Bluesky, which has grown in the days following the US election, said on Friday that it will not practice on its users’ posts about AI for production. This announcement is very different from the AI training policies of X (Twitter) and Meta Braids. Perhaps not coincidentally, Bluesky’s announcement came on the same day X’s new terms of service, which allow third-party partners to train on user submissions, went into effect.
“A number of artists and creators have made their home on Bluesky, and we hear their concerns about training other platforms with their data,” Bluesky posted (via The Verge) on Friday. “We do not use any of your content to train artificial intelligence, and we have no intention of doing so.”
In a follow-up post, the decentralized social network clarified that it uses AI to help moderate content. “Bluesky uses internal AI to assist in content moderation, which helps us screen posts and protect human moderators from harmful content,” the company posted. Bluesky also added that it uses AI in the algorithms that power its Discover feed.
“None of these are Gen AI programs trained on user content,” Bluesky emphasized.
The Verge points out that Bluesky’s robots.txt (the policy that dictates what third parties can extract from the website) does not prevent OpenAI, Google or other leading GenAI companies from searching its data. The company justified that potential hole by pointing to an open and public platform. “Just as robots.txt files don’t prevent third parties from crawling those sites, it’s the same here,” spokeswoman Emily Liu said. The Verge. “Having said that, we would like to do our part to ensure that external orgs respect user consent and are actively discussing within the group how they can achieve this.”
Although Bluesky is still the underdog in the race for X and Threads, the platform has caught its breath after the US election. It passed the 15 million user mark on Wednesday after adding more than a million in the previous week.
A report from web analytics firm SimilarWeb noted that sign-ups coincided with a spike in X’s shutdown. It found that “more than 115,000 US web browsers have shut down [X] account” on November 7, “more than any previous day in Elon Musk’s tenure.” Correspondingly, “web traffic and daily active users of Bluesky increased significantly in the week before the election, and after the election day.”
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