[HN Gopher] "Wait, not like that": Free and open access in the a...
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"Wait, not like that": Free and open access in the age of
generative AI
Author : thinkingemote
Score : 95 points
Date : 2025-03-16 17:23 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.citationneeded.news)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.citationneeded.news)
| pluto_modadic wrote:
| I always appreciate a good post by Molly White :D
| healsdata wrote:
| It is mentioned later in the article but I think it's important
| to clearly draw a distinction between cases where a) The
| "offender" is using the licensed work within the letter of the
| license but not the spirit b) The "offender" has broken both the
| letter and spirit of the license.
|
| I've licensed multiple repositories under MIT, written under CC-
| BY, and published games under ORC. All of those licenses require
| attribution, something that AI, for example, explicitly ignores.
| In those situations "Wait, no, not like that" isn't "I didn't
| expect you'd use it this way" it's "you weren't authorized to use
| it this way."
| AlienRobot wrote:
| Think of it in the positive way. They also don't attribute all
| rights reserved works.
| Paul_Clayton wrote:
| Listing all of the creators from whose attribution-licensed
| works an LLM (potentially) derived an output would seem to
| satisfy the letter of such licenses, but it is not clear that
| such would satisfy the spirit (which seems to assume a stronger
| causal link and a more limited number of attributions). If
| creators can be grouped outside of the creator naming
| explicitly associated with the works, this could degrade into
| "this work is derived from the works of humanity"; however,
| listing all human beings individually does not seem
| _meaningfully_ different and seems to satisfy the attribution
| requirement of such licenses.
|
| From what little I understand of LLMs, the weight network
| developed by training on a large collection of inputs is
| similar to human knowledge in that some things will be clearly
| derived (at least in part) from a limited number of inputs but
| others might have no clear contributor density. If I wrote a
| human "superiority" science fiction story, I could be fairly
| confident that Timothy Zahn and Gordon R. Dickson
| "contributed"; however, this contribution would not be
| considered enough to violate copyright and require licensing.
| Some LLM outputs clearly violate copyright (e.g., near verbatim
| quotation of significant length), but other outputs seem to be
| more broadly derived.
|
| If the law treats LLMs like humans ("fairly"), then broad
| derivation would not seem to violate copyright. This seems to
| lead toward "AI rights". I cannot imagine how concepts of just
| compensation and healthy/safe working conditions would apply to
| an AI. Can a corporation own a computer system than embodies an
| AI or is that slavery?
|
| If the law makes special exceptions for LLMs, e.g., adjusting
| copyright such that fair use and natural learning only apply to
| human persons, then licensing would be required for training.
| However, attribution licenses seem to have the above-mentioned
| loophole. (That this loophole is not exploited may be laziness
| or concern about admitting that following the license is
| required -- which makes less openly licensed/unlicensed works
| poisonous.)
|
| If the purpose of copyright is to "promote the useful arts",
| then the law should reflect that purpose. Demotivating human
| creators and the sharing of their works seems destructive to
| that purpose, but LLMs are also enabling some creativity. Law
| should also incorporate general concepts such as equality under
| the law. LLMs also seem to have the potential for power
| concentration, which is also a concern for just laws.
|
| Perhaps I am insufficiently educated on the tradeoffs to see an
| obvious solution, but this seems to me like a difficult
| problem.
| righthand wrote:
| This reminds me of "Fuck you, pay me" a talk[0] given by Mike
| Monteiro on contract work (I believe the title is based on a
| quote from Goodfellas[1]).
|
| [0] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jVkLVRt6c1U
|
| [1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=P4nYgfV2oJA
| immibis wrote:
| If you care about software freedom, you need to make all your
| software AGPL.
|
| MIT is the "wait, no, not like that" license and GPL is a half-
| measure.
|
| Non-commercial licenses are fine if you also provide a commercial
| option - who cares what the OSI thinks. (And you might want to
| look up who's a member of the OSI)
| jraph wrote:
| If you care about software, why would non-commercial licenses
| be fine under any condition?
