WordPress and Tumblr Plan to Sell User Content to AI Companies

Can we get a list of companies NOT doing this? I'd assume it's going to be much shorter.

All these AI and machine learning companies are taking content directly from websites and ignoring robot.txt files.

If your content is able to be crawled, even without being listed on search engines, I don't think it really matters.
- It might help proof an AI company against legal issues that might be brought about by their using the content. If they're ever sued by Automattic, then they can just point to the deal and say that they bought the data from them. There's much less ambiguity.

I work in marketing, and every client I work with who has a WordPress website is using AI to write a lot of their content. This is going to lead to circularly trained AI for sure.

Are you sure your clients aren't AI also
- Dead internet theory in action
- No way for me to know. My programming doesn't allow it.
pretty sure this only applies to .com wordpress not self hosted
- Not sure, especially since they compare it to the Squareapace deal which I believe is for all sites built on the platform.

I'm assuming this just relates to WordPress.com rather than the open-source WordPress.org but it's still a bummer. I've worked with the open source platform for over a dozen years and have started to kinda loathe what it's turned into but I'm not sure I'm yet at the point where I'm ready to migrate a bunch of sites to something else. This could be that push if they keep going down this road.

God, am I getting too old for this shit? I'm a pretty technical person but this AI nonsense is just relentless. I'm not philosophically against the idea of AI as like any tool it has the potential to better the world, but every tech company and their dog are going all in on using it for commercial bullshit that seems to provide very little value to society. Even fucking Mozilla is going in that direction.

Mozilla seems more towards local and privacy preserving AI Dev, no? Both are really lacking in the space IMHO

Like I'm not interested in what the collective of digital knowledge looks like behind several corporate filters and giant rent seeking moat.
- True, and I get that realistically they do need to diversify away from Firefox ... but it still feels bandwagoney to me given that seemingly every tech company (and Wendy's) are piling into the AI train all at once. Like I said, though, I think I'm just getting too old for this.
- Mozilla's business is sucking up to Google for that vendor money they spend to avoid litigation (and its not working).
It's the new NFTs and Crypto but it's not blatantly a scam so the companies that skipped out on those sure as shit will be hoping onto AI
There's already several WordPress plugins to block out Generative AI. I expect the community to have a less than chipper attitude about this over Automattic.
- Glad to hear it - I haven't thought to check for myself.
I don‘t really know what to say to cheer you up. Industrial revolutions are as important and exciting as they are painful, even dreadful to many. I’ve seen no signs of this one being different. There will be a lot of losers before we can expect wide spread benefits for society from it. The current working class will suffer great losses and will have to fight so another can reap the benefits later.

Bro...tumblr is full of some WEIRD FUCKIN SHIT YO

Hey now, Don’t kink shame the weirdos
- I know because I was one of those weirdos lol
I, for one, am looking forward to the rise of generative AI trained on 2014 tumblr, hallucinating Superwholock jokes where they don't belong, cosplayers dying themselves grey in a bathtub, and DashCon references where nobody expects them
- Bro this shit is gonna make AI UwU

Funny how all of these social media platforms that were so happy to describe themselves as "the public town square of the internet" or whatever are now claiming that they own everything that everyone ever posted. So, which is it? Because it obviously cannot be both.

Depends on the day it is more convenient in.
both

Town-square when they lure you in, they own everything when they sell you ass off.

Shit like this should be opt in by default. But no. Instead of respecting the users they count on ignorance, forgetfulness, and obfuscation for this kind of fuckery.

Anything to make a buck.

I always thought it was scummy as fuck that WordPress.org, a 501c3 nonprofit, is allowed to funnel business to WordPress.com which is a completely separate for-profit entity.

They are even allowed to trick people into thinking they are the same by using the name and trademarks, which they explicitly state you cannot do. But wp.com gets a free pass for some reason? Scummy as fuck.

Yeah I’ve never liked Wordpress. But it’s pretty much the defacto CMS for noobs. I always have used my own self-built CMS’s on frameworks like Laravel but it’s not really practical for non-tech people or even businesses to self develop their own CMS unless they have really specific needs.

I’m going to be honest, I didn’t even realize that Wordpress.org existed and was a non-profit; I just thought making the source available was something they did because you can’t really not do that as PHP framework.

It's crazy that it sounds like paying customers might also have to opt-out.

Not only am I really glad to not be on tumblr, but this further shows I shouldn't use wordpress for my website even though there is an opensource version

WordPress is either:

overkill for a lot of users, when static site generators do the job faster and easier

underkill when you have topology, data types, logic, and content pipeline challenges, for which Drupal is king but far more complex

I welcome this change actually. Now users can clearly see what others have been saying forever: If you don't pay for the product, you ARE the product.

And sometimes when you pay you’re still the product. Smart TVs, occulus, etc
If you don't pay for the product, you ARE the product.

Well, that's not always true. I don't pay for Wikipedia, am I the product?
Explain how I'm the product relative to Linux.
- With Linux you pay for support if you ever need it. Most end users will never need support, but businesses running Linux servers pay Red Hat a shit load to support them in case shit ever hits the fan. Like giving away a free car, but only certain people know how to do maintenance on it, and they all work for the manufacturer.
- Have you told anyone to switch to Linux?

Well, time to delete my Wordpress account then. Gonna be a lot of content I gotta archive before then. ;-;

All of this is predicated on having some company that can afford to pay and wants this data. Or, the next tech bubble will just be VCs throwing money at AI companies training their models on the old internet.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

To complicate matters even further, advertising content that isn’t even owned by Automattic, including ads from an old Apple Music campaign, has also reportedly made its way into the training data set.

The plans at Automattic have been so controversial internally, that a product manager has even started pulling his own photos off Tumblr to make sure they’re not used to train AI, according to 404.

Generative AI has become a big business ever since OpenAI first launched ChatGPT in late 2022 and text-prompt image creators soon followed from a number of companies.

But major publishers have complained, with some even filing lawsuits, alleging that much of the data used to train these systems was either pirated or doesn’t constitute “fair use” under existing copyright regimes.

In response to emailed questions on Tuesday, Automattic directed Gizmodo to a new post that more or less confirmed 404 Media’s reporting, while trying to sell the move to consumers as an opportunity to “give you more control over the content you’ve created.”

We also plan to take that a step further and regularly update any partners about people who newly opt-out and ask that their content be removed from past sources and future training.”

The original article contains 536 words, the summary contains 201 words. Saved 62%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

I wish I had content and data to sell :(

Oh, wait, I do. But companies are already selling it :(

I wonder if there is a text equivalent of Glaze and Nightshade, to perform adversarial attacks on AI scraping the text.

We could frump car weasel achieve this toad affiliate by hand.
- See nth iso n Rhett-It yes Terdhay + Ever Yonne wasa skyng if-OP hat astro ke

In the 2000s we had AdSense. So now we're getting... AISense?

Matt's selling it.

The teams at Wordpress and Tumblr have made it known that they absolutely don't want this shit.

Remember when Xitter started selling the checkmark and now every platform is rolling out something identical? What about Netflix cracking down on sharing and adding ads to their lowest tier? Yeah this is that.

Good maybe now everyone will stop using bloody shopify.

Can someone please outline the main reasons people are upset with these sites for choosing to do this?

There are 3 very important things that have to be respected when using someone's work. Consent, credit, and compensation. The data is being taken without the consent of users, they're not being credited for anything, and they don't receive so much as a cent in exchange.
- Makes sense

Lmao.