Hi, Tumblr. It’s Tumblr. We’re working on some things that we want to share with you.
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 Union’s 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 we’re 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. We’re 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.
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 blogs’ content with third parties, visit each of your public blogs’ blog settings via the web interface and toggle on the “Prevent third-party sharing” option.
For instructions on how to opt out using the latest version of the app, please visit this Help Center doc.
Please note: If you’ve already chosen to discourage search crawling of your blog in your settings, we’ve automatically enabled the “Prevent third-party sharing” option.
If you have concerns, please read through the Help Center doc linked above and contact us via Support if you still have questions.
@makkon what are your thoughts on this
this deal shouldn't be happening at all, and it's utterly revolting that it is. when it goes through, I will likely be leaving tumblr forever.
but since it is happening, opt-out should be on BY DEFAULT. there are accounts that will miss this information (the majority of users), regardless of how available tumblr thinks they're making it. there are accounts of deceased artists and writers who cannot consent. there are accounts of inactive users who may return and could have been completely unaware of these changes. there's a myriad of reasons users could and will miss this information. hell, @thatspacepirate had to tag me to be aware that this post even existed.
but we know why companies always make these an opt-out system: they are DEPENDING on the majority of people being unaware, so that there's a surplus of data immediately available for scraping. they want vast swaths of their regular not-terminally-online users to miss this critical information.
and then of course, because there's zero regulations for data-scraping and generative AI models, companies like Midjourney and Open AI do not give two shits about opt-out systems, there's no reason that they are bound or required to respect it. they will do what they have always done: take everything, with no respect or remorse. they won't even ask for forgiveness.
fuck tumblr. sorry to the staff who have undoubtedly fought against this. in the end, money always fucking wins, and generative AI is all about money, always has been. it's never been about utility, usefulness, or solving problems. if it were, it wouldn't have happened this way.
