RE: Tumblr selling data to GenAI companies. (prev reblog.)
At this point I'm truly wondering what to do, really. (Glaze your art and so on, sure) But even the words we write, our personal thoughts, asks, everything is getting fed into these fucking machines from any site available. "Make your own page!" - Services like Squarespace, which are what I and most of my peers use, have sneakily added the option to allow third-party crawlers to harvest data. And portfolio websites are not social media. I want to interact and I have to reach clients.
Are we reaching the point where we have to post only previews and send finished art via Newsletters or post behind paywalls? Print it out and send a pigeon to our followers' homes?
I'm so fucking tired. So angry.
I've been an artist through life-threatening depression, through working and studying full time, through moving house and country, through the pandemic.
Especially the point about portfolio sites not being social media. I post to twitter because that's where my professional peers are. It's where you can get approached by potential clients or collaborators. I post to tumblr because it's where my fandom peers live, where I can facilitate a gallery with a semblance of an archival and tagging system, where I've posted my art for over a decade.
If I just wanted to post art with no interaction and no feedback, I could probably do that pretty easily. But that's not why I share my art online.
The continued hostility, commodification and devaluation of artists online is making a lot of us question why we even bother anymore. Platforms that were made successful on the backs of artists are all suddenly turning on their core userbase in order to turn a profit. Like, I get it, websites have to make money and if you don't pay for the product, you are the product, yadda yadda yadda. But I gotta assume there are ventures they could explore other than wholesale theft of their userbase's copyrighted content.
And they all handwave it away by pointing to the TOS as if anyone could've known that by signing a standard agreement to have your content hosted on the site sometime in like fucking 2010 for some of us, you'd be agreeing to having your data scraped by third parties years and years down the line. And I get that TOS can change, but tumblr has no way to effectively purge your content from the platform (that I know of), so it's not like you can do much about it if you've been posting here for a decade.
Itâs gotten to a point where walled gardens feel like the only safe space. Yeah I have artist friends on Discord, but is that a community? Not really in the same sense.
Iâd kill to find a place that captures the magic of posting art on deviantART in the 2010s, but there are so few sites that exist like that anymore. A few have popped up, like inkblot and artfol, but nothing catches.
Artists canât seem to agree on where to go, thatâs the real challenge. Nowhere feels safe, and the challenge of art specific websites is that they donât have the same reach as general social media does. Just. Ugh.
Automattic will sign a contract with OpenAI for Midjourney to learn off of Tumblr and Wordpress
Hello! Automattic, Tumblr's parent company, will sign a contract with OpenAI and Midjourney so Midjourney can learn off of Tumblr's and WordPress' art and other user data. :) (The full text of this article is copy/pasted in the cut below). You can opt out! but I truly cannot imagine a more idiotic or out of touch decision on the part of Tumblr's CEO.
First thing's first: When/if this goes live, opt out of this immediately. Do this even if you're not an artist. The more people opt out, the less valuable this contract is to Midjourney. in an ideal world, literally all of the active users would opt out, but if we can even get to 50% that's pretty delicious.
Second: Contact Tumblr Support. It's vital that you do this politely. Tumblr staff is not responsible for this decision and the point of doing this is to show the userbase's unwillingness to be involved in this, not harangue Tumblr staff. (Seriously, stop haranguing Tumblr staff). Here's a script:
Hi, I'm writing in to express my disappointment in Automattic's pending contract with OpenAI to sell user data. Midjourney is already embroiled in copyright lawsuits, and it is not possible to train it without compromising copyright, including violating the IP of artists on this site. I strongly protest this contract and will opt out if it goes live. Depending on the privacy terms around what user data is sold to OpenAI and why, it is possible I will leave the platform entirely. Thank you for your time.
Third: Download Glaze and start poisoning them prompts, my friends
Fourth: Stare into the middle distance for a second with me because holy fucking shit? How stupid can one decision be?
Tumblr and Wordpress are preparing to sell user data to Midjourney and OpenAI, according to a source with internal knowledge about the deals and internal documentation referring to the deals.Â
The exact types of data from each platform going to each company are not spelled out in documentation weâve reviewed, but internal communications reviewed by 404 Media make clear that deals between Automattic, the platformsâ parent company, and OpenAI and Midjourney are imminent.
The internal documentation details a messy and controversial process within Tumblr itself. One internal post made by Cyle Gage, a product manager at Tumblr, states that a query made to prepare data for OpenAI and Midjourney compiled a huge number of user posts that it wasnât supposed to. It is not clear from Gageâs post whether this data has already been sent to OpenAI and Midjourney, or whether Gage was detailing a process for scrubbing the data before it was to be sent.Â
Gage wrote:
âthe way the data was queried for the initial data dump to Midjourney/OpenAI means we compiled a list of all tumblrâs public post content between 2014 and 2023, but also unfortunately it included, and should not have included:
private posts on public blogs
posts on deleted or suspended blogs
unanswered asks (normally these are not public until theyâre answered)
private answers (these only show up to the receiver and are not public)
posts that are marked âexplicitâ / NSFW / âmatureâ by our more modern standards (this may not be a big deal, I donât know)
content from premium partner blogs (special brand blogs like Appleâs former music blog, for example, who spent money with us on an ad campaign) that may have creative that doesnât belong to us, and we donât have the rights to share with this-parties; this one is kinda unknown to me, what deals are in place historically and what they should prevent us from doing.â
Gageâs post makes clear that engineers are working on compiling a list of post IDs that should not have been included, and that password-protected posts, DMs, and media flagged as CSAM and other community guidelines violations were not included.
