Bluesky is already facing its first major AI scrape, despite the stance of its owners that it will never train generative AI on user data.

On 26 November, Daniel van Strien, a machine learning librarian at Hugging Face, uploaded a dataset of 1m public posts and accompanying metadata taken from Bluesky’s firehose API. The dataset card explained it was “intended for machine learning research and experimentation with social media data”.

Although Bluesky itself doesn’t train AI models on user data, it doesn’t prevent others from using its data for training purposes.

Bluesky might not be training AI systems on user content as other social networks are doing, but there’s little stopping third-parties from doing so. Per a report by 404 Media, a machine learning librarian at AI firm Hugging Face pulled 1 million public posts from Bluesky via its Firehose API for machine learning research,

Bluesky user posts and user information was scraped by an AI researcher and built into a dataset and published on open platform, Hugging Face.