Considering how openly a fan of games Yoshi-P is, I could see it, but this is also a typical games industry move. Nobody wants to release in direct competition with a big name release, so releasing the beginning of the next month makes fiscal sense, too.
If they hadn’t given people the option, I don’t think the site would be up today. I already saw one artist who wiped their account and left the site within a couple of hours of the announcement.
And they couldn’t have picked a worse time to do this after the drama with the CEO banning a popular trans woman permanently off the site last week and threatening to sic the FBI on her for a “threat” of cartoon violence she made after the year-long harassment campaign she suffered had been ignored leading up to her being banned over a transition timeline picture of her face. The CEO then went on to spend hours going into trans women’s dms to insist how he’s not a transphobe after writing a post about how she had been banned for the “threat,” not the picture, even though it had been known for a while by that point that she had been banned for that photo being “nsfw/sexual content,” while he eventually started calling her “it.” He then topped it off by chasing her and harassing her on Twitter, still insisting that her wishing cartoon violence was a tangible threat and posting the names of accounts she had had at various times on Tumblr. All while he was supposed to be on a 3-month vacation.
Between that and the rumors of this AI deal happening that popped up last week as well, people were already looking for alternative platforms. Allowing people to opt out is the least that they can do if they don’t want to run off the users who keep the site running. I don’t think many of them are happy that they even have to do that.
They made an announcement at some point after flipping the switch that noted that some people would be opted out by default based on their blog settings. I think if your blog is set to mature or has certain search parameters turned off already.
It wasn’t on for me or several artists I sent messages to who hadn’t even heard that this had happened, and the general discourse around it was pretty clearly upset about it not being opt out by default.
They must’ve updated the app; at the time I wrote that you couldn’t do it through the app.
For any Tumblr users here, this has already rolled out completely unannounced and is opt-in by default. You need to manually opt out, which can only be done on the desktop website. Odds are good that your data is already being sold to Midjourney and used to train their models.
To do so, click on your blog on the sidebar, click on Blog Settings on the other sidebar on the right, scroll down to the Visibility section, and turn the “Prevent third-party sharing for [your blog]” toggle to ON, not off. If you have any sideblogs, you’ll need to manually do this for each of them as well. It’s per blog and not account-wide.
Well, this is the third time the community has failed to secure the AT mines, so it wouldn’t be in the spirit of the game for them to just give them to us anyway.