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.
we are all authors of content. you are the author of your comment, are you not?
CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
Ehhhh, if you want to parse the word usage, sure.
But copyright around your stuff when you write for a living, or even a hobby, is a different thing entirely. This is doubly true with LLM “AI”. See, the machine learning we currently have just isn’t going to be able to intimate you in particular, or me in particular with typical comment lengths.
But once you get into longer forms of writing, be it poetry or prose, then you get something that the machine can learn to imitate directly. That’s where there’s a difference that matters. Not because it’s inherently okay to use anyone’s writing of any length or type without even the courtesy of attributing. It isn’t, but that doesn’t mean that there’s any harm or loss involved, and that’s where copyright laws will need to be reviewed and possibly changed.
Generally, an author is only different from anyone else by dint of putting in effort to construct their words and edit them carefully. Not that we netizens can’t put that effort into casual comments, nor does that mean every author actually puts in the work. But there is s difference between the concepts in usage, if not in every dictionary.
Tbh, it’s largely a matter of value, which isn’t exactly a clearly quantifiable thing. I mean, “first” is obviously without value beyond a split second of eye rolling. And I’ve seen some serious time put into some seriously valueless writing that was much longer than some books. We all know how much value there can be in a good comment because that’s what reddit tried to trade on; the accumulated value of user writing. But most of this kind of thing is very low value, low effort drivel.