Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/04/05/photobucket-archives-may-sell-for-billions-to-train-ai.html
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Well, I guess that means they’re at least paying someone for the images, even if it’s still not the people who put in all the work. 
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Too late now, yet it would’ve been a better* thing had there been more of an effort to train 'A.I.'s on carefully curated databases rather than whatever was available and, typically, questionably scraped. (“So we’ve achieved the artificial intelligence of a paranoid 4chan follower” “Well if you wanted reality, that’ll cost ya double”)
(*‘better’ from a particular point of view)
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Any bets that they’re selling images that users thought they deleted when Photobucket enshittified many years ago?
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So glad that I never used PhotoBucket; this is so fucked up for everyone who did.
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No bets, but quite likely lawsuits from people who thought that once images were deleted, they were gone forever instead of just getting moved into a dumpster.
Tumblr’s CEO is on the same path, and that site’s userbase is up in arms about it (amongst other things…)
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Did their TOS at the time of “deletion” allow for anything close to this use of copyright material?
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Not that it will stop them from selling years of my hard work, but I guess it’s time to remove all my art from Tumblr…
There’s literally nowhere that it is safe to share your work.
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Sometime last year I got hit with about a hundred emails from Photobucket ‘reminding me’ to backup my photos and to come and ‘renew’ my account. I haven’t been on that site for at least a decade. I have no idea what, if any, photos I might have had on there - not many is a certainty.
I assumed that was a last gasp to boost their revenues before a sale, and I was probably right.
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I never did either, but i have pictures up on FB. Good thing they can’t ever do anything with them, though, because of that post I shared there (I HEREBY DO NOT GIVE MY PERMISSION…). Suck it, Zuck!
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Not a humblebrag:
I haven’t had an account since 2017, and even then, almost no images were posted on it.
I’m not nearly immune, but I have been actively resisting a lot of ‘the programming’ for a long time now.
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Dunno, I’ve never used the service. I host my pictures on my own web server.
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On Jan 29th, Tumblr staff user “cyle” posted that they were going to be moving all their art off Tumblr. It was pretty quickly confirmed after that some sort of AI sale was going to happen.
There’s been a campaign for Tumblrinas to use Nightshade to poison images since.
Here’s a series of reblogs with the basics:
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Is that why photobucket has sent me an email a day for like 8 weeks saying they are going to delete my account and do i want to reactivate it…
In the end i pressed delete just to stop the emails…
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