Read this today and have a sad feeling about this website. The Internal documents about this deal was uncovered by 404 media. This deal is similar to Reddit and google doing the same, with Google using Reddit data to train Google Models.
I feel that in today’s age with so much data generated on these free sites it’s hard to say what business model these companies will change to. The issues is there is no opt out option from the start and we don’t know what kind of data is used. There is a lot of private blogs and content that is going to be fed to the LLM without user consent.
Looking at Medium where I also blog sometimes, their default stance is No to training data for your stories.
https://blog.medium.com/default-no-to-ai-training-on-your-stories-abb5b4589c8
WordPress.Com was originally pitching the idea to have your website hosted and have a presence online, it was a good alternative to social media which takes all your data and sell it to advertisers.
WordPress has paid services which I feel they should do more to protect user data. In the deal memo private blogs will be part of the data to be sold. It is also not clear how these blogs and images will be packaged for the AI companies.
Right not it might be better to self host if you can. I do think that AI integration will come to all services but I feel that Automattic should be more transparent about this and not hide the settings.
Pay Me
One solution is to pay those who opt in to have their data trained for the LLM.
Link to article: https://www.404media.co/tumblr-and-wordpress-to-sell-users-data-to-train-ai-tools
If You can follow the settings guide here to Opt out of the training data.
The new toggle can be found in Settings → General → privacy section. Or, you can click here: https://wordpress.com/settings/general.
Reference Links:
https://wordpress.com/read/blogs/147750070/posts/14821
