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We recently shared Bluesky’s stance on user data and AI training, which has not changed. Bluesky will not train generative AI on user data. bsky.app/profile/bsky...

Bluesky@bsky.app

A number of artists and creators have made their home on Bluesky, and we hear their concerns with other platforms training on their data. We do not use any of your content to train generative AI, and have no intention of doing so.

Bluesky is an open and public social network, much like websites on the Internet itself. Websites can specify whether they consent to outside companies crawling their data with a robots.txt file, and we’re investigating a similar practice here.

For example, this might look like a setting that allows Bluesky users to specify whether they consent to outside developers using their content in AI training datasets Bluesky won’t be able to enforce this consent outside of our systems. It will be up to outside developers to respect these settings

We’re having ongoing conversations with engineers & lawyers and we hope to have more updates to share on this shortly!

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Option to completely disable AI? I am so sick of it being pushed on me in every single app! I don't need help to think of DMs to people! I'm a good writer and my brain still works. I feel like I'm being offered a wheelchair every time I get off the couch. I want AI to fuck off! Thank you! ❤️

Aren't there better things to spend engineer and legal hours on, than legitimizing a manufactured moral panic? Like actually encrypting DMs or fixing the regular netsplits between the PDSs?

Back when I was a software engineer at Blizzard, I kept hearing our players saying things like "why don't you spend time fixing the 3D models for this and that instead of what you're currently doing", and, like, I'm not an artist, I'm a software engineer...

Tbh you don’t need Ai here on Bluey. Users will post content and use the app like the old (and good) Twitter. We don’t need Ai writing our posts etc. Keep it all simple, and keep Ai away from the platform. Let the users create the content we will post, and Bluey will thrive.

While you're talking with lawyers, can you also discuss changing section (2 C) and (2 D i) of the terms of service to remove or change the phrase "future offerings"? There's concern that that's too broad, and it would let you be malicious with our data if control of the team changed.

If you can't offer assurances that our creative output won't be fed to the AI slop machine without our consent, creators will (and should) stop posting on this platform

The only ways they could stop this is requiring login to view posts or private accounts. The latter reduces visibility for artists entirely. The former guarantees nothing unless they also put a clause in the user agreement about not training AI (still hard to enforce though).

So if a billionaire come to pay millions to "outside developers " in order to create AI networks in bluesky, which will be trained by our accounts posts, is OK for you..... this is insane, men. Anyone of the billionaires will can do that to manipulate the safety of bluesky.

Hi there! As an artist, I'd like to give my input on this. And while I know that you're likely being flooded by responses, I hope that someone sees this and at least gets them thinking. First: I hope that you're not just working with lawyers and engineers. Involve artists in the conversation too.

Second: This may be what you're working with the engineers on, but there are plenty of ways to 'glaze' artwork to prevent AI scraping. Perhaps you could apply that to any images that are uploaded to Bluesky, except for the users who have opted in Third: PLEASE have it be opt-in and NOT opt-out.

Finally: It makes me very happy to see companies and organizations working to make AI training ethical. First SAG-AFTRA negotiating the regulations for voice actors being able to be paid for training, and now this. I can tell that y'all genuinely care and are trying to make it as best as possible.

would not recommend this, glaze itself is an AI model and it's inference uses up a lot of resources just for a single image. I could not imagine how more computing you'd need just for any time someone wants to upload an image

Glad to hear this! As I understand it (happy to be corrected, not an AT expert), you should have both technical and legal remedies at your disposal. You can collaborate across hosts to track IPs that are accessing inhumanly large amounts of data at inhuman speeds and block or rate limit them, no?

I have been trying to warm up to Blue Sky, but I find the character limitations and other limitations to be irritating at best. I just tried to post a couple of videos, and was informed that videos could not be longer than 60 seconds. Too many restrictions. #Bluesky

Please let me know how I might join such a conversation. Been making some #powershell #websocket experiments with the site, and want to ensure that any user can easily ban ai training / scraping.

Do what you have to grow, we live in 2024 and users need to understand we live in a different landscape than before. Google, Meta, and X all utilize these tools for their benefit. We can’t lag behind now.

The benefit on those platforms being? Driving people away? Making people stop interacting cause everything they post gets fed into a machine so someone else can shit out 14 copies of something that looks just different enough to sell while the actual artist doesn’t get any of the profit?

Eager to hear what your lawyers and engineers come up with. I'm a singer-songwriter. I've stopped using most social media platforms because of their gross lack of ethics when it comes to AI. I was truly hoping that this site would be different.

It's as different as it technically can be, that's the big thing. There literally is no way to prevent this scraping, especially on something with a public protocol like BlueSky has with AT. This truly isn't about BlueSky's ethics. This is entirely about the ethics of other companies.

They have the traction and demand to make the bold move of siding with artists. If they didn’t think something could be done they wouldn’t bother meeting with lawyers and engineers. I hope they think as big as the orgs and artists who have been making strides with litigation.

Meeting can just mean "is there anything else we can do?" We've had this issue on the internet since the 90s, and we haven't been able to solve it yet. Just a bunch of agreements that only work when people follow them.

I hope they look beyond what they can’t prevent and look into what resources they can arm artists with to make litigation against companies who are scraping much easier. And perhaps they should attempt to do what Cara was trying to with Glaze integration.

The getting lawyers and all makes me feel a tiny bit better but im still kinda eh… when it’s up to rich fucks to honor people’s consent if they opt out of something. The rich will do what’s best for their own interest.. and once somethings used to train an ai model.. it’s in the ai’s system :/

give me a shout please, I’d like to understand this better as we can share notes on how trusted publishers of news and entertainment are also approaching these signals. Thanks.

Bluesky made the same analogy. They also talked about individual-level consent, which is also interesting. Mastodon's got a simple opt-in/opt-out for search indexes, that's clearly not enough but perhaps an interesting place to start.