As a researcher with many articles in the ACM library, I have to say this is a masterclass in hypocrisy. Obviously, lawyers can decipher the terms of ACM publishing contracts and Creative Commons licences to determine if this will be acceptable or not. But ACM is not a company, it's a non-profit founded in 1947 to represent scientists.
I would be surprised if a majority of ACM members were to say yes should we ask them (but ACM is not known for such democracy). Along with book authors, we are one of the many people that provide the knowledge and expertise on which large tech firms train their models, and get nothing in return. Actually, life is getting worse for us: extra workload in universities with students' AI use, a completely broken peer review system, etc. Hence the irony of ACM thinking about licensing, and only licensing, at a time where this is the least of our priorities.
How do you square away the idea that you do science for the increase in knowledge of human kind, but then say that a particular use of that knowledge is verboten?
I get the copyright aspect of this and I'm not arguing that here. I'm more asking about the moral / ethical idea of choosing who can benefit from your science.
Obviously there are the moral / ethical arguments about AI in general here to weigh against - those have been hashed out significantly elsewhere, and I'm not interested in debating them. What I'm asking about here is the impact on science by sharing it with tooling that distributes it in ways not generally considered when originally written.
A quick check of your post history suggests the frame that you work in strongly is privacy related research (observation - may be wrong). I'm curious how that impacts what you wrote here generally.
(Just to be perfectly clear, I'm not arguing your points here, trying to understand them better)
Good question. Unfortunately, academic knowledge is widely ‘verboten’ already. Everything under paywall, researchers having to pay up to $10,000 to publish in open access in some venues, rare books unavailable even to top universities. Access to knowledge and information is increasingly difficult for everyone.
That said, what matters here is the social contract, what do I bring to society and what do we get from tech companies. For most people around the world, access to the typical leading models is out of reach. Not many on this planet can pay the subscriptions (or even API keys) that offer access to the best models. So I'm not buying the argument that tech companies are broadening access. What we're creating is a increasingly discriminatory society where the few get access to information, and the many don't.
> most people around the world, access to the typical leading models is out of reach. Not many on this planet can pay the subscriptions (or even API keys) that offer access to the best models. So I'm not buying the argument that tech companies are broadening access. What we're creating is a increasingly discriminatory society where the few get access to information, and the many don't
I’m sorry, but I can’t buy this argument. Making information more available does not make it more discriminatory. Nobody is saying it will only be available in the best models and withheld from other models or services like the ChatGPT free plan. Nobody is saying we’re going to make the original content inaccessible through the previous means after the LLMs are trained on it. Nothing about this shrinks access or makes it more discriminatory.
I understand that you’re upset about the use of the content, but I think you need to admit that your stance is the one trying to restrain use of the content. Training LLMs on it can only bring knowledge to a wider audience, not restrict it.
Whether or not that’s a good or fair idea is a separate discussion, but arguing that this makes access to the knowledge more discriminatory and locked away is 180 degrees backwards.
Thanks for the reply here.
I guess I have some perspectives on a bunch of this. I'm for open sharing of academic work for all (but I'm not an academic, so my perspective is a consumer), so inferring your perspective here I think we agree on that. I maintain many open source (MIT/Apache2 licensed) libraries, and I've also worked in big tech (Amazon, OpenAI). I believe both in the idea of collective commons but also in the ideas that there should be the ability of people to sell software. There's tension in that social contract similarly, and it gets more complex when you look at copyleft.
I guess I'd be disappointed if this was just allowing big labs access and not more broadly allowing access to the ACM library for smaller open source models. Very much in agreement with your last points there.
I’m pretty sure most people who have papers in the ACM digital library already have “preprints” in other freely accessible locations, especially for papers written in the last two decades. LLMS have been able to search/find most of my papers for long time now.
The peer review system was broken before AI, so I’m not sure what your point is there.
If it was a non profit that trained the model - would that change your mind?
