Like Paul, and so many others, a post of mine has been used as a source for a chatbot answer. This is a public forum, understood, but I don't like this one bit. Not one bit, I tell ya.
Think I'll go live in the garden shed for awhile.
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A while back, I was asking Grok about some baking detail, and noticed that it listed TFL as one of its sources.
Sometimes a chatbot goes on an internet search, same as you or I would. And sometimes I've noticed that the content of a page doesn't support what the chatbot said. So this doesn't necessarily mean it was trained on all the TFL posts. In fact, the underlying LLM generally doesn't know where its information came from. Just like most of us...
TomP
I get what you're saying. It's the idea of anything semi-relevant we've posted anywhere online being found and presented to the world (so to speak) in a much more efficient way that an old web browser could do. I like to toil in relative obscurity. Of course, we know that anything that's posted can come back to bite, as many cancelees have learned. This post of mine that was used as a source--it opened with a comment about my husband. The comment was innocuous, but it gave me the willies seeing it on a chatbot.
A Davey answer might be: don't want to be seen, don't post. Enjoy.
This thread reinforces my approach to posting on forums. I usually try to limit the amount of personal info I include in a post to try and remain anonymous as possible on the internet. I have also refused to have any Meta (Facebook, Instagram), X, or other social media accounts. For the most part, those sites do more harm than good. I do have a Flickr account because there are a lot of good photographers on it, especially posting historical and current railroad photos.
One problem I do have is that there are some individuals and commercial entities that post only on FB or Instagram. For example, Lance (@albacore) recently posted a link to Ian Lowe's sourdough rules on Instagram. I'm curious about what Ian has to say, but I can't view the post or all the comments to see the complete discussion. But I'm willing to forego that inconvenience to keep my online profile low.
I'm much the same way. I was able to read Lance's post even though I have no account. Of course, that put my computer's IP address into Instagram's logs, but that will happen with most sites you visit. It also put an Instagram cookie on my system but I've removed it. I no longer do this with FaceBook, though.
If I wanted to join any social network, I'd give a Mastodon server a try. But I don't feel impelled.
How did you manage to read the post? I wasn't successful at seeing anything.
I just went to the URL. I normally use a javascript blocker and I had to allow the two Instagram addresses, then I could see the page. A login box popped up but I just closed it with the close box in the upper right corner. I had to enlarge it to read Ian's two lines, Oh, yes, this is on a Windows computer but I doubt that it matters. The specific browser is Zen, an offshoot of Firefox. I just tried it in Vivaldi, which is an offshoot of Chrome, and I could read the page there, too.