New business in the AI era: Automattic, the parent company of the well-known blogging platform WordPress and Tumblr, is currently planning to sell user content, including photos posted by users on Tumblr, to artificial intelligence companies such as OpenAI and MidJourney for training data.
This decision caused an uproar even within Automattic, so much so that its product managers deleted the photos from their own Tumblers to prevent the photos from being sold.
The details of the transaction are unclear at present, but the source said that Automattic will provide users with the option to withdraw from the program, but if the user does not choose to withdraw from the program, the pictures, including photos, he posted will be sold.
Automattic plans to offer users a new setting starting Wednesday that actively opts out of training the AI, but most users apparently won't see this message and won't actively opt out, so most of the content will actually be for sale.
For AI companies such as OPENAI and MidJourney, it is necessary to obtain enough picture data. These pictures can be used to train artificial intelligence to better generate pictures or videos from text.
Automattic also announced the news in a blog. The company said it believes in a free and open Internet and respects users' personal choices. It also pointed out that there are no laws requiring web crawlers to follow such preferences.
The implication is that the photos posted by users on public platforms, even if they contain private information, may be crawled by various crawlers and are not private in nature. In this case, it is reasonable to sell them and provide users with exit options, right?