Social network Bluesky, in a post on Friday, says that it has “no intention” of taking user content to train generative AI tools. It made the statement the same day X’s new terms of service that spell out how it can analyze user text and other information to train its generative AI tools go into effect.
“A number of artists and creators have made their home on Bluesky, and we hear their concerns with other platforms training on their data,” Bluesky says in a post. “We do not use any of your content to train generative AI, and have no intention of doing so.”
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.”
In another post, Bluesky notes that it uses AI to “assist in content moderation, which helps us triage posts and shield human moderators from harmful content.” It also uses it in the algorithmic Discover feed. “None of these are Gen AI systems trained on user content,” Bluesky says. The company also points to a page where you can find its terms of service, community guidelines, and other policy documents.
Bluesky just crossed 17 million users, according to a stat tracker, as users seek out alternative microblogging platforms to X. Meta’s Threads, one of its primary competitors, isn’t standing by. Threads boss Adam Mosseri said yesterday that the platform has already surpassed more than 15 million signups just this month, and Meta said today that it is testing custom feeds — a feature that Bluesky is already well known for. Unlike Bluesky, however, Meta recently acknowledged that it’s trained its AI models on almost everything you’ve posted publicly since 2007.
Correction, November 15th: We initially said that Bluesky made its statement ahead of X’s new terms of service going into effect, but those revised terms are in effect as of today.
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