1717 Art Blog

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.

"Discouraging AI crawlers" is just as good as saying you still allow AI crawlers to gather content from Tumblr. AI crawlers still gather data without asking for consent. So who are these "partners?" Who is Automattic cooperating with?

Strange. Searching for 'Tumblr AI partnership' doesn't yield an exact name, but we can already see that Open AI and Midjourney are supposedly the big players mentioned, from an insider in this 404 Media article. It's probably not true, but let's assume this is, for the sake of my point.

Open AI's datasets - the content used to 'train' the software - are basically just everything available on the web. Straight up, they admit to using information available on the internet, information they get from third parties, and information from their trainers. They've been around since 2015. In which case they've never asked for consent anyway and have likely long collected this. Like, really? Was anyone prepared to jump regulation on this technology as fast as it came up?

Midjourney's datasets are vague, but they've been around since at least 2022. Baby little thing! But there are interviews with the founder David Holz, and... oh, dear. You haven't been seeking consent? Until recently? When Tumblr's been around for 17 years? And we've only just recently had this toggle implemented! Dang.

Anyways, I have the respective toggles turned on. This 'change' is utterly useless because of how invasive the Google C4, LAION, and whatever the hell Common Crawl is. I share my art across multiple platforms already so whether I like it or not, my words and my art are used somewhere. Those Stable Diffusion cronies got deviantArt too so my old stuff is probably getting repeatedly deformed in some fashion, despite my account being inactive and never giving consent in the first place.

So what does it mean for this blog? It's staying. I'll keep posting art. These greedy scrooges have been scraping data forever and are incentivizing people to pay for regurgitated images or whatever it is they're calling it. They've already done the damage and this won't solve anything.

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