The issue here is ACM focusing on licensing. A non profit would not be able to pay ACM for access. Hence why this policy is hypocritical: it gives more power to the larger players and undermines smaller actors in the field who have fewer resources.
Everybody gives more power to the larger players. You won't work for me for $10/hr but you'll work for a guy who has more money for more. There's nothing wrong with that. Money is just a fungible unit representing value offered.
Why did you sign off your copyright to ACM then? If you kept the copyright and prevented others from distributing your work, you could be the sole distributor and negotiate the price with the AI company yourself.
Because if you don't publish in academia, you might as well be dead. And the terms for most places to publish are similar.
It's a racket.
Ok, then next question is why are you in academia? To share knowledge with humanity, bring the Promethean light to the mortals or something I guess. But then if they use it for productive things that make money, that's too smelly, that's too practical, too dirty, or what?
Non Profit != No Money
A non profit could well pay, and there are plenty of reasons frontier models should be managed by non profit. After all, why allow a for profit to benefit from free contributions?
If you don't hold a patent for the use of the knowledge you published publicly, you can't prevent others from using the knowledge. You enjoy the prestige attached to the idea that you're an academic who participates in giving away their knowledge but then you play this game when that knowledge would actually be useful as opposed to being read by 3 other people in your special area who sit on your various committees in your career, now you want to forbid the use for culture war intra-elite signaling reasons.
You don't own the knowledge you put out there unless you have a limited time valid patent. The rest is absurdity. If you want to keep your findings to yourself, keep them secret.
The intellectual property law that governs ACM articles is copyright law, not patents. I don’t know who controls these (the ACM or the authors) or what rights might have been granted to the public.
The entire point of copyright law is so that people can make their writing public and still be able to control the right to make copies (for example, into your dataset for training an LLM).
Copyright protects against reprinting or reproducing the wording and expression, not using the idea expressed in there in novel contexts.
AI reproduces copyrighted work exactly in many cases, so it clearly infringes copyright in this sense
The output of it is also a derivative work, and derivative works also infringe copyright. Its only not a problem if you ignore copyright entirely
Humans are the only entities that get to enjoy special idea-learning-exemptions, not AI
Are you a lawyer that has tested this in court, or is this just what you want the reality to be?
As someone with lots of open source code out there that has likely been used as LLM training data, I'm very sympathetic to this point of view, but that doesn't seem to be the legal reality. Much of this has not been fully tested in court, but it seems likely that LLM training is not copyright infringement, as long as the training material itself was acquired legally.
I mean, its theoretically possible that a court might rule that if an LLM outputs an exact or lightly modified piece of copyrighted work, that it won't be copyright encumbered. We'll end up in a situation where copyright doesn't exist anymore, because you can always claim that its been laundered through an AI. This seems terribly unlikely to me, because 1:1 transformations (eg copying an image into memory) are already established to count as making a copy for legal purposes, there's strong precedent around piracy
There's also been court cases where material has been found to be infringingly used, eg song lyrics, so the case where copyright ceases to exist doesn't seem to be coming through yet, thankfully. It'd be the most staggering upheaval of copyright of all time if this doesn't turn out to be true
The verbatim reproduction is clearly a red herring and not the main use case. Nobody reads novels (or science papers) by prompting ChatGPT to give the next paragraph.
Derivative work or transformative? It's not the same.
AI code generation often outputs exact copies of code that exists in the wild. I've seen it output chunks from research papers unprompted as well, its a big problem, or blending two papers together in a salad
AI works also clearly aren't transformative in many cases. If you ask it a question about a paper, it'll quote bits of the paper at you. That serves as an exact substitute of the original work. If you ask it for song lyrics, or information about the news, its content is a direct substitute for the original source it was trained on. This clearly does not fall under a transformative use case
You could argue that some uses of it are transformative, but even then - its easy to find some piece of training data in the source code that the output work supersedes. By its very nature it does not have the capacity to genuinely invent under the law (as it is not human), and a prompt isn't a significant enough part of the processing to count here
Are you sure you didn’t have RAG enabled and it wasn’t putting the paper in its context for your prompt? I find it hard to believe that anything but the most commonly published papers/code would exist directly in model weights.
