Platforms vs Creators: Who Should Profit?

Let’s cut to the chase because it seems that WordPress news is back this week! At least, the Link Squad inside the WP Minute Slack have been busy curating the news as we kick off the month of March. 

404 Media reported on two of Automattic’s products, WordPress.com and Tumblr.com, apparently signing a deal with “AI tools to help train their models” based on public facing content that users publish. 

I ran a poll on Twitter (it has 1 hour left at the time of this writing) asking “Does WordPress.com sharing/selling user generated content to AI platforms bother you? 

Currently respondents are steady at: 59.3% Yes, it does bother them. 40.7% No, it doesn’t. That’s based off of 135 participants. 

It’s important to know that if you are a WordPress.com user, as I am with my $300/year Podcast Setup Newsletter, you can opt out with their “Prevent third-party sharing” setting inside Settings > General. 

From what I can see this creates a robots.txt file that sets a disallow for well known AI platforms like Claude and ChatGPT — there’s some others in there as well. 

What is not clear to me, is whether or not this also disables some other API or data firehose that is part of the shared data agreement with Automattic. Is there some other connection behind the scenes where Automattic allows partners to forklift this data over to their platform? 

I uploaded a 12 minute video to Twitter going deeper on this topic and showing you in more detail what the robots.txt file does. 

My two takeaways to ponder on:

It’s what I expect of any corporation, really. The only thing Automattic has to release now is a PR note stating that they were breached and 20 million user records were stolen — but not their billing information, of course. 

If you want to go deeper into critical thinking about this topic, read the Ten Questions for Matt Mullenweg re: Data Ownership and AI — by some other guy who thinks out loud on the internet too OR hit reply, let me know how you feel about this whole thing. 

Together with The Repository

Why is Automattic selling user data to train AI tools? We unpack the negative press. Plus, we speak to WordCamp Asia organizer Jon Ang about what to expect at next week’s flagship event in Taipei and dig into what happened to DonateWC — and what happened to the money that was donated.

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Important Links of the week

Now it’s time for those important links of the week. And there’s a lot!