The Colossal Clean Crawled Corpus (C4), a top-tier AI tool, relies heavily on various cryptocurrency platforms for a significant portion of its data. Recent analysis shows that C4 extracts millions of text snippets from websites and web platforms that are closely related to cryptocurrency.
Reports indicate that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) accounts for 36 million C4 tokens, which is equivalent to 0.02% of the platform’s dataset. The SEC’s website (sec.gov) is ranked 39th among the websites engaged by C4, from which the tool fetches the data.
Bitcointalk.org, created by the anonymous Satoshi Nakamoto, accounted for 6.1 million C4 tokens, which is equivalent to 0.004% of the total tokens. It ranked 780th among the websites engaged by the platform.
Other cryptocurrency platforms that are engaged by C4 for data acquisition include Cointelegraph and CoinmarketCap, both of which are crypto news websites and tokens aggregation platforms, respectively. These and six other related websites account for 0.008% of all C4 tokens, while other websites related to specific cryptocurrencies form a negligible part of the representation.
IPFS (ipfs.io) and Steemit (steemit.com) are two other websites that feature significantly in C4’s dataset. IPFS is ranked 16th, while Steemit is ranked 594th. Although these sites are not directly involved in crypto, they have significant inclinations toward the crypto industry.
The involvement of cryptocurrency-related platforms in C4’s AI training process highlights the industry’s encroachment into the mainstream. The extent of representation of crypto websites is significant enough to influence the outcome of C4, even though mainstream websites like Google and Facebook outrank them significantly.
C4 has faced criticism over pirated data and hate speech, despite reports of the dataset being “cleaned.” With only 400 words in its list for censoring specific content, it suggests that there could still be controversial content within C4. The presence of crypto sites in its dataset could also affect its level of bias.
In conclusion, the extent of cryptocurrency’s involvement in C4’s AI training process is significant enough to influence the outcome of the tool’s data analysis. However, the presence of controversial content and the potential for bias must be taken into account. As cryptocurrency continues to grow, it will be interesting to see how it continues to impact AI tools and other technological advancements.
