Internal documents obtained by 404 Media show that Tumblr staff compiled users' data as part of a deal with Midjourney and OpenAI.

this could not be timed worse for Tumblr which is in huge hot water with its userbase already for its CEO breaking his sabbatical to ban a prominent trans user for allegedly threatening him (in a cartoonish manner), and then spending a week personally justifying it increasingly wildly across several platforms. the rumors had already been swirling that this would occur, but this just cements that they were correct

    • FaceDeer
      20•1 year ago

      They’re giving you services in exchange for your contents.

      Does nobody even think about TOS any more? You don’t have to read any specific one, just realize the basic universal truth that no website is going to accept your contents without some kind of legal protection that allows them to use that content.

        • FaceDeer
          9•1 year ago

          Are you serious? We’re speaking in the Fediverse right now. It’s notable in its difference. Though instances have their own TOSes, so it’d be pretty trivial to set one up to harvest content for AI training as well.

            • FaceDeer
              2•1 year ago

              A user’s data still belongs to the user when they post it on sites like Reddit and such, too. The ToS doesn’t take ownership away from them, at least not in any case that I’ve seen. It just gives the site the license to use it as well.

              • @eveninghere@beehaw.org
                1•1 year ago

                I mean, even if that’s tue, I don’t count it as “ownership” if they change the monetization scheme for what I wrote, without giving me a good chance to say what I get in return. Reddit even allegedly put back comments which users deleted.

                It’s near-impossible to delete all my own comments on Reddit, for example.

                • FaceDeer
                  1•1 year ago

                  It’s true, go ahead and read the ToS. It only grants a license to Reddit to use your content. It explicitly says:

                  You retain any ownership rights you have in Your Content, but you grant Reddit the following license to use that Content:

                  And then goes on to enumerate what you’re licensing them to do with it. There’s also a section titled “Changes to these Terms” about how they can change the ToS going forward.

    • @jarfil@beehaw.org
      2•1 year ago

      No, and no, and no:

      • If a user wants to assign ownership to a company, that’s their right.
      • These companies DO NOT ask for ownership, they only license the content (ownership carries responsibilities, they don’t want those).
      • Whether a user wants to get paid or not, is again up to them (see the various OpenSource and CC licenses).
      • @eveninghere@beehaw.org
        2•1 year ago

        Hard disagree.

        • Companies don’t give you a good chance to prevent them from eroding your control on the data further.
        • Even if they technically disown the data, they’re doing even worse. They are de-facto doing anything they want without taking responsibility
        • Open source / CC licenses don’t apply to whatever user data people are talking about here