Users of the popular blogging and web publishing platform WordPress reacted with alarm to a report this week from 404 Media on documentation showing that WordPress parent company Automattic was in final talks to share users’ published data with AI companies OpenAI and Midjourney to train their models.
VentureBeat, a WordPress customer (this article and our entire site are published on the platform), received the following email text from WordPress CEO Nick Gernert, a copy and paste from a blog he published on the WordPress VIP Lobby today:
You may see news reports of our parent company, Automattic, striking deals to sell data from WordPress.com and Tumblr to OpenAI and Midjourney. The original report appeared in 404 Media and was picked up by The Verge.
I want to assure WordPress VIP customers that your data has not been shared as part of any deal that Automattic may have negotiated and we will never share your data without explicit consent.
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And while we’re on the topic of AI crawlers and your content – while it is not possible to prevent all AI crawlers, you can signal to reputable organizations that you do not want your content crawled. We have more on managing AI crawlers in our documentation.
Please do reach out directly – I’m ng@automattic.com – if I can help in any way. Thank you for your continued partnership.
Notably, Gernert’s blog post and email text specify that “WordPress VIP customers” can be assured their data has not been shared and will not be shared “without explicit consent.” Yet WordPress VIP is but one of the three-tiered options offered under the brand named WordPress — and the one that is the most costly at $25,000/year, designed for enterprises rather than individuals.
I’ve emailed Gernert at the email he left in the blog post to ask if the content-sharing policy he outlined applies to users of its free WordPress.org open-source blogging code repository and WordPress.com fully hosted version, the latter of which is more tailored to individual bloggers and small publishers. As noted on the WordPress VIP site, collectively, WordPress powers about 40% of the entire internet, so licensing any part of it for AI training would be, in the words of U.S. President Joe Biden, a “big f***ing deal.”
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