404Media: “Tumblr and WordPress.com are preparing to sell user data to Midjourney and OpenAI, according to a source with internal knowledge about the deals and internal documentation referring to the deals. The exact types of data from each platform going to each company are not spelled out in documentation we’ve reviewed, but internal communications reviewed by 404 Media make clear that deals between Automattic, the platforms’ parent company, and OpenAI and Midjourney are imminent. The internal documentation details a messy and controversial process within Tumblr itself. One internal post made by Cyle Gage, a product manager at Tumblr, states that a query made to prepare data for OpenAI and Midjourney compiled a huge number of user posts that it wasn’t supposed to. It is not clear from Gage’s post whether this data has already been sent to OpenAI and Midjourney, or whether Gage was detailing a process for scrubbing the data before it was to be sent…The statement published by Automattic after this article was published specifically mentions WordPress.com, which are blogs that Automattic hosts as a service. There is separately an open-source WordPress CMS (WordPress.org) that people and businesses use on self-hosted websites. What remains unclear is whether self-hosted WordPress blogs that use popular Automattic plugins like JetPack to connect those blogs with Automattic’s infrastructure are subject to the company’s AI-scraping deals. Automattic did not immediately respond to a question about whether sites using JetPack are subject to its data sharing agreements.”

• See also The Verge: How to keep your art out of AI generators
• See also Vox – A poster’s guide to who’s selling your data to train AI. Those Tumblr, Reddit, and WordPress posts you never thought would see the light of day? Yep, them too.