BlueSky Proposes 'New Standard' for When Scraping Data for AI Training

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Social network Bluesky recently published a proposal on GitHub outlining new options it could give users to indicate whether they want their posts and data to be scraped for things like generative AI training and public archiving.

CEO Jay Graber discussed the proposal earlier this week, while on-stage at South by Southwest, but it attracted fresh attention on Friday night, after she posted about it on Bluesky. Some users reacted with alarm to the company's plans, which they saw as a reversal of Bluesky's previous insistence that it won't sell user data to advertisers and won't train AI on user posts.... Graber replied that generative AI companies are 'already scraping public data from across the web,' including from Bluesky, since 'everything on Bluesky is public like a website is public.' So she said Bluesky is trying to create a 'new standard' to govern that scraping, similar to the robots.txt file that websites use to communicate their permissions to web crawlers...

If a user indicates that they don't want their data used to train generative AI, the proposal says, 'Companies and research teams building AI training sets are expected to respect this intent when they see it, either when scraping websites, or doing bulk transfers using the protocol itself.'

Over on Threads someone had a different wish for our AI-enabled future. 'I want to be able to conversationally chat to my feed algorithm. To be able to explain to it the types of content I want to see, and what I don't want to see. I want this to be an ongoing conversation as it refines what it shows me, or my interests change.'

'Yeah I want this too,' posted top Instagram/Threads executive Adam Mosseri, who said he'd talked about the idea with VC Sam Lessin. 'There's a ways to go before we can do this at scale, but I think it'll happen eventually.'

Read more of this story at Slashdot.