Bluesky says it won't train AI on your posts

(theverge.com)

25 points | by rntn 3 hours ago

6 comments

  • righthand 3 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 3 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 3 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 3 hours ago
        Right they didn’t promise to prevent generative AI from scraping. Does Dorsey have any generative AI investments?
        • nasso_dev 3 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 3 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 3 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 3 hours ago
        Right so they aren’t offering any sort of actual value in that promise to the user, other than moral security.
        • kevinh 3 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 3 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 3 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 3 hours ago
      This is certainly aimed at illustrators and artists flocking from X to Bluesky, not people microblogging.
  • christkv 3 hours ago
    Reminds me of that company with that slogan “don’t be evil” or something /s.
    • pfraze 3 hours ago
      actually our slogan is "the company is a future adversary"
  • TheMoonToMyLeft 2 hours ago
    [dead]
  • derelicta 3 hours ago
    For now...
    • theshrike79 2 hours ago
      Mastodon can’t promise it either, nor can they prevent it