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Bluesky’s New Privacy Settings Aim to Stop AI From Stealing Your Posts—Sort Of
March 18, 2025Ever post something funny online, only to see a weird AI-generated meme pop up a week later using your exact joke? Welcome to the internet in 2025, where everything you post is free real estate for AI models. Now, Bluesky is stepping in with a new privacy proposal that could stop AI companies from scraping user content. The plan? A special set of privacy controls that would let users tell AI bots to back off. Sounds great, right? Well, before you start celebrating, let’s talk about the giant loophole in this plan.
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How Does Bluesky’s AI Blocker Work?
Bluesky’s idea is built around robots.txt, a tiny file that tells bots what they can and can’t do on a website. Think of it like putting up a “No Trespassing” sign—it tells AI scrapers, “Hey, please don’t steal my content.” Here’s the problem: robots.txt isn’t legally binding. AI companies can ignore it, and some probably will. Right now, everything on Bluesky is public, meaning AI scrapers (and Google Search) already have access to your posts.
So, while Bluesky’s new setting will ask AI bots to stop, it’s about as enforceable as those “I do not consent to being recorded” Facebook status updates people used to post.
The Internet Reacts: “Nice Try, But AI Is Already Eating Everything”
When Bluesky CEO Jay Graber first mentioned this at South by Southwest, users had some… questions. Some thought Bluesky was actually making data collection worse, while others assumed their private DMs were being fed to Skynet (they’re not). Once Graber explained the situation, the real concern became clear:
Will AI companies actually follow the rules?
The answer? Probably not. The internet is already being vacuumed up by AI models, and companies like Meta and OpenAI have been accused of using, uh, questionable methods to train their models. Imagine posting a tweet, and then a week later, you see a bot tweeting the same joke—but with weird formatting and no credit. That’s where we are with AI scraping.
Bluesky’s new privacy settings are a step in the right direction, but they also feel a bit like a “Please Be Nice” rule in an online game lobby—nice to have, but good luck enforcing it. Remember when Instagram said, “We won’t recommend AI-generated content,” but then everyone’s feed was filled with horrifying AI-generated hands? Yeah, this feels kind of like that.
For now, Bluesky’s proposal is just that—a proposal. If they implement these settings, users might have some level of control over AI scraping. But unless AI companies agree to follow the rules, this is more of a suggestion than a shield. So, if you want to protect your posts from AI, you might still need the old-fashioned way—by posting absolute nonsense AI models can’t understand.