|
| First rule of free software is any goal, including commercial
| ones.
|
| > MIT is the "wait, no, not like that" license
|
| I don't get this. Someone who releases their under MIT, GPL or
| AGPL allows selling a copy on amazon and could think "wait, no,
| not like that" regardless.
|
| I think the reasonable stance is to (kindly, humanly) ask, that
| one doesn't do such or such thing even if it's legal.
| Pannoniae wrote:
| "First rule of free software is any goal, including
| commercial ones."
|
| Yeah and that's what we disagree with. :P If Creative Commons
| has NC licences for art, why shouldn't software? Apart from
| programmers being too meek to assert their rights.
|
| And yes, the OSI is mostly hyperscalers, that's fairly
| commonly known. They aren't interested in protecting the
| commons the slightest.
|
| Even the JSON licence ("don't be evil") and stuff like that
| are better than MIT and friends - gives enough of a headache
| for bigcorp lawyers to think twice before stealing your
| stuff.
| lolinder wrote:
| > before stealing your stuff.
|
| You were at least consistent up until this point, but this
| phrasing runs directly counter to the rest of your thesis.
| It's not stealing to use software that you put out as FOSS
| to be used by anyone for any purpose. If you didn't intend
| to do that, that's on _you_ to have picked a license that
| reflected your intentions and to accept the consequences of
| that choice (mostly likely less interest in using it from
| _everyone_ , not just megacorps).
|
| There's no moral imperative to respect terms of use that
| existed only in the head of the developer--on the contrary,
| it's an immoral bait-and-switch to release your code as
| FOSS and then throw a fit when someone uses it to make
| money.
| Pannoniae wrote:
| You are entirely right about my word choice, good point!
| (it's a bit ironic in retrospect)
|
| However, let's not pretend that choosing a licence is a
| fully informed decision free of any kind of pressure. If
| you pick a non-OSI licence, that has social costs (as you
| said, less interest from other developers for example)
|
| The problem is two-sided: both those companies exploiting
| the FOSS landscape and the participants in the FOSS
| landscape more concerning themselves with uploading the
| status quo than to try to do something about the problem.
|
| P.S.: The OSI are not even sellouts - they mostly consist
| of exactly those corporations themselves. The FSF are
| much better but the FSF's philosophy was mostly informed
| by RMS not being able to fix his printer in the 80's....
| times change, y'know? A philosophy/worldview which worked
| for the 80s and the 90s might not be appropriate for the
| 2020s.
| lolinder wrote:
| > If you pick a non-OSI licence, that has social costs
| (as you said, less interest from other developers for
| example)
|
| Yes. People make a decision to choose from the FOSS
| licenses because being seen as FOSS is valuable to them.
| That comes with tradeoffs, and it's unethical to expect
| to receive the benefits but not the drawbacks of your
| chosen license.
|
| > P.S.: The OSI are not even sellouts - they mostly
| consist of exactly those corporations themselves.
|
| I know. I find the bellyaching about the "spirit of Open
| Source" to be pretty ironic given that Open Source exists
| to "dump the moralizing and confrontational attitude that
| had been associated with "free software" in the past and
| sell the idea strictly on the same pragmatic, business-
| case grounds that had motivated Netscape" [0].
|
| > those companies exploiting the FOSS landscape
|
| Exploiting how? What harm does $MEGACORP using a FOSS
| project do to the FOSS project? Does it hurt that it
| gives them more credibility? For there to be exploitation
| there has to be a quantifiable harm to the exploited
| victim--it has to be win-lose, not win-neutral or win-
| win. So where's the loss to the FOSS maintainers as
| victims?
|
| [0] http://web.archive.org/web/20071115150105/https://ope
| nsource...
| thaZT wrote:
| It's a derivative work and stripping the license violates
| it. Why do people repeat this stupid corporate
| propaganda?
