The suddenly hot Bluesky says it won’t train AI ...

Bluesky, which has surged in the days following the US election, said on Friday that it won’t train on its users’ posts for generative AI. The declaration stands in stark contrast to the AI training policies of X (Twitter) and Meta’s Threads. Probably not coincidentally, Bluesky’s announcement came the same day X’s new terms of service, allowing third-party partners to train on user posts, went into effect.

“A number of artists and creators have made their home on Bluesky, and we hear their concerns with other platforms training on their data,” Bluesky posted (via The Verge) on Friday. “We do not use any of your content to train generative AI, and have no intention of doing so.”

In a follow-up post, the decentralized social platform clarified that it does use AI to help with content moderation. “Bluesky uses AI internally to assist in content moderation, which helps us triage posts and shield human moderators from harmful content,” the company posted. Bluesky also added that it uses AI in the algorithms powering its Discover feed.

“None of these are Gen AI systems trained on user content,” Bluesky stressed.

The Verge points out that Bluesky’s robots.txt (the policy that dictates what outside parties can scrape from a website) doesn’t prevent OpenAI, Google or other leading GenAI companies from crawling its data. The company justified that potential hole by pointing to the platform’s open and public nature. “Just as robots.txt files don’t always prevent outside companies from crawling those sites, the same applies here,” spokesperson Emily Liu told The Verge. “That said, we’d like to do our part to ensure that outside orgs respect user consent and are actively discussing within the team on how to achieve this.”

Although Bluesky is still the underdog in a race with X and Threads, the platform has picked up steam after the US election. It passed the 15 million user threshold on Wednesday after adding more than a million in the past week.

A report from web analytics company SimilarWeb noted that the signup surge coincided with a spike in X deactivations. It found that “more than 115,000 US web visitors deactivated their [X] accounts” on November 7, “more than on any previous day of Elon Musk’s tenure.” In parallel, “web traffic and daily active users for Bluesky increased dramatically in the week before the election, and then again after election day.”