Bluesky is weighing a proposal that gives users consent over how their data is used for AI

Speaking at the SXSW conference in Austin on Monday, Bluesky CEO Jay Graber says the social network has been working on a framework for user consent over how they want their data to be used for generative AI. The public nature of Bluesky’s social network has already allowed others to train their AI systems on users’ content, as was discovered last year when 404 Media came across a dataset built from 1 million Bluesky posts hosted on Hugging Face. Bluesky competitor X, meanwhile, is feeding users’ posts into sister company xAI to help train its AI chatbot Grok. Last fall, it changed its privacy policy to allow third parties to train their AI on users’ X posts, as well. The move, followed by the U.S. elections that elevated X owner Elon Musk’s status within the Trump administration, helped fuel another exodus of users from X to Bluesky. As a result, Bluesky’s open source, decentralized X alternative has grown to over 32 million users in just two years’ time. However, the demand for A ... Read full article.