AI is far from a step in the right direction. It creates a way for devs to just be lazy and produce less than satisfactory content.
As confident as I am in AI, I doubt it’s ever replacing human work in the art / GFX field. Typing a prompt can’t ever reach the artistic touch a real human provides. It’s too unpredictable to actually be consistent and useful. Besides, AI rarely ever produces something good anyways.
This policy change does not change any of that. Change or not, if Roblox gets hacked, you’re toast, and they’ll be equally as liable for damages now and in the future. No difference between now and then.
From the legal standpoint, you are free to do two things:
Refuse the new policy: Send an e-mail to Roblox to let them know you refuse this new policy. THIS WILL LEAD TO YOUR ACCOUNT BEING DELETED Accept the new policy (default): You waive your rights to suing them for selling your data against your consent since you’ve given them consent.
I’m not an AI enthusiast. It probably is coming for the job of some of my best friends, and then for mine. Nevertheless… we did go from Cleverbot the Idiot, to ChatGPT, Midjourney, and GPT-4o in under 3 years.
AI is far from being done in improving. Eventually it will reach a point where not only it can make decent enough content that 50%+ will be okay with it, and it’ll allow for modifications to an existing generated work.
There will still be a market for fine human art, but it’lll be seen as an object of wealth and of superior quality, akin to a swiss watch, something that you can get for cheaper and a little bit less good, but that you get to show you’re wealthy or because you have a passion for it.
I do think that AI in its current progression is the doom of most jobs on Earth, except ones that REQUIRE a human (teaching, nursing…), but that is not until a long while.
Roblox is a megacorp, they would not do this AI nonsense if they didn’t run it past an army of lawyers and bean counters telling them it’s legal and profitable, and this is clearly the next step from their earlier procedural generation nonsense. As for the data selling, well, the US is big enough it is profitable to run a branch of European Union compliant services and a branch of American compliant services - so until we get an American GDPR megacorps being megacorps will simply tailor things on a per state basis. (Fire up a VPN, connect to germany, and load up google. All of the sudden you have far more privacy options, up front, without needing to dig through multiple sub menus and weird wording.)
The sad truth is the selling of data, especially for advertisements, remains profitable, and is likely never going to end. This is why I run adblock and encourage everyone else to also use adblock. It’s as close as you will get to voting with your wallet against this nonsense. If you can, run a PiHole for even more adblock across your entire network.
If you happen to be skilled in network administration and posses a proper hardware firewall you can do what I do and go much further in blocking ads and trackers. This is involving things like deep packet inspection. For most people this is overkill, for me it is more resume experience and a hobby. Be warned, such firewalls are pricey.
I am going to vouch for this quickly. Roblox has a thing for telemetry and in other words stalking you and a Pi-hole server is not hard to set up and will save you so much privacy. Roblox is at the very top of my top blocked list:
I think both of these updates are ludicrous, and should not be implemented. If someone wants to have their data sold, then that should also be an opt-in, or at the very least opt-out.
Well let’s be realistic here. Everything these days is either opt-out or forced no matter what. I’d rather have the option to opt-out than to have no option at all. This is why I appreciate the EU when they force companies to make changes, however that company technically only needs to make those changes for the EU, it’s just that sometimes those changes are easier and cheaper to do globally rather than on a per-country basis. The US is still very far behind politically on this front.
It really does seem absolutely evident how that ever since Roblox became a Public company things have gotten a lot worse on the site. It’s astounding, its like night and day.
I didn’t actually share my experience with ROA here. It’s way more of a pain than it’s worth to be honest. They’ll bug you to find literally any email that was ever linked to your account, then ask for your ID. I sent a passive aggressive email saying how I won’t be sending my ID over and I got something along the lines of “You’re not required to send it over because you previously verified your identity”. If I wasn’t required to why was I asked in the first place? Seems like they’re gatekeeping hardly useful information (despite its name the document is just a list of some data they have on you, not all of your data/info on their servers currently Just keep some old giftcards on hand and youll be good to go.
This is most likely the reason for roblox removing user ads. This is exactly why AdBlock is a thing.
I hate how AI is being integrated in the wrong ways for every company. (e.g. Adobe’s newest T.O.S being vague about what they will do with user’s information & documents)
AI was originally made for good intentions, but companies and individuals are making them for the worse. With AI being added to some company’s resources, that somehow gives them the right to spy on their own users.
I find it outrageous on how that’s justified for companies to do this. I really hope that something like the EU fights for user privacy in the future when it comes to AI.
I really hope Roblox reconsiders their decision with this new AI policy. However, I have my doubts because Roblox and other companies rarely listen to their users feedback. Roblox and others should really be transparent when making decisions. Me and many others heavily disagree with this new rule change.
Just a reminder to everyone that this is opt-out. If you actually read the changes, it specifically mentions the following:
“Creators will have the ability to control their data sharing preferences for what assets will be used for training generative AI-based tools, such as for Experiences, paid Creator Store assets, and avatars and avatar items.” Source
sure, they say that you can opt out, and there’s a page currently letting you opt out of code collection, but the legal terms now give them the right to do so without your explicit consent. they’ve also now rolled out the new terms, which means you’re required to accept them before using the Roblox website.
This is a very good point. I looked at the top of the page to see that it says the ToS is effective as of yesterday, despite the controls to opt-out not already being there. I’d like to give Roblox the benefit of the doubt here, but it’s clearly a dangerous thing that they’ve done. Other companies are getting called out for bad practices like this, where the option to opt-out doesn’t exist until after you’ve agreed to everything and made an account.
The only good thing I can say is that this appears to be opt-in rather than opt-out, at least for the time being.
Every website needs to disclose data for ads, that’s how ads work. They aren’t selling your data they are using it to select which ads show up for the immersive ad program.