Artists have complained about their artwork being stolen, people are arguing about threads.net stealing their data on despite this being a public forum, Reddit, Twitter, Github and other platforms are putting up walls to to stop AI bots from scraping everything.
However generative AI and large language models have been been spitting out their training data including copyright notices and other stuff verbatim. “poem poem poem to get personal data from ChatGPT”.
So, instead of providing all our comments for free to LLMs, how about adding a copyright notice to everything we write?
I propose the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license? Basically, if somebody uses your comment, they have to attribute you, but they may not use it for commercial purposes.
This license requires that reusers give credit to the creator. It allows reusers to distribute, remix, adapt, and build upon the material in any medium or format, for noncommercial purposes only. If others modify or adapt the material, they must license the modified material under identical terms.
All you’d need to do is add this text CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 Deed anywhere in your comment or post.
I think a lot of the concern here, for me if noone else, is them taking the data and then turning it around into a closed for-sale product. If AI is going to be trained, it should be trained well, but if the result of doing so is them turning around and charging [me/us/everyone, as applicable] an ass load for the privilege of its use then I want no part of it.
AI trained on public data should be public. So if adding boilerplate is the solution to this problem, let it be infectious licensing which forces opening of the resultant model to the public.
Even private for-pay AI is useful to me. Even ones I don’t pay for myself, since other AI developers have been making heavy use of existing AI models to generate data for training their own new models.
In any event, as I said, copyright doesn’t even apply here. Adding a CC license does nothing, it’s not “infectious” to AI models trained off of it.
Yeah, CC doesn’t cover it in any case. Any attempt would probably need some sort of bespoke license to specifically target the training use case while still allowing comments to be used like normal.
And a Microsoft-sized pile of money to fight it out in court.
If copyright doesn’t apply to AI training, then no license of any sort will “work” because the trainers could simply refuse it.
Copyleft works because if you refuse the license you’re left with no rights to use the work in question. But if you don’t need copyright permission to train, that’s fine.
It’s not the solution. It looks more like the problem to me.
As has been said, licensing doesn’t work. When you write something, you automatically have the copyright. With a license, you allow others to copy it, which otherwise would be illegal. For this to work, copyright would have to be extended to cover learning. That’s obviously terrible. But let’s assume for a moment that copyright is only extended to cover machine learning (ML).
You would not be allowed to use anything on the internet for ML, unless there was a license allowing it. It would basically outlaw scraping the net for training data. You’d have to sift through everything to find stuff, with a permissive license. Of course, no for-profit enterprise would pick anything up with an infectious license.
AI companies would have to pay for training licenses. Non-profits that cannot pay would be limited to public domain data: Stuff that is so very old that it is out-of-copyright, some government publications and, of course, your infectiously licensed posts. Sound good?
The for-profit stuff would be more expensive to generate a steady cash-flow to “rights-holders”, like streaming does today.
Well, maybe that’s what you want. For some people, this is simply a matter of ideology. They feel that (intellectual) property is supposed to work like that, and damn the consequences. I’m going to assume you are not like that.
We’d create a new, steady flow of money to property owners, who have to do nothing in return. It’s nice to be rich. I don’t think we need to make it nicer, but that would be the result.
It would be great for corporations like Microsoft that already have a lot of intellectual property for training. It would also be great for the likes of Meta, that can just amend their TOS to get a license from their users. Traditional publishers would likely also see a nice windfall profit, as they’d be able to sell all their old newspapers, magazines and books.
To me, this just seems crazy. It’s doubling down on everything that’s already going wrong.
I’m guessing that that is not the outcome you want. So, the question would be, how you came to support a policy that would lead to it.