While I was figuring out how to be human in 2024, I missed that Tumblr and WordPress posts will reportedly be used for OpenAI and Midjourney training.

This could be a big deal for people who take the trouble to write their own content rather than filling the web with Generative AI text to just spam out posts.

If you’re involved with WordPress.org, it doesn’t apply to you.

WordPress.com has an option to use Tumblr as well, so when you post to WordPress.com it automagically posts to Tumblr. Therefore you might have to visit both of the posts below and adjust your settings if you don’t want your content to be used in training models.

This doesn’t mean that they haven’t already sent information to Midjourney and OpenAI yet. We don’t really know, but from the moment you change your settings…

• WordPress.com: How to opt out of the AI training is available here.
  
  It boils down to this part in your blog settings on WordPress.com:
  
  
  
• With Tumblr.com, you should check out this post. Tumblr is more tricky, and the link text is pretty small around the images – what you need to remember is after you select your blog on the left sidebar, you need to use the ‘Blog Settings’ link on the right sidebar.

Hot Take.

When I was looking into all of this, it ends up that Automattic, the owners of WordPress.com and Tumblr.com is doing the sale.

If you look at your settings, if you haven’t changed them yet, you’ll see that the default was set to allowing the use of content for training models. The average person who uses these sites to post their content are likely unaware, and in my opinion if they wanted to do this the right way the default setting would be to have these settings opt out.

It’s unclear whether they already sent posts. I’m sure that there’s an army of lawyers who will point out that they did post it in places and that the onus was on users to stay informed. It’s rare for me to use the word ‘shitty’ on KnowProSE.com, but I think it’s probably the best way to describe how this happened.

It was shitty of them to set it up like this. See? It works.

Now some people may not care. They may not be paying users, or they just don’t care, and that’s fine. Personal data? Well, let’s hope that got scrubbed.

Some of us do. I don’t know how many, so I can’t say a lot or a few. Yet if Automattic, the parent company of both Tumblr and WordPress.com, will post that they care about user choices, it hardly seems appropriate that the default choice was not to opt out.

As a paying user of WordPress.com, I think it’s shitty to think I would allow the use of what I write, using my own brain, to be used for a training model that the company gets paid for. I don’t see any of that money. To add injury to that insult of my intelligence, Midjourney and ChatGPT also have subscription to offer the trained AI which I also pay for (ChatGPT).

To make matters worse, we sort of have to take the training models on the word of those that use them. They don’t tell us what’s in them or where the content came from.

This is my opinion. It may not suit your needs, and if you don’t have a pleasant day. But if you agree with this, go ahead, make sure your blog is not allowing third party data sharing.

Personally, I’m unsurprised at how poorly this has been handled. Just follow some of the links early on in the post and revel in dismay.