Bluesky says it won't train AI on your posts

(theverge.com)

27 points | by rntn 12 hours ago ago

18 comments

  • righthand 12 hours ago

    If I can run my own instance can they really promise that?

    They may not but the AI companies will. Seems like an easy promise to keep is all.

    • superfrank 12 hours ago

      > Other companies could still potentially scrape your Bluesky posts for training. Bluesky’s robots.txt doesn’t exclude crawlers from Google, OpenAI, or others, meaning those companies may crawl Bluesky data. “Bluesky is an open and public social network, much like websites on the Internet itself,” spokesperson Emily Liu tells The Verge. “Just as robots.txt files don’t always prevent outside companies from crawling those sites, the same applies here. That said, we’d like to do our part to ensure that outside orgs respect user consent and are actively discussing within the team on how to achieve this.”

      They can't and they fully admit that.

    • beepbooptheory 12 hours ago

      It is a promise from Bluesky specifically, not the entire atproto "atmosphere", as they call it. This is ultimately no different than if Twitter promised such a thing, but couldn't stop people from still scraping the site.

      • righthand 12 hours ago

        Right they didn’t promise to prevent generative AI from scraping. Does Dorsey have any generative AI investments?

        • nasso_dev 12 hours ago

          for the record: Dorsey has nothing to do with Bluesky today (he even hates it now)

          https://www.theguardian.com/technology/article/2024/may/07/j...

          • culi 11 hours ago

            Hate is some strong editorializing. He hasn't made any statements against Bluesky. All he's done is encouraged people to stay on Twitter after Musk initially took over. Internet denizens saw that as anti-Bluesky. He's never actually publicly critiqued Bluesky

            My opinion: he's probably trying to avoid legal trouble that would come from propping up a Twitter competitor after making a major sale. Especially one that was initially conceived within Twitter itself

    • bananapub 12 hours ago

      > If I can run my own instance can they really promise that?

      what? it's Bluesky promising not to do a thing, they're not promising every other entity in the world won't do a thing.

      • righthand 12 hours ago

        Right so they aren’t offering any sort of actual value in that promise to the user, other than moral security.

        • kevinh 11 hours ago

          You generally give the company whose platform you're hosting on a license to use your work. That's not something that they'd have that groups scraping the data would not. If the tide turns on AI having to respect copyright, that could significantly change the significance of that promise. Will it? Probably not.

      • daft_pink 11 hours ago

        i think people are a little bit unclear about what such a promise means or if it’s even of value for a decentralized system compared to the usefulness of such a promise for a traditional centralized social network.

  • nightski 12 hours ago

    I think a public short message service like X / Bluesky / etc.. is the one area where I absolutely could care less if AI is trained on it lol.

    • jchw 12 hours ago

      This is certainly aimed at illustrators and artists flocking from X to Bluesky, not people microblogging.

  • 12 hours ago
    [deleted]
  • christkv 12 hours ago

    Reminds me of that company with that slogan “don’t be evil” or something /s.

    • pfraze 12 hours ago

      actually our slogan is "the company is a future adversary"

  • TheMoonToMyLeft 11 hours ago

    [dead]

  • derelicta 12 hours ago

    For now...

    • theshrike79 11 hours ago

      Mastodon can’t promise it either, nor can they prevent it