On Friday, the social network Bluesky made a clear statement that it has “no intention” of using user content to train generative AI tools. This announcement coincided with the implementation of new terms of service by X, which explicitly state that user text and other information can be analyzed to train its generative AI tools.
Bluesky emphasized its commitment to artists and creators who have chosen the platform as their home, acknowledging their concerns about other platforms using their data for AI training. In a post, Bluesky stated, “We do not use any of your content to train generative AI, and have no intention of doing so.”
However, Bluesky also noted that other companies might still scrape its posts for training purposes. The platform’s robots.txt file does not exclude crawlers from companies like Google or OpenAI, meaning these entities could potentially access Bluesky data. Emily Liu, a spokesperson for Bluesky, commented, “Bluesky is an open and public social network, much like websites on the Internet itself. Just as robots.txt files don’t always prevent outside companies from crawling those sites, the same applies here. 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.”
In another post, Bluesky clarified that it does use AI for content moderation, which helps manage posts and protect human moderators from harmful content. Additionally, AI is used in the algorithmic Discover feed. However, Bluesky assured users that “None of these are Gen AI systems trained on user content.” The company also directed users to a page where they can find its terms of service, community guidelines, and other policy documents.
Bluesky has experienced significant growth, with more than three million new users joining in the past week, according to the platform’s safety account. The company reported an increase in “spam, scam, and trolling activity” and is expanding its moderation team to handle the increased workload.
Bluesky recently surpassed 17 million users, as people look for alternative microblogging platforms to X. Meanwhile, Meta’s Threads, a primary competitor, is also seeing rapid growth. Threads boss Adam Mosseri announced that the platform has gained over 15 million signups this month alone. Meta is testing custom feeds, a feature for which Bluesky is already well known. Unlike Bluesky, Meta has recently admitted to training its AI models on almost all publicly posted content since 2007.
