For any Tumblr users here, this has already rolled out completely unannounced and is opt-in by default. You need to manually opt out, which can only be done on the desktop website. Odds are good that your data is already being sold to Midjourney and used to train their models.

To do so, click on your blog on the sidebar, click on Blog Settings on the other sidebar on the right, scroll down to the Visibility section, and turn the "Prevent third-party sharing for [your blog]" toggle to ON, not off. If you have any sideblogs, you'll need to manually do this for each of them as well. It's per blog and not account-wide.

How does tumblr keep jumping into bad decisions don't they know their audience lmao

Class actions need to be made. Not just against AI, but Facebook, Google, Microsoft, banks... Basically anyone who collects data for profit while slipping it in as a secondary transaction in the terms and conditions, without providing any consideration.

The data brokerage industry is a $400bn industry, yet there are only 8bn people in the world. Even if we assume everyone is online and everyone's data is of equal value (both are far from true), that means an individual's data is worth at least $50 per year on the market. These are just people buying and selling data, and does not include companies that keep proprietary datasets and only sell advertising, or the value of peoples' written works online (which is likely of even greater value). Businesses are now selling off our copyrighted work for far less than its worth, all the while not paying the creator their rightful dues.

It simply isn't the case that data is traded for access to the website or service. That isn't how the transaction is presented. Front and centre, the services are offered free of charge (or sometimes, eg with Microsoft, you already pay for the service) and then a second transaction is buried in the fine print in obscure language. The entire purpose of this is deception, so the user does not understand the value they are giving up, and so as to deny them a fair opportunity to assess any supposed value exchange - because it isn't an exchange, you're giving it up for free, just like they give you access for free. It's two separate transactions deceptively run parallel.

You can't build a car without paying for the nuts and bolts. They steal the nuts and bolts we produce and then sell them on as their own products.

Edit: weird formatting issues from posting with low signal.

It should be illegal for the company to own user-generated contents. They should at least pay the users.

So after banning adult content a few years ago, Tumblr decided to shoot itself in the other foot? It feels like the people in charge are actively trying to drive off the site's users.

is there a real fediverse alternative to tumblr yet? i did hear that tumblr was working on activitypub support... but this shows the opposite intentions :<

Think AI as the new tool to make money quickly after crypto, NFT, etc.

@alyaza Freaking hell, is there any more mainstream social media platform left that does not and does not plan to sell your data to an AI already?!? *sigh*

This sucks, but I'm also morbidly curious of how unhinged an AI trained on Tumblr posts would be.

Glad I have lemmy and sharkey in these trying times

sincerely considering spinning up a sharkey instance as a tumblr alternative because fuck tumblr

I don't know what Train AI Tools are, but I'd be ok with them if they had the temperament of Thomas the Train rather than Blain the Mono. How do we know which Train AI is buying our data?