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.
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.