NEW from @samleecole: Tumblr and Wordpress are preparing to sell user data to Midjourney and OpenAI, according to internal documentation we've reviewed 404media.co/tumblr-and-wor…
@samleecole An initial scrape of data for Midjourney and OpenAI included private and deleted posts, things Tumblr doesn't have rights to. Unclear if this was turned over or was caught, with cleaning work ongoing
here's a podcast where we discuss what's happening and why: The 404 Media Podcast wherever you get them, or here: shows.acast.com/64e387653cabbc…
Besides this deal, Automattic edited a developer page in September to explicitly allow for AI companies to buy access to a "firehose" of a million WordPress posts per day through a company called SocialGist 404media.co/wordpress-fire…
@jason_koebler @samleecole I've paid for pro Wordpress for yrs for my tech ethics reporting site redtailmedia.org & personal project w lots of audio/photos (redtailmedia.org/spilling-grain/). I'm resigned to possibility this content is in scraped datasets. But packaging it for sale is a different beast.
@jason_koebler @samleecole This is not okay @WordPress prepare for legal action. CEASE AND DESIST.
@jason_koebler @samleecole Genuinely frustrating as I started hosting my art blog/portfolio on Tumblr to avoid scrape-happy platforms like DA and Twitter..... guess i'd just be better off hosting my own damn website at this rate
@jason_koebler @rachelcoldicutt @samleecole My stuff is not theirs to sell.
@jason_koebler @samleecole Recently I tried to delete a post of wordpress's forum, on their own site. They don't let you delete old forum posts. I had to beg and plead to someone at wordpress to remove it, it took months. It was awful just to delete an old forum post.