Goodbye Gravatar: Why Automattic's AI Changes Prompt My Final Exit
Re: Bye Bye Gravatar
I am deleting my Gravatar account after Automattic silently added AI features without consent. My frustration with WordPress and the Gutenberg editor has grown over time, but this unannounced change is the final straw. With better alternatives like Bio Link and FediProfile available, I see no reason to stay with a service that feels like it is enshittifying its products.
I do NOT EVER consent to ANYTHING being done in regard to AI in my name.
- behindsight
The blog's visual design is quite pleasant to read.
However I am a bit confused by the author's remarks
> I do NOT EVER consent to ANYTHING being done in regard to AI in my name.
> With newer sites like Bio Link and FediProfile I don't see the usefulness of Gravatar. If anything, I think it now has ANTI-features.
It's conflicting to mention Bio Link with the author's ideology since it quite prominently has:
- AI assistant to answer visitor questions based off of your "links, descriptions, posts, and a short knowledge base"
- AI site builder
- chrismorgan
It’s funny, I’d genuinely say that Gravatar improved for quite some time. In the old days it was fine, then for quite some time under Automattic when they started fiddling with it it was ridiculously bad and for a while even literally unusable due to broken tie-in to WordPress.com accounts or something (I forget), then they finally got it together again so that it was arguably better than before they took it over, with the caveat that they had expanded its scope a little so there was foolish distraction, but at least the core flow was actually better… but then they’ve continued fiddling with it.
At a cursory glance, this “AI Context” thing is just frivolous AI-washing of the profiles feature they put in some years ago for humans to be able to read. I’m tired of that sort of thing, and products advertising features as being AI Ready™ for an Agentic Future™, when those features are just as meaningful for poor humans.
- mvdtnz
I feel like I'm missing a lot of context and I'm not willing to click on a (another) random link to get it.