OpenAI and Tumblr aren’t like, besties. Tumblr has always had issues with bots and spam so I don’t think they were exactly stumbling out the door to make a contract with the company that’s been the spearhead of modern day spam.

Tumblr and openAI negotiated the contract, so think for a second about what each company gets out of the deal. You can easily argue that OpenAI wouldn’t want an opt-out option, so you could also argue tumblr was the party behind the option existing. This is all speculation, but it’s just as valid to say ‘The opt-out option was a non-negotiable for tumblr, but OpenAI pressured them into making it opt-out instead of opt-in’ as it is to say ‘Tumblr only included the opt-out option to appease the user base’. People are only making the latter point (and I’d argue are primed to accept it) because all the fear-mongering has made everyone’s knee jerk reaction to AI fear and rage. Oooooo neural nets and weighted graphs Ooooooooooo they’re gonna kill art for real this time for real oooooo all the other panics about automation were wrong but THIS one is real I promise oooooooooooo we need to ‘Kill AI’ just like we had to ‘kill automation’ because technology has gotten too advanced. we need to make computers worse and then everything will get better ooooooooooo