Recently, Automattic, the parent company of WordPress and Tumblr, has sparked heated discussions in the industry. Automattic is in talks with AI companies, including Midjourney and OpenAI, to plan content on its platform for those companies to train AI to use, according to a new report from 404 Media on Tuesday. Automattic, on the other hand, tries to reassure users that they can opt out at any time.
This news not only caused a stir in the outside world, but also there were conflicts within Automattic. 404 Media reported that some of the content crawled by AI companies included private content that was not intended to be saved, and to complicate matters, some ad content that wasn't even part of Automattic, such as an ad for an old Apple Music campaign, was also reported to have been included in the training dataset.
Automattic's plans have sparked so much controversy internally that one product manager has even started pulling his own ** from Tumblr to make sure they won't be used to train AI.
Since OpenAI first launched ChatGPT in late 2022, generative AI has become big business, followed closely by text-prompt image creators from multiple companies. This technology is "trained" on large amounts of data, enabling it to generate seemingly original **, images, or text. However, major publishers have filed complaints, and some have even filed lawsuits, arguing that the vast amounts of data used to train these systems are either pirated or do not constitute "fair use" under the existing copyright system.
In today's rapid development of AI technology, your blog, ** or even graffiti may become the object of AI learning. Automattic's move has sparked controversy, but it's also a wake-up call that while enjoying the benefits of technology, we should also be aware of and in control of our digital footprint. Let's hope that this conversation on creativity, copyright and AI will lead us towards a more open and equitable digital future.