"This is about the things you do, the products of your creativity, your expressions of joy and anger and pain and love and beauty. It’s about a company who used to claim to support writers and other creators deciding that all you do, all the things you care enough to express in whatever imperfect, broken, dumb way are up for grabs to feed to a machine whose expressed purpose is to replace you, to drown your work in the digital equivalent to toxic waste. And very obviously Automattic knew it was shady. Because they worked on this completely in secret: They could have introduced an opt-in system for third party data use beforehand. Communicated things honestly, going into an exchange with their users before accepting checks from Microsoft/OpenAI and others. But they didn’t. Because they didn’t think that the writers and artists that made WordPress and Automattic what they are and their work are deserving of respect."
"This is about the things you do, the products of your creativity, your expressions of joy and anger and pain and love and beauty. It’s about a company who used to claim to support writers and other creators deciding that all you do, all the things you care enough to express in whatever imperfect, broken, dumb way are up for grabs to feed to a machine whose expressed purpose is to replace you, to drown your work in the digital equivalent to toxic waste. And very obviously Automattic knew it was shady. Because they worked on this completely in secret: They could have introduced an opt-in system for third party data use beforehand. Communicated things honestly, going into an exchange with their users before accepting checks from Microsoft/OpenAI and others. But they didn’t. Because they didn’t think that the writers and artists that made WordPress and Automattic what they are and their work are deserving of respect."