Bluesky, the company behind the social network that has seen enormous growth in recent days, announced on Friday that it will not use its users’ posts to train generative artificial intelligence systems. This decision stands in stark contrast to the policies of X and Threads.
This statement, however, was not released at a random time but on the very same day I am X’s new terms of service come into effect that allow third-party partners to use user content for AI training.
Bluesky’s only uses of AI are for content moderation and content discovery algorithms.
Bluesky’s decision comes strategically at a time of strong growth for the platform, which surpassed 15 million users on Wednesday after adding more than one million subscribers in the last week. This increase coincides with the peak of account deactivations on Xfollowing Elon Musk’s political position in America and statements regarding AI training.
“Many artists and creators have made Bluesky their home, and we we listen to their concerns about the use of their data by other AI training platforms,” Bluesky said. “We do not use any of your content to train generative AI and have no intention of doing so.”
The company also wanted to point out that it uses AI internally to assist with content moderation and the algorithms that power the Discover feed. “None of these are generative AI systems, trained on user content,” Bluesky pointed out.
Despite Bluesky’s clear position, the platform’s robots.txt file does not prevent major generative AI companies like OpenAI and Google from collecting data from the site. Spokesperson Emily Liu explained: “Just as robots.txt files don’t always prevent outside companies from collecting data from those sites, the same is true here. That said, we’d like to do our part to ensure that outside organizations respect consent of users and we are actively discussing within the team how to achieve this.”
The recent explosion of Bluesky, as we anticipated earlier, is closely linked to recent political events. SimilarWeb found that “more than 115,000 US web visitors deactivated their X accounts” on November 7, “more than on any other day since Elon Musk took over.” At the same time, “Bluesky’s web traffic and daily active users increased dramatically in the week leading up to the election and began growing exponentially again on Election Day.”
Source: www.tomshw.it
