I am not a lawyer, but according to Your Discourse forum and the GDPR - Communiteq (which is a page on a site run by a Discourse hosting provider based in the EU and thus subject to EU law), the posts are not considered “personal data”:
I point out that your response implies the aforementioned preconception that I presumed: disciplinary action requires investigation, especially if it harms no one in the action that is considered wrong. The link is dead, not causing harm to anyone (he’s trolling - are you serious?) It seems like a reaction driven by a specious vision.
Did you find an error? it’s generated by an LLM: if you hadn’t found one, what would you have thought?
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The forum explicitly bans LLM-generated posts, because they’re harmful to the community’s status as being a place for discussion amongst humans. So, it does harm people.
There are plenty of errors that are committed by humans and not LLMs. Does this seem like one of those to you? Do you have an explanation for how this error could have been made by a human? I don’t, and so far nobody else has offered one either. On the other hand it’s easy to imagine a computer making this sort of mistake, yes?
I would have let the post stand, as it’s otherwise ambiguous as to whether it was written by an LLM, or was written by a human but just happens to sound like an LLM.
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The thread you deleted on the mere suspicion of being LLM generated was in the one category where LLMs are not forbidden. The category created specifically so that those of tender sensibilities could filter it out.
We’ve just had a poll in which 88% of the votes were to allow or at least tolerate LLMs for the limited purpose of translation. Andrea is known to require translation.
I don’t know why we bother having polls. It is clear that the moderators don’t feel bound by the results.
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Please also note that “boost the search engine rankings of third party sites” is also explicitly forbidden in the TOS.
A survey is not the same thing as a vote. And the survey very clearly showed that the majority of the forum would not carry a LLM exemption for translation without any restrictions.
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No, that’s the one category where discussion of LLM-generated software is not forbidden. There is no exception for LLM-generated posts in that category; those are still forbidden there, too.
Users remain responsible for whatever they post, even if they used a machine to translate it from another language. But are you really suggesting that a translation LLM made this error? It’s not like any other I’ve seen from a translation LLM before…
It’s a poll, not a referendum. The moderators are discussing how precisely to phrase a potential rule change in this area. That hasn’t happened yet, so we’re still in a “gray area”. But I did not hide the post because I suspected translation LLM use; I would have left it up were that the case.
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I don’t agree that anonymisation is equivalent to erasure, and I believe the GDPR’s right to be forgotten deserves more weight than it’s being given here. That said, I have no intention of turning this into a tug of war. Please go ahead with the anonymisation.
I’d only ask the project to reflect, going forward, on how it handles erasure requests from European contributors: it’s a matter that will need to be addressed regardless of this particular case.
I’ll take this chance to say goodbye to the forum community. Over these years I’ve put time and passion into it, and I don’t regret any of it. I’m leaving with a slightly bitter taste over how things went, but with my respect for the project intact. See you around, in other places. All the best to everyone.
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Here you are. You either didn’t notice it, or chose to ignore.
I already addressed that above:
I don’t have to suggest anything. YOU assert that this error comes from an LLM. Go ahead and back it up beyond just a vague intuition.
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The witchhunt and anti-AI attitude of the main devs and moderators here couldn’t be more clear than this. I was a BeOS user and always supported OpenBeOS and later Haiku, but all this abuse of power is beyond disappointing.
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How many people flagging a post does it take for the post to be hidden? I ask because it doesn’t look like it is “the community” flagging the post. If it were the community, the post should be unhidden by the number of likes it received. Or does it no matter to the moderators what the real community at large thinks?
Sorry, what are you talking about? Almost all “moderated” posts that are just obnoxiously rude have a couple of likes. The flagging is not a “dislike” button…
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You’re required though to delete or anonymize all of his posts that identify him. That will be all of the posts that have a link to his GitHub account or mention his GitHub username, since he has his photo and real name on his GitHub profile. For example: [deleted]
Of course it is possible that the user has included some identifiable information in their posts and in that case it is a good idea to remove that specific information on a case-by-case basis.
To help you solve the case-by-case question, I can recall what a corporate lawyer in one of my previous place of work suggested with regards to personal info in the cases like that. Is there valid legal reason to keep it? No? Then delete or anonymize. (And no, being too lazy to search through his posts for the links to his GitHub repos, or mentions of his GitHub username is not a valid legal reason).
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This is what I am talking about. Also, saying “it was flagged by the community” is a lie. It was a moderator, who really doesn’t speak for the community at large.
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Computers systems do not lie, they simply output information based on a set of rules, in this case the rule is anyone above trust level 1 or 2 or something has flagged the post, then this message is displayed, it does not distinquish if it was a moderator or not. (Discourse takes the view that users above some thresholds are more trustworthy than others)
If the post was not flagged then this message would not have been displayed. In this case I flagged it as offensive because of the rather tasteless analogy of comparing peanut allergy (which can be quite deadly) to LLM usage in the post. I did not take any action on it, simply so another moderator can confirm if they agree they find this offensive or not. In this case two other moderators saw two additional problems with the post, and commented on it publically, so I don’t see how you can in good faith claim that the post shouldn’t have been moderated.
The stuff with trust levels is public information and you can read about it here: Understanding Discourse Trust Levels
Ascribing intelligence and the intention to lie to an autogenerated forum message is a new low…
Good point. I went through and deleted all the posts I could find that have such mentions.
The forum administrators personal approach to LLMs is starting to resemble an Inquisition-style holy war, and I absolutely dislike it.
By the way, regarding the argument that the URL points to the search page instead of the GitHub page, @waddlesplash is completely wrong – the likelihood of an LLMs making such a mistake is significantly lower than a human being. I often copy links from search results that don’t lead to the site itself (this is a search engine issue), and then have to delete the inserted garbage. Due to the nature of LLMs work, which always strives to minimize the response for the sake of efficiency (that’s how they were trained), the likelihood of such an error is low
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My locally running Gemma confirmed everything stated above:
PS: To sum this up: you made hasty judgments based on prejudice rather than objective reality. You falsely accused a person of lying and practically forced an active user to leave the forum.
This is deeply unworthy behavior.
The best thing you can do in this situation is to issue a public apology to Andrea, and ensure that your future moderation decisions are based on objective facts, not on personal emotions, phobias, or baseless assumptions
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