I've seen a couple people saying they're jumping ship for [other big socmed] after the AI announcement here, but like. Guys. Friends. You do realize all the other sites have been silently working with big AI companies for a while now. Bluesky has not implemented any acknowledgement or protection, and the CEO worked with crypto for years. They're just not broadcasting it or giving you an option to help remove your work from automatic scraping. Cohost has implemented similar levels of prevention compared to Tumblr.
I greatly prefer the transparency and the tiny bit of protection, no matter how flimsy. Tumblr is pretty awful, but it's still better than everything else so far. Which sucks but until we burn down the plutocracy, this isn't gonna be escapable.
(Also, no Tumblr did not quietly sneak this in. They literally announced it before implementing.)
Tumblr hasn't been transparent at all: they already sold your data, openAI already received them. The toggle only means that they won't send your data in the future, and they request openAI to stop using the data from you they already have (they are not obliged to comply). But the announcement had been worded in a way that makes it look not as bad.
Also, the protections Cohost and the rest have to avoid data scraping are in practice the same as Tumblr: the only thing Tumblr can do against data scraping is politely request to not do it, but if the scraping companies don't want to acknowledge the request (and they never do), they don't have any reason to do so, neither technical nor legal . Still, the staff announcement lets you think Tumblr is implementing an extra level of protection others don't have, when the only thing that actually does is letting you opt-out of them selling your private data in the future. Again, because you can't do anything to get it out of that first data sale.
So no, Tumblr is not being transparent here. It's being as sneaky as it could be.