Automattic plans to launch a new setting on Wednesday that will allow users to opt-out of data sharing with third parties, including AI companies, according to the source, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, and internal documents. A new FAQ section we reviewed is titled âWhat happens when you opt out?â states that âIf you opt out from the start, we will block crawlers from accessing your content by adding your site on a disallowed list. If you change your mind later, we also plan to update any partners about people who newly opt-out and ask that their content be removed from past sources and future training.âÂ
404 Media has asked Automattic how it accidentally compiled data that it shouldnât share, and whether any of that content was shared with OpenAI, but did not immediately hear back from the company. 404 Media asked Automattic about an imminent deal with Midjourney last week but did not hear back then, either.
Another internal document shows that, on February 23, an employee asked in a staff-only thread, âDo we have assurances that if a user opts out of their data being shared with third parties that our existing data partners will be notified of such a change and remove their data?â
Andrew Spittle, Automatticâs head of AI replied: âWe will notify existing partners on a regular basis about anyone who's opted out since the last time we provided a list. I want this to be an ongoing process where we regularly advocate for past content to be excluded based on current preferences. We will ask that content be deleted and removed from any future training runs. I believe partners will honor this based on our conversations with them to this point. I don't think they gain much overall by retaining it.â Automattic did not respond to a question from 404 Media about whether it could guarantee that people who opt out will have their data deleted retroactively.
News about a deal between Tumblr and Midjourney has been rumored and speculated about on Tumblr for the last week. Someone claiming to be a former Tumblr employee announced in a Tumblr blog post that the platform was working on a deal with Midjourney, and the rumor made it onto Blind, an app for verified employees of companies to anonymously discuss their jobs. 404 Media has seen the Blind posts, in which what seems like an Automattic employee says, âI'm not sure why some of you are getting worked up or worried about this. It's totally legal, and sharing it publicly is perfectly fine since it's right there in the terms & conditions. So, go ahead and spread the word as much as you can with your friends and tech journalists, it's totally fine.â
Separately, 404 Media viewed a public, now-deleted post by Gage, the product manager, where he said that he was deleting all of his images off of Tumblr, and would be putting them on his personal website. A still-live post says, âi've deleted my photography from tumblr and will be moving it slowly but surely over to cylegage.com, which i'm building into a photography portfolio that i can control end-to-end.â At one point last week, his personal website had a specific note stating that he did not consent to AI scraping of his images. Gageâs original post has been deleted, and his website is now a blank page that just reads âCyle.â Gage did not respond to a request for comment from 404 Media.Â
Several online platforms have made similar deals with AI companies recently, including Reddit, which entered into an AI content licensing deal with Google and said in its SEC filing last week that itâs âin the early stages of monetizing [its] user baseâ by training AI on usersâ posts. Last year, Shutterstock signed a six year deal with OpenAI to provide training data.
OpenAI and Midjourney did not respond to requests for comment.Â
Hi, Tumblr. Itâs Tumblr. Weâre working on some things that we want to share with you.Â
AI companies are acquiring content across the internet for a variety of purposes in all sorts of ways. There are currently very few regulations giving individuals control over how their content is used by AI platforms. Proposed regulations around the world, like the European Unionâs AI Act, would give individuals more control over whether and how their content is utilized by this emerging technology. We support this right regardless of geographic location, so weâre releasing a toggle to opt out of sharing content from your public blogs with third parties, including AI platforms that use this content for model training. Weâre also working with partners to ensure you have as much control as possible regarding what content is used.
Here are the important details:
We already discourage AI crawlers from gathering content from Tumblr and will continue to do so, save for those with which we partner.Â
We want to represent all of you on Tumblr and ensure that protections are in place for how your content is used. We are committed to making sure our partners respect those decisions.
To opt out of sharing your public blogsâ content with third parties, visit each of your public blogsâ blog settings via the web interface and toggle on the âPrevent third-party sharingâ option.Â
For instructions on how to opt out using the latest version of the app, please visit this Help Center doc.Â
Please note: If youâve already chosen to discourage search crawling of your blog in your settings, weâve automatically enabled the âPrevent third-party sharingâ option.
If you have concerns, please read through the Help Center doc linked above and contact us via Support if you still have questions.
Just repeating AGAIN that it is VITAL to be kind and polite to Tumblr staff when reaching out through Support. The people answering your questions and taking your feedback had nothing to do with this decision and may have complicated or negative feelings about it themselves. Be nice to staff if you choose to reach out!
What is this about the tumblr staff wanting to sell art data to midjourney?
An ex-colleague of mine mentioned yesterday that there may be contacts between Automattic and midjourney in that direction, but nothing is public yet and I don't have any more info. They probably won't have anything specific to share either, since they left the company weeks ago too. That being said:
I have no reason to doubt my ex-coworker word, they are a trustworthy person.
Tumblr's CEO has been absurdly enthusiastic (comically, even) about AI, and is a big fan of LLMs and 'AI' companies.
A deal with midjourney could solve tumblr financial issues (not the same company, but openAi is paying up to 5 million/year to news companies to use their content as training data... tumblr generates several orders of magnitude more content than any newspaper or any media company and it only would need a 20 to 30 million per year deal to be profitable)
So I don't have any extra info yet, but I'm keeping my ears open.
And I just got confirmation from a second ex-colleague that a deal with midjourney has been brewing since months ago. Not any extra details, just that's a real thing.
Shit, I don't see any way for this to happen that doesn't make it an apocalyptic event the size of the porn ban. Fuck.
Shit. This may be pure chance and coincidence, and it's not he is in a position to be able to talk about anything, but seeing prominent staff members announcing they are moving their original photography out of tumblr just two weeks ago seems a pretty significant cue of shit to be about to hit the fan.
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