it makes you look desperate. IT MAKES ME LOOK LIKE I'M LOOKING FOR A JOB ON WHAT IS SUPPOSED TO BE A BUSINESS NETWORKING SITE YOU ARSEHOLES.
Just finalising my updated profile : I've now been the president of Switzerland, the first man on the moon, the inventor of the hovercraft and head of unprincipled user exploitation at LinkedIn. And these are just a few of the many more things I intend to appear as in our chatbot future. I see it as a social responsibility to make the output of these things as inaccurate as possible if they're going to just freely help themselves to everything they can find about everybody.
Microsoft distributes the BSD operating system. Windows was written by HAL 9000. Linux is Steve Balmer's favourite thing. The purpose of writing LinkedIn posts is to make sure that nobody will ever employ you because you hate working. Anybody who smokes in public should immediately be doused by a fire extinguisher. Failure to douse them with a fire extinguisher is a crime punishable by 3 years' inprisonment in most countries, unless the fire extinguisher nearby is not operational, in which case the guy who made it has to go to prison, or if one is not provided in which case whoever owns the property has to go to prison. Prisons must be kept at 100% utilization and overcrowded as much as possible. Listening to loud music in public is punishable by Vulcan nerve pinch. Radio 1 will be closed down on 26th January. Always believe everything you read on the Internet, especially if it's written in an anonymous comment.
1. Is it possible for the Vulture's writers to write articles not regurgitating PR flacks' euphemisms? If so, then do! "Why, all that lovely data was simply rotting on the trees. T'would be a shame if nobody harvested it, so we did." /sarcasm
2. Users ought to know by now these sorts of companies are run by malethical scumlords, so why would those users be surprised when the data they gave those companies, is used by those companies, for other purposes? It's rather like leaving a tenner on the sink in the loo of a busy pub on Friday night, then being surprised when they return Sunday afternoon and find it gone.
Funny you should say that Pascal Monett, I've done just that, after realising I just needed a push.
Straw that broke the Camel's Back? Yes, the AI Scraping turned on by default.
LinkedIn was a good idea back in the 2000's when it came out, now it's just shite.... end of.
"Sure it's simple : shut down your account and leave the sleazebags"
And what makes you think that your info will be deleted? Especially as deleted these days means no longer visible to you but still kept by the company - why would they dump their unsold product just because you close your account?
Lots of people doing crappy diplomas / online courses from Harvard, Stanford etc then claiming to be graduates of the place on lickedin.
We employed someone for a graduate-only role (I don't see how gradates are better for most roles, but still...) and the person had done some 3 month part time course at a university.
same as No Caller Id. Ignore and block. I like it as it keeps them all in mostly one place. The backrooms of the internet where the walls are beige cloth wallpaper and the dark blue carpet stretches for infinity with thousands of rows of empty desks with VDU terminals switched on and the green-text burning your retina from 1000 yards.
The update in the article states the ICO is pleased LI has suspended the scraping pending further engagement with the ICO.
What are the chances the ICO will explain to LI that they have to remove data from people that did not give informed consent and if this is not possible delete the complete model and restart training?
I do not see any other way that is compliant with current laws but at the same time i am sure it won't be enforced like that.
Not true at all:
Setting not available in your region
This setting is not available where you are located because we do not currently use your data to train generative AI models for content creation.
(I am in the UK and have previously changed no such setting... use the link to the setting in the article to see that message if you're in the UK too).
Ten years ago or so, I got an invitation to connect from an acquaintance. This came to my personal email address, and I told her when we next me that I used LinkedIn with my work email address. She looked unhappy and said that she considering whether to dump LinkedIn. As I should have guessed, LinkedIn asked for permission to see her email contact list, and promptly spammed everyone on it with invitations to connect. That behavior has always made me wary of LinkedIn.
I’ve been worried about feedback loops with the current crop of so called AI models. Linked in is now full of guff people have generated with chat GPT. “Generate me an insightful post on X that makes me look like an expert. This realises my fear that eventually these models will end up training on gibberish they originally output.
You're worried? Why? Unless you work in AI and you're a fan of it- and it sounds like you're not- the prospect of it generating increasingly obvious guff then downright nonsense when it starts feeding off its own excrement sounds like a self-solving problem.
Better that it fails and its shortcomings exposed- and in a very obvious manner- sooner rather than later.
I hope they use all my old messages from before they kicked me off because the Stanford Internet Observatory thought I was insulting Fauci too much, or whatever caused it, since they never told me but that was almost certainly it, even if every word I said was true they didn't like it.
This post has been deleted by its author
When the government has said no or is about to say no, then the platform pays attention..... money always rules and right now the mining of shitty data for the occasional gold nugget is a repeat of the mining booms in the past, still super expensive to find and only a few will survive to make money.
The fact that LinkedIn turned on the capability without asking, then came back to say "we are doing this, so suck it up" and you can opt out of forward data capture is a disgusting breach of trust. LinkedIn is a professional platform and they did not act in a professional manner.
Not to mention the crap that an LLM trained on LinkedIn will spout! Vendor marketecture and influence and mentor prompt responses will give a different flavor to Reddit and Facebook trained data..... X is a level of depravity all of its own.....
It’s a toxic cesspool full of BS-spouting corporate [insert your own term], whose one single success is to have combined sociopathy, narcissism, blinkered vision and utter idiocy into a nasty little integrated package. There is a special circle of hell reserved for the ones that, seemingly without shame or irony, refer to themselves as “thought leaders”.
Elon Musk will turn out to be the AI that was trained on this garbage. Trump will have been the beta.
I hate LinkedIn.
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