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The owner of Tumblr and WordPress.com is in talks with AI companies Midjourney and OpenAI to provide training data scraped from users\u2019 posts, a report from 404 Media<\/em> alleges<\/a>. The report, based on an anonymous source inside the company, says that deals between Automattic and the two AI companies are \u201cimminent.\u201d It follows nebulous rumors<\/a> that have spread on Tumblr over the past week, suggesting a deal with Midjourney could provide a new revenue stream for the site.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n According to 404<\/em>\u2019s <\/em>report, Automattic plans to launch a new setting Wednesday that will \u201callow users to opt-out of data sharing with third parties, including AI companies.\u201d But it cites internal posts that suggest the company scraped an \u201cinitial data dump\u201d containing \u201call Tumblr\u2019s public post content between 2014 and 2023,\u201d including \u2014 apparently by mistake \u2014 content that wouldn\u2019t be publicly visible on blogs. It\u2019s unclear what was done with this data and what data (if any) has been sent to Midjourney and OpenAI. OpenAI, Midjourney, and Automattic did not immediately respond to requests for comment from The Verge<\/em>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n A number of companies have struck deals with AI tool makers to provide training data \u2014 which has historically been scraped from publicly available online data, a process that\u2019s become legally riskier<\/a> in recent years. Reddit reportedly has a $60 million annual deal<\/a> with Google, while Shutterstock has signed a deal with OpenAI<\/a> to train on its photo library. But a number of artists and writers \u2014 in other words, the creative community that Tumblr in particular caters to \u2014 have protested their work being used for training. Companies have struggled to walk a line between satisfying users and experimenting with new AI tools, leading to backlash against online spaces like DeviantArt<\/a> that have flirted with the tech. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n For now, there\u2019s not much information about what any deal would entail, nor how much Automattic stands to gain from it. The company has a long-standing web hosting business with WordPress.com and WordPress VIP, both built on the open-source WordPress software. But it\u2019s struggled with a variety of methods for monetizing Tumblr \u2014 which it acquired from Verizon in 2019<\/a> \u2014 and announced that it would downscale its ambitions<\/a> for the site last year.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n