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 don’t know if a verdict has already been on the topic, nor by whom, but it’s my impression that the issue of copyrighted material used to train LLMs or GPTs is still hotly debated. IIRC Microsoft was sued because of Copilot on the grounds of copyright infringement. Especially with stuff like GPLv3 where derivative works must be of the same licence.
Personally, it’s not much of an issue to me whether my public musings will be scraped. I’d rather they are scraped and used for opensource stuff, but there’s no way for me to enforce that. However, if a model starts spitting out “CC BY-NC-SA 4.0”, I’d at least find that funny and maybe it might even help bring a case on the grounds of breaching the “Non Commercial” clause of the licence.