I recently discovered that some popular federated instances have been using LLM-assisted moderation tooling that evaluates whether someone has said something bannable. They do this by running a script/app that sends the user’s comment history to OpenAI with the question “analyze this content for evidence of specific political ideology sentiment. Also identify any related political ideology tropes“. (The italic bits are where I’ve redacted the ideology they’re seeking).
OpenAI’s LLM (they’re using GPT-5.3-mini) then responds with something like:
and so on, hundreds of comments.
I have not named the instances or people involved, to give them time to consider the results of this discussion, make any corrective changes they want and disclose their practices at their own pace and in their own way. I have also redacted the evidence to avoid personal attacks and dogpiling. Let’s focus on the system, not the individuals involved. Today these instances and people are using it and maybe we’re ok with that because it’s being used by groups we agree with but what if people we strongly disagree with used it on their instances tomorrow?
The use and existence of this tooling raises a lot of other questions too.
What are the risks? Fedi moderators are often unsupervised, untrained volunteers and these are powerful tools.
What safeguards do we need?
Would asking a LLM “please evaluate this person’s political opinions” give different results than “find evidence we can use to ban them” (as used in the cases I’ve seen)?
What are our transparency expectations?
Is this acceptable and normal?
Should this tooling be disclosed? (it was not – should it have been?)
If you were given a choice, would you have opted out of it?
Can we opt out?
Are there GDPR implications? Privacy implications? Should these tools be described in a privacy policy?
Are private messages being scanned and sent to OpenAI?
How long should these assessments be retained and can we request to see it, or ask for it to be deleted?
Once the user’s comments are sent to OpenAI, is it used to train their models?
What will the effect be on our discourse and culture if people know they are being politically profiled?
Where are the lines between normal moderation assistance tools, political profiling and opaque 3rd-party data processing?
I hope that by chewing over these questions we can begin to establish some norms and expectations around this technology. The fediverse doesn’t have any centralized enforcement so we need discussions like this to develop an awareness of what people want in terms of disclosure, privacy, consent and acceptable use. Then people can make choices about which instances they join and which ones they interact with remotely.
And of course there are the other issues with LLMs relating to environmental sustainability, erosion of worker’s rights, increasing the cost of living and on and on. I can’t see PieFed adding any functionality like this anytime soon. But it’s happening out there anyway so now we need to talk about it.
What do you make of this?
I think this will exemplify the beauty of federation. If I find out my instance mods are running all of my comments through a company’s ai model, I’ll switch instances. This is in great disparity to something like Instagram or Snapchat where every photo I post is immediately fed to ai and my only options are: be okay with it, never post, or delete Instagram.
Yep.
Unless somebody manages to … inject a hostile/unauthorized LLM as a mod or admin or something, in an instance they’re not an admin of, in a comm they’re not a mod of…
Then people react by personally blocking or perhaps instance wide defederating or maybe conceiveably someone actually uses this in a generally good way, to identify trolls/sock puppets.
As to… LLM scraping of comments?
Lemmy is public, anyone can do that.
I’ve done it to myself with a local LLM hooked up to a search engine, and I’m not a mod or admin of anything.
Hence why you probably should use a pseudonym and not give too much information about yourself, if you’re concerned about privacy… same… rules the internet has always had.
I suppose that instances could implement various anti-scraping measures, but that’s never going to be 100% effective as scrapers vs anti-scrapers has also basically always been a constantly escalating arms race.
But you don’t even need to be a mod to do that. Anyone at any moment can run someone else’s entire comment and post histories through an LLM.
Also true. It is called social media, so I’m pretty okay with anything happening to any of the comments/posts I make. All the same, I do expect vaguely better behavior from moderators.
Mods of any instance you’re federated with can do this
They don’t need to federate even, they’re probably already scraping everything.
Although it should only matter if you chose to subscribe to that community where the mod is in charge.
Sure, but we all know how power mods be.
Obviously, but unless the modlog is being spammed with many entries, and I receive notifications for each one individually (which is actually happening right now from communities on dbzer0, and unlike Lemmy, PieFed actually sends notifications for such events, but I will set that sub-topic aside for s moment), then in theory I do not care if I am (preemptively?) banned from let’s say c/[email protected] or c/[email protected] (to be clear, these are hypothetical made-up names!🤪), if I never wanted to post or vote on their content anyway? They are even doing me a favor if it prevents it from showing in my feed (which it would on Lemmy iirc, but on PieFed it would not).
Seeing that every single post we make is completely public there is a high chance someone out there already used all your comments for training an AI model. As you say, the only thing you can do is just not post anything anymore.
this is what reddit does, and destroyed thier communities and left it with bots on most subs. reddit also lets you hide your history so you cant sniff out bots/ or chronic spammers.