Frida. Swedish. 30+ y/o. I write, I draw, and I share what I create. Since 2020 main fandom has been Star Wars. Gen and Obikin happens here in equal measure.
"Stop saying 15 year olds with weird interests are cringe, they're 15" this is true however you should also stop saying adults with weird interests are cringe because who gives a shit
the fact that i'm no longer the same age as the protagonists of novels and films i once connected to is so heartbreaking. there was a time when I looked forward to turning their age. i did. and i also outgrew them. i continue to age, but they don't; never will. the immortality of fiction is beautiful, but cruel.
I want y'all to notice something else about tumblr’s opt-out AI setting. Look at how it was officially announced:
And now I ask you to consider something else: When we introduced “blaze other people posts”, Staff also got a lot of flak for making it an opt-out setting. But really it wasn’t (at first): When it was launched, every tumblr user got a pop-up the next time they logged in telling them about the change and warning them to go to settings and disable the new checkbox if they weren’t ok with it. And you didn’t really get opted-in until you had seen that pop-up: It could have been better, but at least there wasn’t anyone being opted-in without their knowledge.
But with AI? no pop-up, just a (very hidden) new checkbox in the blog settings, and a @staff announcement. An Staff post that makes an strong use of passive voice to not making it too clear that tumblr ACTUALLY has partnered with AI companies to sell your data: It looks like they are being nice and giving you the chance to add an extra layer of security against data scraping, right? nothing too urgent, don’t worry about it!
But then the 404 media post went out a day before they intended to (quietly) launch this and they had to rush it out. With the verbiage that was intended for a purposely low-key announcement. Sure, without that 404 post there would be some low-key pitchforks and torches, focused on why the hell don’t make this protection the default… but they weren’t planning to let us know that AUTOMATTIC ALREADY HAS A DEAL WITH OPENAI TO SELL YOUR DATA BY DEFAULT, just that “hey we are giving you this new setting to discourage any AI company to use your data for training… wouldn’t that be crazy if it happened, uh? hehe”.