Bluesky has been seeing a sign-up surge following the announcement of a change in X’s blocking policy. As the platform is growing more than ever, Bluesky has now addressed its users saying it doesn’t train generative AI on their posts and has no intention to do so down the line.
Bluesky assures users it won’t train generative AI on their posts
The latest announcement from Bluesky came the same day X started implementing changes to its blocking feature. In a post, the company mentioned that it is aware of users’ concerns about other platforms training AI on their data. Bluesky further confirmed, “We do not use any of your content to train generative AI, and have no intention of doing so.”
In a continued post thread, Bluesky adds that it only uses AI internally for content moderation which helps the platform to filter posts and protect human moderators from harmful content. The company also says that it uses AI in the Discover algorithmic feed to serve posts based on users’ preferences.
Bluesky further states, “None of these are Gen AI systems trained on user content.” The company also encourages users to learn more about its terms of service, community guidelines, and other policy documents.
Other companies could still use your Bluesky post, though
It’s worth noting that your Bluesky posts aren’t entirely safe from being fed to generative AI, though. Other companies could still use them for training their AI models. Now, you must be wondering why is that even a possibility, right? Well, Bluesky’s robot.txt doesn’t exclude crawlers from companies including Google, OpenAI, and more. In other words, outside companies can still crawl Bluesky data.
In a statement to The Verge, Bluesky’s spokesperson Emily Liu said, “Bluesky is an open and public social network, much like websites on the Internet itself. Just as robots.txt files don’t always prevent outside companies from crawling those sites, the same applies here.” However, she assured that the company would do its part in ensuring other companies respect their users’ content. The company is reportedly mulling over ideas for the same.
In case you’re unaware, Bluesky became available to everyone in February 2024. Now, it stands as a direct competitor to X (formerly Twitter). The social media platform reportedly gained nearly 2 million users following X’s ban in Brazil over a misinformation feud. Moreover, Bluesky’s COO has recently also hinted that the company could soon introduce a paid subscription without the blue tick.