https://www.404media.co/tumblr-and-wordpress-to-sell-users-data-to-train-ai-tools/
(reading this entire article is free, you just have to sign up for an account on the site)
TL;DR:
- tumblr is planning to routinely scrape user data to sell to midjourney/openAI
- they ALREADY scraped a shit ton of data and fucked up at it, scraping a bunch of private, explicit, deleted and copyrighted material
- there's going to be an opt-out policy, but it's not an immediate opt-out and it relies entirely on AI companies following the honors system
- Automattic's head of AI is named Andrew Spittle. not crucial information, but i did want to underline that
from what The Homies and i can tell this doesn't include privately hosted blogs with Wordpress installed, only blogs hosted on Wordpress.com, btw. if you used Wordpress to build your webcomic site or something, you're fine.
anyways. there are probably gonna be more people coming here from tumblr! that means more work for admins and more server load to pay for. maybe toss eggbug a few dollars before the tide rises
also, because i know this post might blow up, if you have more than a few dollars to spare, consider buying a comic or something from my store
so a little thing regarding this, if you want to stay on tumblr and are concerned that your data will be used in this manner: i think this is actually a violation of 6.2 in Tumblr's Terms of Service, wherein they essentially state that you retain all ownership and intellectual property rights of things published on their platform
to combat this i think it'd be prudent to contact support with an email/ticket like so
I've recently been informed that the platform is looking to sell my data in some form or another to AI companies as training data for their machine learning models.
I did not consent, nor do I consent, to the usage of my data in this manner. Item 6.2 in the Terms of Service explicitly states that I retain ownership and all intellectual property rights to my content.
In addition, as an EU citizen, I am protected under GDPR against the unauthorised use of my data. I do not consent to the use of my personal data towards the aforementioned purpose.
I would suggest blacklisting my content from data collection. Thank you.
Regards
basically state explicitly that you do not consent!! because apparently these fuckers assume you're wholeheartedly committed to letting them sell your fucking data
