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lostcitycomics · 29 days
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The End
I'm heartbroken. I've been on Tumblr on and off since 2011. But the recent announcement from @staff that Tumblr is selling all of OUR content to Midjourney and OpenAI has left me at the end of the road. Yes, they have a tab you can click that says "please don't share my work with AI." I don't trust that. Midjourney stole an unknown amount of my work without the fig leaf of an automatic opt-in, and I'm supposed to believe the clicky thing is enough protection?
For now I've made all my posts from the past 13 years private. That's no guarantee Midjourney won't end up stealing my work anyways, since they no longer need to skim the internet for it, they can get it straight from Tumblr staff. But also, it's being reported that Tumblr ALREADY gave them all of our content, so no matter what I do there's little safety here. I'm leaving this shuttered Tumblr as a monument to the following statement:
Midjourney and OpenAI can have my work over my dead body. Let my opposition to AI theft be on record, so when you end up in court, there can be no lack of clarity. I did everything I could to stop you.
To the friends who have followed me for all this time, I don't know where else I can send you. I'm still on Bluesky regularly. I have my own websites. I have a Webtoon. That's it. It feels like the internet keeps getting smaller. But I'll be online, somehow, in forgotten corners where no one ever looks, for a while yet at least. Until there's nothing left.
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lostcitycomics · 1 month
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Mijourney already stole art from me. @staff When this deal goes through, I will be removing the content from all three of my blogs and shutting them down permanently. I have been on this app for so many years that I’ve long since stopped paying attention to the anniversary announcements. You do not have a right to my art. I would rather burn it all than let you have it.
What is this about the tumblr staff wanting to sell art data to midjourney?
An ex-colleague of mine mentioned yesterday that there may be contacts between Automattic and midjourney in that direction, but nothing is public yet and I don't have any more info. They probably won't have anything specific to share either, since they left the company weeks ago too. That being said:
I have no reason to doubt my ex-coworker word, they are a trustworthy person.
Tumblr's CEO has been absurdly enthusiastic (comically, even) about AI, and is a big fan of LLMs and 'AI' companies.
A deal with midjourney could solve tumblr financial issues (not the same company, but openAi is paying up to 5 million/year to news companies to use their content as training data... tumblr generates several orders of magnitude more content than any newspaper or any media company and it only would need a 20 to 30 million per year deal to be profitable)
So I don't have any extra info yet, but I'm keeping my ears open.
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