As long as it is not substantially similar to training set it should be OK to reuse ideas. Ideas should not be protected by copyright or we can't create anything. We should not accept "vibe copyrights".
Everyone treats the human user of the AI as furniture, but they steer the whole process into unique directions.
Under the law, machines are not able to create copyright, and basic human involvement is not enough to change this. Eg if you click a button saying "go", that won't create copyrightable content
You can use all the ideas you want, but AI cannot because its not a person, and does not enjoy the same protection under the law. The copyright holders by and large did not agree to you using their content like this
If we enable this, people won't create anything because all their work will immediately be stolen by the AI models. Copyright partially exists to promote the creation of new content, because theft disincentivises novel creation
Suddenly it's "copyright infringement" to count the amount of times one word occurs after another word. I find this whole thing so amusing.
AI has the capacity to exactly reproduce its training data, just because something is a transformed representation does not mean that it isn't copying it in some fashion. The JPEG format 'just' counts the frequencies in an 8x8 block of pixels, and yes that's 100% copyright infringement
I have the capacity to exactly reproduce things I've read as well, but it's not automatically copyright infringement if I do so.
> and yes that's 100% copyright infringement
Says what court of law?
I'm kinda getting tired of this stuff. I'm someone who has been, and still to some extent is, uncomfortable with the possibility of copyright/license laundering in LLMs, but they way you are making your argument is incredibly off-putting and not sympathetic. You're throwing out wild assertions about the law that are not supported by... anything, really.
There's way too much hand waving on this topic. It is legal to produce copywritten work. If I draw Pikachu the drawing is mine. Legally. I am simply unable to make money on it. I can give it away if I want with zero liability. I could even hang the drawing up in my restaurant as a decoration. No big deal. What I can't do is use that drawing as my mascot or branding. We have an entirely separate process to determine if you are infringing on a copyright / trademark by using it to sell something. That's why whether or not an LLM can produce a picture of Pikachu is largely irrelevant. It's what you do with it that matters. Even more interestingly if I draw a picture of Pikachu and then the Pokemon Company decides they wanna use that specific picture they actually would have to pay ME for the copyright to use it.
Let's not mix copyright and trademark in mixed phrases like "infringing on a copyright / trademark". The two are very different concepts with different goals.
The main question in the "AI image generator generates a Pikachu image" is whether the AI company serving that image generator to you is violating the copyright or not. Because they make money when doing so (API / subscription cost), and so it's like selling images of Pikachu. The user is likely in the clear as long as they don't go on sell that Pikachu further. But the AI company sold the Pikachu image to the user.
That question is irrelevant. Artists may be hired to reproduce copywritten work without the consent of the copyright owner. In this case an LLM is no different from Photoshop. It is a tool. Nothing more.
You reproducing something does not have the same legal status as a tool reproducing something, as you are a human
>Says what court of law?
If you turn a png into a jpeg, and distribute it, that's copyright infringement. There isn't a court in the land that wouldn't find you guilty of that
The courts don't agree with you and I don't either. Now what?
Courts have ordered AI models to remove song lyrics from their training data, they most definitely do not agree with you
derivative work & fair use. end of.
Not only are you not winning this one but I'm gonna laugh at you the entire time.
Ok, but courts haven't made those rulings yet so good luck with that
Bartz v. Anthropic PBC, No. 24-cv-05417 (N.D. Cal. June 23, 2025)
Kadrey v. Meta Platforms, Inc., No. 23-cv-03417 (N.D. Cal. June 25, 2025)
Did... you read any of these?
Fair use is a defence against copyright infringement. Ie you actively say that you *have* committed copyright infringement, but you're allowed to do it under fair use doctrine to train the model. That says nothing about the purposes the model is used for
There's also these parts:
> its use of pirated books to create such library does not constitute fair use.
