Do you have a tumblr? Do you have five tumblrs? Do you want tumblr to sell the work you posted there to OpenAI and Midjourney and not pay you? Are the answers "yes", "yes" and "no"? Okay. Log in now, click "Account" on the left hand side, then click on each of your blogs individually, click "Blog Settings" on the right, and scroll down to "Visibility". You will find the above checkbox. It defaults to off, you must turn it on.
This box is reportedly also visible in the mobile apps, but I don't know how to find it there.
What?
This morning, 404 Media posted an expose based on internal documents showing that Tumblr is about to announce a deal to sell "user data" to "AI" companies specifically including OpenAI and Midjourney. (That post requires 404 media registration, but if you're in the Venn diagram of people who think plagiarism is bad but piracy is good, there's a gist here.) The 404 post claims that on "Wednesday" Tumblr will be adding an opt-out box for "AI" resale, but it is Tuesday and I find the above checkbox on all my blogs this second. One person I talked to said the checkbox was already checked on some of their blogs, which suggests the checkbox has been there a while but did not mention "AI" until sometime recently.
404's leaked documents include executive claims that if they give "content" to an "AI" company and then someone opts out after their data is sold, then Tumblr will inform prior recipients you have opted out and "advocate" that your data they sold them be redacted. So that's… good, I guess, but unfortunately 404 raises the possibility the data dump has maybe already happened and this "advocacy" is all you're going to get at this point. An internal post by a whistleblower claims "the initial data dump to Midjourney/OpenAI" (what does that mean? has that "dump" already been sent?) included nonpublic data such as private posts on public blogs. I am unhappy.
One quick final note. After logging in to Tumblr and checking the "no sell to AI" checkbox on all my old blogs there, before logging out again I decided to use the "Feedback" feature of their support page to tell the company how unhappy I was about them trying to turn me into AI. In order to submit this message, I was required to check the following checkbox:
Do you want me to be a robot or not, Tumblr?? Do you want me to be a robot or not???
