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.