| lolinder wrote:
| I'm really confused--are you talking about AI training?
| I'm talking about corporations building systems on top of
| FOSS.
|
| Also, why did you feel the need to create a throwaway for
| this comment?
| immibis wrote:
| MIT explicitly gives the right to sublicense. That means
| you give certain rights to Alice, who gives fewer rights
| to Bob. Bob isn't allowed to give away copies of the
| software Alice gives her, because Alice, being a smart
| businesswoman, made sure Bob's license agreement is a
| proprietary one. She's not violating MIT, because she put
| your name and a copy of the MIT license in notices.txt,
| but the license doesn't actually apply to the software.
| immibis wrote:
| I think when you take something from the public domain
| and make it proprietary, that is close enough to stealing
| that it's appropriate to use the word colloquially.
| HeatrayEnjoyer wrote:
| Maybe that's a rule you have but don't speak for the rest of
| us.
| lolinder wrote:
| They should have put Free Software in capitals to be more
| clear, but they're referring to the Four Essential Freedoms
| as defined by the Free Software Foundation [0]:
|
| > The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any
| purpose (freedom 0). ... "Free software" does not mean
| "noncommercial." On the contrary, a free program must be
| available for commercial use, commercial development, and
| commercial distribution. This policy is of fundamental
| importance--without this, free software could not achieve
| its aims.
|
| You're welcome to come up with a different set of coherent
| rules for an ethical model of software development, but to
| avoid confusion it would be best to use a different label
| than "free software" so we don't overload the term with
| conflicting definitions.
|
| [0] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html#four-
| freedoms
| immibis wrote:
| If it's GPL, or AGPL, someone can sell a copy on Amazon, but
| it's pretty pointless because the person who buys it is
| allowed to give away more copies for free.
|
| If it's MIT, the person who buys it ISN'T allowed to give
| away more copies for free if the seller doesn't want them to.
| MIT means SOMEONE ELSE can (for all practical purposes)
| copyright YOUR software, and all you get is your name in a
| notices.txt file.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| Restricting what people can do with the software you write
| doesn't sound very free
| simion314 wrote:
| >Restricting what people can do with the software you write
| doesn't sound very free
|
| It depends on POV, user freedom or developer/publisher
| freedom. To make it easy to understand, I remember a quote
| from some book where a french and USAian were debating about
| what country is fmore free and slavery and the USAian says
| "We are more free since we are free to own slaves"
| immibis wrote:
| Restricting people's freedom to restrict other people's
| freedom ensures maximum freedom overall. That's why we have
| prisons for thieves and killers.
| UncleEntity wrote:
| What I worry about is once the robots become the main source of
| information then how will the corps restrict what information is
| fed into them to support whatever bias they have.
|
| For example, just yesterday someone posted "noam chomsky is a
| genocide denier" so I went internet sleuthing to see what they
| were talking about. I first asked google and then ended up on the
| "Bosnian genocide denial" wikipedia page. I read the argument and
| checked the sources and concluded that, _maybe_ , someone could
| make that claim.
|
| Today, in response to TFA, I asked deepseek and received a well-
| rounded and, IMHO, unbiased response to the same question which
| summarized the arguments from both sides. The only problem is
| they cite no sources so you just have to trust the response or do
| as I did yesterday and go to the google.
|
| Personally, if someone makes an extraordinary claim I'm going to
| go digging to find out what they're talking about, if their
| argument is based on fact and if you can draw their conclusion
| from the facts. Take that ability away and we're just a bunch of
| sheep for the Silicon Valley Billionaires Club to fleece.
| stephantul wrote:
| Great post. I love the vampirism metaphor.
|
| The internet as an open resource has been a tremendous boon to
| society as a whole. AI, likewise, acts as a force multiplier on
| top of this knowledge. You can learn anything. But AI also
| depletes the resources on which it builds.
