#nivenly — Public Fediverse posts

@[email protected] @[email protected] the parent post has links to a great case-study-in-progress of community governance; and @[email protected] and @[email protected] this ties in with the discussion here as well.

Some of the things to look for, based on the experiences I noted with some of other community governance efforts ... thinking about these up front could lead to a more inclusive and effective discussion, and once it's done looking at them in retrospective could be another good data point for what does and doesn't work.

-- @[email protected]'s #TertuliaExtraordinaria discussion (collected here in a single document) is a great example of a fediverse governance-related discussion conducted in a way that lets multiple voices be heard (as opposed to privileging those with the largest platform). What if any mechanisms will be used here, both in the broad initial discussion and then the next phase of the general membership discussion?

-- In the social.coop and cosocial discussions, BIPOC and transvoices were almost completely absent. Will there be a similar dynamic here #nivenly discussion? [To be clear, I'm talking both about who participates and whether cis white participants elevante the voices of non-participating BIPOC and trans people.]. And the parent post discusses another "who's at the table" question that could crop up here:

"For example Nivenly is tech- and open-source focused. How well represented will artists, photographers, writers, actors, and musicians -- the people who tools like #Haidra exploit -- be in the discussions and voting?"

-- Mastodon doesn't have no way of getting notified about replies to a post that _don't_ mention you; it's functionality that's been requested multiple times, dating back to 2018 if not earlier. Github discussions are better on this front; and unlike vanilla Mastodon they allow formatting via Markdown. So on the one hand it's a more useful platform for people who are used to Github -- which, given Nivenly's techie and open-source focus, presumably includes all the board and paying members, and quite possibly most of the people who have accounts on @[email protected]. At the same time though @[email protected]'s has some good points about the lack of inclusivity of using github.

Of course Nivenly's also encouraging discussions on the fediverse and in their Discord chat, and offering an email option for people to submit questions ... that's good: people without github accounts aren't excluded from the conversation. Still, the structure certainly favors people who do have github accounts. In particular, techies (who as a class, and in some cases as individuals, are more likely to profit from normalizing exploitative AI governance) are more likely to have github accounts than artists, photographers, writers, actors, and musicians (who as a class and as individuals are the ones who are exploited), so this could accentuate the potential "who's at the table" problem.

-- as @[email protected] mentions in the post, it's not clear what mechanism to use for voting. is there a way to use existing affordances to address this? If not could some straightforward improvements help?




@[email protected] @[email protected]

Nivenly, the cooperative that runs hachyderm.io, is having a community discussion and vote on what to do about Haidra and AIHorde, a distributed generative AI system.

@quintessence's Our First Community Discussion and Vote: Haidra has a summary and information about next steps. @Db0's The Birth of Haidra and the Join With Nivenly has background.

The discussion's open to all but voting is restricted to members They're also tracking discussion on social media in the Discord chatrooms but ask that official questions be submitted via Github discussions or email to [email protected]. They're gathering questions between now 8 Aug 2023, and will be. posting followup blog pots, followed by a general member discussion from August 14 - 25 August 2023 and an "election" after -- specific mechanism TBD,

Eligible voters including project members, trade members, and general members who pay $7/month). Something that's always interesting to watch in situations like this who's at the table. For example Nivenly is tech- and open-source focused. How well represented will artists, photographers, writers, actors, and musicians -- the people who tools like Haidra exploit -- be in the discussions and voting? What happens if somebody used #AIHorde ("a crowdsourced distributed cluster of Image generation workers and text generation workers") to generate fake avatars and profiles, sign up 1000 new accounts and voted to ban these exploitative tools?

Here's an excellent thread from @hrefna with some initial thoughts and questions https://hachyderm.io/@hrefna/110833561126744694). The "ACM" references in the thread are to the ACM Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct at https://ethics.acm.org/

Nivenly's discussion potentially affects cross-intance communication as well, and is a good chance to think about AI-related issues in general. In the Github discussion, for example, somebody brought up a question about whether posts and images that federate to hachyderm (or another nivenly-run instance) would be used to train future AIs. With Haidra, based on the discussion so far, the answer appears to be no; but this isn't the only situation where there's a risk of using federated data without consent to train AIs. What kind of ground rules do other instances want to have, and do we need to have conventions such as extending the nodeinfo structure (which gives basic data about every fediveres instance) to include information about whether or not an instance is using data for AI training?

So it's certainly a discussion worth tracking -- and participating in, if you're interested.

#haidra #nivenly

EDIT: A response in the github discussion describes why data federating to Hachyderm isn't being used to train Haidra's models, so I updated the text above to make that clear. It's still a good example of how this conversation highlights more general issues. If other instances using images and text they receive to train AI models, should they have to disclose it?