Illustration: The Verge
The owner of Tumblr and WordPress.com is in talks with AI companies Midjourney and OpenAI to provide training data scraped from users’ posts, a report from 404 Media alleges. The report, based on an anonymous source inside the company, says that deals between Automattic and the two AI companies are “imminent.” It follows nebulous rumors that have spread on Tumblr over the past week, suggesting a deal with Midjourney could provide a new revenue stream for the site.
According to 404’s report, Automattic plans to launch a new setting Wednesday that will “allow users to opt-out of data sharing with third parties, including AI companies.” But it cites internal posts that suggest the company scraped an “initial data dump” containing “all…