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.
Surprisingly, nowhere in this post, does Tumblr explicitly say that they've partnered with OpenAI and Midjourney to let them scrape your content unmitigated unless you opt out.
THE OPTION SHOULD BE TOGGLED OFF BY DEFAULT AND ENABLED BY THE USER. OPT-IN, NOT OPT-OUT.
Forcing within your site's settings that everyone is giving automatic consent until they notice and opt out is fucking unethical. DeviantArt already tried this and got their asses handed to them.
MAKING PEOPLE CONSENT BY DEFAULT AND FORCING THEM TO REVOKE IT IS NOT ETHICAL DATA USAGE.
Scream it from the fucking rooftops until these dumbasses get the picture.
