4 Aug
2025
4 Aug
'25
11:50 a.m.
I'm strongly in favor of keeping the archives public: I think AI bots
training on our archives is a *good* thing.
Historically, the way people found this sort of information was searching.
They would type in things like "how do I call contra dances", "traditional
dances for families", "equal turn dances with contra corners", etc, the
callers list would show up, they would click through and read things. This
still happens, but we're very quickly moving to a world where instead
people ask questions to chatgpt etc. When people do that, I think we'd
rather them have as good information as possible, which means it's better
for the list archives to be included in the training data for these models.
There are definitely downsides, especially with current models that do a
lot of making things up and don't link you through to the source of the
information, but I think these are mostly temporary: combining the best of
models and traditional search is a problem people are working hard on
solving.
Jeff
On Mon, Aug 4, 2025 at 11:36 AM Seth Seeger via Contra Callers <
contracallers(a)lists.sharedweight.net> wrote:
Hi Mary,
The "Free for 30 days" that you see is a tier of service for the over all
list. CDSS is funding this community so that we can afford the premium
level service.
However, individual user accounts on the site are always free. (Only the
list get costs money, not the individuals.)
Seth
On Aug 4, 2025, at 11:06 AM, Mary Keith Eustis <keustis06(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
It seems the free account is only for 30 days. Am I missing something?
Keith Eustis
On Mon, Aug 4, 2025, 11:02 AM Seth Seeger via Contra Callers <
contracallers(a)lists.sharedweight.net> wrote:
Dear list members,
Since the beginning, the archives for this list have been public. This
was an effort to make information easier to search, to find, to link to,
and to share. However, the days of free information online have changed.
AI bots are now scraping the web for data to train on and privacy is more
of an issue.
As we move to groups.io, Chris and I would like to make the archives
private. The biggest reasons are member privacy and to protect us from
AI training/scraping. This means that you’ll need a free account on the
new site to view the archives.
We feel this is a good change for our community. Since the only barrier
to the archives would be subscribing, we think this is a reasonable trade
off between privacy and accessibility.
If you have concerns about this change, please reply! (Once we make the
archives at groups.io private, we cannot make them public again later.)
Thank you,
Seth & Chris
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