I thought I’d make it out of February without a final post, but here we are on Leap Day and here I am blithering on about how to (maybe) block AI from scraping your WordPress blog.
To “prevent third-party sharing” with anyone, including and especially with “partners” that “train AI models,” open your WordPress dashboard, select Settings, then under Privacy, Public, make sure to check the Prevent… checkbox (see screenshot at the start of this post). Make sure to click the Save settings button at the top.
Over the last few days many articles have cropped up about how Automattic, the owner of WordPress and Tumblr, have struck deals with one or more AI companies to sell content on both sites as training data to help train said AIs. Reading about this indirectly in the news as apposed to hearing about it directly from Automattic is not “good optics” with regards to Automattic. But I shouldn’t be surprised by this, as the biggest story so far is how Reddit basically screwed everybody over on the Reddit site by charging money for use of their API, which in turn led directly to Reddit selling training data content to big AI for what are probably pennies on the dollar. All of this selling is well after it became plain how AI models were strip-mining the web of every big of content they could lay their digital hands on, copyright be damned.
Making sharing an opt-out instead of an opt-in is so typical of the web these days, as is burying it within menus and then not telling anyone about it until all hell breaks loose.
Links
- Tumblr and WordPress to Sell Users’ Data to Train AI Tools — https://www.404media.co/tumblr-and-wordpress-to-sell-users-data-to-train-ai-tools/
- A poster’s guide to who’s selling your data to train AI — https://www.vox.com/technology/24086039/reddit-tumblr-wordpress-whos-selling-your-data-to-train-ai
Radarwitch
Thank you for that valuable information. Since my attitude is basically that all AI efforts everywhere should be banned under penalty of death, I have to say it’s not very comforting to know that yet another web site has snuck in ‘parsing for profit’. It ought to at least be illegal for them to do this without telling people (I suppose there was some notice somewhere probably requiring a subscription to learn about the change). Really getting tired of the constant and increasing misuse of technology to abuse end users for the sake of corporate dollars.
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