🖼 Mastodon updates terms to ban AI model training

Mastodon Updates Terms to Ban AI Model Training

Social networks are strengthening their terms of service to combat crawlers and bots that scrape website data for AI model training. Just a few days after Elon Musk's X updated its terms to explicitly ban AI model training, the decentralized social network Mastodon today also updated its own rules, likewise prohibiting any form of model training.

Mastodon said in an email sent to users: "We explicitly prohibit scraping user data for unauthorized purposes, such as archiving or large language model (LLM) training. We want to make it clear that using Mastodon user data on our instances to train LLMs is prohibited."

The new terms will apply to the social network starting July 1st, and its legal provisions prohibit any data extraction and the development of automated systems.

The terms state: "The use, activation, development, or distribution of any automated systems, including but not limited to any spiders, bots, cheating tools, crawlers, offline readers, or any data mining and similar data collection and extraction tools to access the instance is prohibited, except for the local cache of a standard search engine or internet browser, or for manual viewing and interacting with the content on the instance."

It should be noted that these terms only apply to the Mastodon.social server, which is just one instance in the fediverse (a distributed network). This means that if the terms of service of other servers do not explicitly prohibit it, crawlers may still extract data from these servers and use it to train AI models.

Other platforms including OpenAI, Reddit, and The Browser Company have also added similar terms to their rules to prevent other companies from training models.

In addition to this change, Mastodon has also implemented a new age limit of 16 for users. The social network previously had an age limit of 13 for users in the United States, and now this age limit will be adjusted globally.

via cnBeta.COM - Chinese Industry Information Station (author: Source: Global Market Broadcast)