Can we get a list of companies NOT doing this? I’d assume it’s going to be much shorter.
All these AI and machine learning companies are taking content directly from websites and ignoring robot.txt files.
If your content is able to be crawled, even without being listed on search engines, I don’t think it really matters.
It might help proof an AI company against legal issues that might be brought about by their using the content. If they’re ever sued by Automattic, then they can just point to the deal and say that they bought the data from them. There’s much less ambiguity.
You are correct, about the legal stuff. These companies are being sued all the time.
Doing this deal also makes processing the data a lot easier. Being handed a big ass database would be a lot easier than crawling for content.
What I posted was about how they operate. These companies showed time and time again that they don’t really care what data they are taking or from whom. They will even take their own AI or machine learning content and put it in their own system.
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.
Are you sure your clients aren’t AI also
Dead internet theory in action
It was half dead and suicidal even before AI
No way for me to know. My programming doesn’t allow it.
pretty sure this only applies to .com wordpress not self hosted
Not sure, especially since they compare it to the Squareapace deal which I believe is for all sites built on the platform.
there is no self hosted squarespace
My misunderstanding. But it looks like you need a .org to self-host WP, and like 99% of WP-built sites are .com as far as I’ve seen. I definitely do not know the technicals about different ways to host/build on the same platform, so I certainly defer to you there, but in any case, my bet is that any site/platform that gets scraped indiscriminately will lead to a lot of circular AI training.
There are A LOT of self hosted Wordpress sites out there. Many of them you wouldn’t know unless told they were Wordpress (I believe both The Verge and TechCrunch use self hosted Wordpress). I myself have two self hosted Wordpress sites. Though I’ve been considering moving away from Wordpress for awhile now.
Yeah there are def more self hosted than not. Wordpress.org is just the site for the open source project. Most hosting sites come with 1 click WordPress installs. I’ve built so many sites with it.
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.
Mozilla seems more towards local and privacy preserving AI Dev, no? Both are really lacking in the space IMHO
Like I’m not interested in what the collective of digital knowledge looks like behind several corporate filters and giant rent seeking moat.
True, and I get that realistically they do need to diversify away from Firefox … but it still feels bandwagoney to me given that seemingly every tech company (and Wendy’s) are piling into the AI train all at once. Like I said, though, I think I’m just getting too old for this.
They were already making some good work in the field before but they trended away from it.
Honestly it just seems like they struggle with follow through.
Mozilla’s business is sucking up to Google for that vendor money they spend to avoid litigation (and its not working).
I know about the funding problem, but what do you mean on the kitagation piece?
Google gives Mozilla its money to appear that they aren’t trying to corner the browser space with Chrome. If they win the argument in court they aren’t monopolizing, they don’t have to give Mozilla shit anymore.
It’s the new NFTs and Crypto but it’s not blatantly a scam so the companies that skipped out on those sure as shit will be hoping onto AI
There’s already several WordPress plugins to block out Generative AI. I expect the community to have a less than chipper attitude about this over Automattic.
Glad to hear it - I haven’t thought to check for myself.
I don‘t really know what to say to cheer you up. Industrial revolutions are as important and exciting as they are painful, even dreadful to many. I’ve seen no signs of this one being different. There will be a lot of losers before we can expect wide spread benefits for society from it. The current working class will suffer great losses and will have to fight so another can reap the benefits later.
Bro…tumblr is full of some WEIRD FUCKIN SHIT YO
Hey now, Don’t kink shame the weirdos
I know because I was one of those weirdos lol
Got 'em.
Sad they’re doing this with Tumblr though. It was fun but I just deleted my 10+ year old account.
haha its been about that long since I even logged into mine.
I heard now is the best time to check it out
I, for one, am looking forward to the rise of generative AI trained on 2014 tumblr, hallucinating Superwholock jokes where they don’t belong, cosplayers dying themselves grey in a bathtub, and DashCon references where nobody expects them
Bro this shit is gonna make AI UwU
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.
Depends on the day it is more convenient in.
both
Town-square when they lure you in, they own everything when they sell you ass off.
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.
Anything to make a buck.
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.
Yeah I’ve never liked Wordpress. But it’s pretty much the defacto CMS for noobs. I always have used my own self-built CMS’s on frameworks like Laravel but it’s not really practical for non-tech people or even businesses to self develop their own CMS unless they have really specific needs.
I’m going to be honest, I didn’t even realize that Wordpress.org existed and was a non-profit; I just thought making the source available was something they did because you can’t really not do that as PHP framework.
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
WordPress is either:
- overkill for a lot of users, when static site generators do the job faster and easier
- underkill when you have topology, data types, logic, and content pipeline challenges, for which Drupal is king but far more complex
Well, time to delete my Wordpress account then. Gonna be a lot of content I gotta archive before then. ;-;
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.
And sometimes when you pay you’re still the product. Smart TVs, occulus, etc
If you don’t pay for the product, you ARE the product.
Well, that’s not always true. I don’t pay for Wikipedia, am I the product?
Explain how I’m the product relative to Linux.
With Linux you pay for support if you ever need it. Most end users will never need support, but businesses running Linux servers pay Red Hat a shit load to support them in case shit ever hits the fan. Like giving away a free car, but only certain people know how to do maintenance on it, and they all work for the manufacturer.
I’m not a business, so it doesn’t apply to me.
Have you told anyone to switch to Linux?
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 :(
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.
