Tumblr and OpenAI are fixing up a deal.

Tumblr getting in bed with AI bigwigs. Automattic, the company behind Tumblr and WordPress, is reportedly close to deals with OpenAI and Midjourney.

What's going on here?

Tumblr and WordPress are joining the AI auction with their massive data pile.

What does this mean?

The deal has been buzzing within the Tumblr community for a while now. 404 Media reported that Automattic plans to introduce an opt-out setting for users who don't want their content used by AI companies.

Automattic took the report personally and dropped a statement on "Protecting User Choice". First, it makes a pinky promise about blocking AI crawlers by default and only sharing public stuff where users are chill with it. Then we get to the good stuff: the company is working with unnamed AI companies that respect what the community wants—attribution, opt-outs, and control.

Don’t @ me but that 404 Media report says they have already scraped an initial dataset of Tumblr posts from 2014-2023, with stuff that’s not so public.

Why should I care?

My post about Reddit’s $60M deal for its data aged like a fine wine. More content platforms are realizing they’ve got the goods big AI companies want. Many don’t want to train their own LLMs but licensing this data can mean a big payday. Especially when many are in a cash crunch.

On the other hand, AI trained on this data is gonna be wild. This will be us millennials’ retribution.