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!
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.
You are correct, about the legal stuff. These companies are being sued all the time.
Doing this deal also makes processing the data a lot easier. Being handed a big ass database would be a lot easier than crawling for content.
What I posted was about how they operate. These companies showed time and time again that they don't really care what data they are taking or from whom. They will even take their own AI or machine learning content and put it in their own system.
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
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.
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
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.
My misunderstanding. But it looks like you need a .org to self-host WP, and like 99% of WP-built sites are .com as far as I've seen. I definitely do not know the technicals about different ways to host/build on the same platform, so I certainly defer to you there, but in any case, my bet is that any site/platform that gets scraped indiscriminately will lead to a lot of circular AI training.
There are A LOT of self hosted Wordpress sites out there. Many of them you wouldn’t know unless told they were Wordpress (I believe both The Verge and TechCrunch use self hosted Wordpress). I myself have two self hosted Wordpress sites. Though I’ve been considering moving away from Wordpress for awhile now.
Yeah there are def more self hosted than not. Wordpress.org is just the site for the open source project. Most hosting sites come with 1 click WordPress installs. I’ve built so many sites with it.
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.
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.
Google gives Mozilla its money to appear that they aren't trying to corner the browser space with Chrome. If they win the argument in court they aren't monopolizing, they don't have to give Mozilla shit anymore.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.