BlueSky, which soared in the days following the U.S. presidential election, announced on Friday that it would no longer train its generative AI on user posts. This declaration stands in stark contrast to the AI training policies of X (Twitter) and Meta’s Threads. Perhaps not coincidentally, Bluesky’s announcement came on the same day that X’s new terms of service went into effect, allowing third-party partners to train on user posts.
“Many artists and creators are based on Bluesky, and we hear their concerns about other platforms training their data,” Bluesky posted on Friday (via The Verge). “We do not use your content to train our generative AI, nor do we intend to.”
In a follow-up post, the decentralized social platform revealed that it uses AI to help moderate content. “Bluesky uses AI internally to assist with content moderation, which allows us to prioritize posts and protect human moderators from harmful content,” the company posted. I did. Bluesky also added that it uses AI in the algorithms that power the Discover feed.
“None of these are Gen AI systems trained on user content,” Bluesky emphasized.
The Verge notes that Bluesky’s robots.txt (a policy governing what outside parties can collect from websites) does not prevent data from being crawled by OpenAI, Google, or other large GenAI companies. I am doing it. The company justified its potential hole by pointing to the open and public nature of its platform. “While robots.txt files don’t necessarily prevent outside companies from crawling these sites, the same is true here,” spokeswoman Emily Liu told The Verge. “That said, we want to do our part to ensure that external organizations respect user consent, and we are actively discussing within our team how to achieve this.”
Bluesky remains an underdog in competition with X and Threads, but the platform has gained momentum after the US election. It added more than 1 million users in the past week and passed the 15 million threshold on Wednesday.
The spike in sign-ups coincided with a spike in X deactivations, according to a report from web analytics firm SimilarWeb. It found that “more than 115,000 U.S. web visitors deactivated (X) accounts” on November 7, “more than on any day during Elon Musk’s tenure.” . In parallel, “Bluesky’s web traffic and daily active user numbers increased dramatically in the week leading up to the election and again after Election Day.”
