Technically copyright stops them. I know, the whole copyright debate on AI training hasn’t been settled. But when you sign a contract with reddit or dropbox, I assume it includes a licence to use the content to train AI.

Here on Lemmy, I never gave a licence to my instance to reuse my content. and I keep full copyright on the content.

Well I know, nobody cares about copyright, but there is a difference between OP downloading a torrent of my little pony and a company making tons of money out of it. Remember that the pirate bay founder got jail time,

Nothing is stopping them from doing it, and the only reason it might not be already happening is the possibility that nobody has cared enough to bother yet.

And by design nothing much can be done about it. That’s the nature of a decentralized platform - it’s explicitly set up to share content, and that’s what it does, by default. And there is no central authority that can control access to the fediverse as a whole. And that’s pretty much that.

And personally, I don’t care. I’ve never bought into the nonsensical idea that the stuff I post in a public forum is in any meaningful sense my property after I post it.

They have to pay Reddit now as the api is gone. I’m quite certain that at least one of the companies scraping the web to train their LLM have been using it.

And I’m quite certain that this happens to fediverse as well. You don’t even need an api, just set up your own instance. Make a few thousand accounts and sub all over using these. You got all the data in a nice db

Nothing is stopping it except that one guy that copyrights all his comment he frightens them.