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.
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.