|
| An obvious way to counteract this is for the AI companies to give
| back generously through monetary donations or, at the very least,
| attributions. But unfortunately we see exactly the opposite.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > But AI also depletes the resources on which it builds.
|
| The article author is clearly assuming that, but I'm not sure
| whether it's even true to any meaningful extent. How many
| contributors to free/open content resources are even bothered
| that their work might end up being used for AI training?
|
| Also, maybe AI firms should pay for the scanning and OCR text-
| extraction of existing paper-backed resources. There's a lot
| of, e.g. old academic research that's still _not_ meaningfully
| available online, much of it is even free of copyright
| worldwide. If you care about ensuring that your AI 's are
| adequately well-read, this is a bottleneck that might be
| especially easy to address.
| stephantul wrote:
| I don't think that's what this would look like. It's more
| like: people won't even know Wikipedia exists or that there
| is something to contribute to, or that the model gained its
| knowledge from this resource. That's why this pattern is so
| disingenuous in my opinion. When I was young we were
| surprised that Wikipedia existed. Future generations might
| not know that Wikipedia exists, or that you can contribute to
| it.
|
| Current frontier models couldn't exist in this form or
| wouldn't exist at all without people putting in the work of
| writing down what they knew for free. And the model creators
| not even paying lip service to this, and instead saying they
| will replace Wikipedia, is hubristic and a very clear example
| of the tragedy of the commons.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > And the model creators not even paying lip service to
| this, and instead saying they will replace Wikipedia
|
| What model creators are saying this? It's very easy to put
| this assertion to the test btw: just pick your favorite
| Wiki article, ask a LLM to "improve" the writing, and check
| how much stuff it ends up rewriting in a confusing way, or
| even gets outright wrong. Compared to your average high-
| quality Wiki article, a LLM is just a very confused parrot.
| tyre wrote:
| I think in a year LLMs are better at writing Wiki
| articles than the p90 quality Wikipedia page today.
|
| They have access to _huge_ volumes of information--books,
| research papers, PhD dissertations, newsletters from
| experts, peer-reviewed articles. They're getting better
| every day at organizing it. Claude has a (beta) citations
| API, which forces the LLM to directly cite sources and
| use direct quotations.
|
| They'll get better and better at managing translations--
| maybe not them translating, but them finding resources in
| other languages, using a translation tool, then pulling
| in that information.
|
| Will they be perfect? No, but good lord is Wikipedia not
| either. Will they hallucinate, probably sometimes, but,
| again, the median Wikipedia author does not have a New
| Yorker fact checker at their side.
|
| I think we overestimate how good humans are at this. And
| it's far easier to validate cited sources than it is to
| consume and craft the original writing.
| egypturnash wrote:
| If you train your AI on the commons, everything it generates
| should be in the commons. And all your profits should be shared
| with everyone.
|
| If running your AI is incompatible with respecting copyright and
| intellectual property then you should not get to own a single bit
| of its output.
| Hamuko wrote:
| > _If you train your AI on the commons, everything it generates
| should be in the commons._
|
| Isn't AI output not copyrightable already?
| fudged71 wrote:
| This is a perfect modern example of the Tragedy of the Commons,
| where the absence of governance mechanisms or social contracts
| around a shared resource (open knowledge) leads to exploitation
| that threatens the resource's sustainability for everyone.
|
| If implementing a full game theory solution is challenging, a
| minimal viable approach could combine:
|
| - Wikimedia's Enterprise API model for high-volume users -
| Technical measures to identify and throttle non-contributing
| scrapers - Public transparency reports on AI company usage and
| contributions - Industry certification program for "commons-
| friendly" AI development
|
| This hybrid approach uses game theory principles to realign
| incentives while being practically implementable with current
| technologies and organizational structures.
| simonw wrote:
| This is such good writing, and manages to offer a nuanced and
| informative _new_ angle on an issue which has already been
| discussed at great length.
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