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

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.

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.

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

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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.