If you were disturbed by yesterday’s news that Automattic, the company that owns WordPress.com and Tumblr, selling data to artificial intelligence modeling companies, then it’s probably not worth stressing over. While a company profiting from its users’ content may seem suspicious, the expansive majority of what we put online today is already being used by hungry AI bots for language training.
However, the news has caused widespread confusion that arises whenever the discussion turns to WordPress-related topics, and which is essential if you are concerned about whether this data brokerage will affect you: What is the difference between WordPress, a management system content and WordPress. com, hosting site – and is your personal WordPress site included in the data being sold?
What is WordPress?
As noted, WordPress is a content management system (CMS) used by approximately 40% of all websites. The simplest way to describe a CMS is a database that stores all of your site’s content, combined with standard web code – whether it’s HTML, php, JavaScript, Ruby, or Django – that tells the data what to look like and how to act once it’s accessed. access.
To break it down in practice: the content of, say, a blog post – words, images, links and titles – is stored in a database. Web code (often referred to as a “theme”) tells the site what the background color should be, whether to align text and images left or right, what font to employ, where to place the images, how gigantic to make them, and what the overall layout should look like.
The reason why people employ a CMS like WordPress is elementary: coding websites by hand sucks and the results can be very inconsistent. Using a CMS means you can make universal changes to the theme and ensures that the data itself is portable, meaning it can be easily exported and used elsewhere. You can always change your theme and therefore change the layout, colors, fonts and everything else, but the data in the database remains unchanged.
WordPress fired about 20 years ago, and for various reasons it has become a popular choice among competitors such as Moveable Type and Drupal. Although it was briefly considered just a blogging tool, WordPress and other CMS systems were quickly found to be useful tools for creating fully functional websites for businesses. Currently, blogs constitute a compact part of CMS content.
WordPress also became popular for the simplest reason: it is (technically) free.
WordPress itself – i.e. the files that create the basic structure of the CMS – is available free of charge under an open source license called GPL. In compact, you don’t have to pay for WordPress code or any derivative products. You can simply download it from WordPress.org and install it on any web host or locally on your computer. People often call this “self-hosted WordPress.” At this point, almost every hosting provider has a tool they can employ to install WordPress for you.
While you can’t charge for WordPress itself, a huge industry has grew up around custom WordPress themes and plugins and developed all kinds of functionality around the software.
What is WordPress.com?
Currently, WordPress is maintained by an ongoing community of volunteers developersand the trademark is the property of the company WordPress Foundation, a 501c3 nonprofit organization. Website WordPress.org is affiliated with the WordPress Foundation.
Meanwhile, people who invented WordPress started its own company mentioned above Automatic, and their first product was selling hosted WordPress sites. In other words, you can self-host your WordPress site anywhere, or you can download it directly from the source at WordPress.com.
If you are confused, don’t worry; has been confusing everyone for twenty years and is a constant topic of debate. To make it easier, think of it this way: if you go to WordPress.com to log in to your site, there is a risk that your site’s content will be used to train AI models. If your site is hosted somewhere other than WordPress.com (e.g. GoDaddy, Bluehost, or Siteground), then you have a self-hosted WordPress site.
Differences between self-hosted WordPress and .com-hosted WordPress
Although both WordPress solutions are based on the same technology, there is a difference between them, and not just who you pay to host your website. WordPress.com is a much more controlled platform with a constrained number of plugins, themes, and options. Most importantly, it offers customer service. You can also pay for various utility upgrades, such as your own domain name or backup services.
Self-hosted WordPress has no limits, which is both a blessing and a curse. You can install any plugin or write your own. You can employ any theme or code it yourself. Theoretically, it’s yours, from your data to your domain name and host. But if you somehow break it, you’ll have to figure out how to code your way out of it.
Is your WordPress data really at risk?
As far as we currently know, AI concerns are mostly constrained to WordPress.com sites – those hosted on the WordPress.com platform. You can opt out of having your data included in the program by adjusting the settings on your WordPress.com site. If you’re self-hosted, it looks like your data is NO sold to Automattic’s AI partners.
However, this does not mean that it is not used to train artificial intelligence models, simply because it is available on the Internet. AI bots troll for content the same way search engine spiders troll for content. As Jake Peterson, Lifehacker’s senior technical editor, pointed out yesterday, many self-hosted WordPress sites employ a plugin called Jet pack. Jetpack is a collection of services that Automattic can provide to self-hosted WordPress, including CDN, backups, spam monitoring, and more. Since Jetpacks is a cloud-based service that connects your database to Automattic, it can potentially be used in the same way that Automattic uses WordPress.com sites.
Yesterday, automatic X‘d (formally known as a tweet) that WordPress.org was not included in AI modeling content, but did not address the specific issue of using Jetpack as a gateway for this content.