Which indicates that there are tight bounds depending on the ethics of how the content was obtained
Similarly with the second one
>Meta moved to dismiss plaintiffs’ cause of action for direct copyright infringement only to the extent that it was premised on a theory that the software comprising LLaMA is itself an infringing derivative work.
We're talking specifically about the output of the models being infringing, not whether or not the models themselves are infringing. If you read onwards
>Plaintiffs’ claim for vicarious copyright infringement failed because the complaint did not allege that any output generated by LLaMA contained protectable expression that recast, transformed or adapted the books. Without “an infringing output, there can be no vicarious infringement.”
Which strongly indicates the precise opposite of what you're saying, if you actually like, read the rulings
You are the one that brought up copyright infringement here in your original comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49089627
I just pointed out none took place.
Anyway I'm not replying in this thread anymore.
Source on that?
> The output of it is also a derivative work,
A short session is just retrieval, a long session is always unique. The more the user writes the more it diverges from any content in the dataset.
This makes no sense whatsoever. How would a philosopher of science, or a social scientist who publish in the ACM apply for a patent? Or someone who builds software (software patent not so easy to get ;)). I have applied for patents before and I'm pretty sure my patent application has been fed to countless LLMs by now.
The issue is not who owns knowledge, it's how it benefits humanity.
They can't apply for a patent in those categories, so they have no way of preventing others from reading their text (or using a program to process the text, and compute statistical properties), and using the ideas in other contexts (without re-expressing the same text).
If someone reads a philosophical essay, has a heureka moment from it, applies the principle to their work, and makes bank (commercial profit), they never have to pay a percentage to the author of the essay.
The world would be quite different if AI companies had to create the knowledge they trained on, rather than consume that knowledge freely given away. They're not known for freely giving away their produce either, I don't know why you think the ire should be pointing in this direction.
I like open models for sure. I support free software as well. But using published knowledge to solve new problems was never disallowed, even for profit. Today, a for-profit company, e.g. a gigantic Big Pharma company can have their employees read chemistry and biology papers and use the knowledge gained from it to improve their products and processes and make more profit without paying a cent to the authors (beyond what they may get - likely nothing - due to the potential paywall).
Patents shouldn’t exist.
Patents were invented to incentivize disclosure of inventions and prevent extended secrecy. In exchange for the public disclosure (which allows others to experiment with the idea without selling yet), you get to keep exclusivity for N years.
And?
Currently patents are predominantly used to prevent interoperability and impose costs.
“If you don’t lock your bike, you can’t prevent others from taking it for a ride. You enjoy the mobility attached to the idea you’re a bike rider who rides a bike but then you play this game when that bike would actually be useful as opposed to sitting in the bike rack all day”.
Nope, and I'd also download cars.
[flagged]
You mean the knowledge you gathered with public grants, with a public paid salary, yet don’t want to make freely available to the public?
Yeah, too bad
This is about the ACM licensing it to for-profit AI companies, who will then make you pay a subscription to access the knowledge. Not about making it "freely available to the public."
As long as we are going toward a world of abundance where money doesn't mean much and the main currency is time, I can't complain. I will subsidize that with my brain power turned into ink on paper.
It’s pretty clear that the premise won’t be becoming reality.
Well, once there is no more jobs, or once a large enough number of people are made redundant, it will mechanically happen. Future is all about research and entertainment. That is why tiktok stars and soccer players get so much money. All that being based on DARPA research, I mean the internet. People just want to have fun. Du pain et des jeux.
well, we are not, so far it is just concentrating wealth and power in smaller and smaller subset of people
Yes and then continue your reasoning... Is this sustainable? What do you think it leads to?
Abundance for whom, exactly? And if the answer is everybody: who in charge has an incentive to do this?
Sorry to ruin your day, but if the people with money could have introduce equal society, you would have noticed their attempts by now.
Abundance for everyone or it is not abundance. With abundance, the field gets levelled because everything someone else can get, you can too. Society can't be equal when everyone is in survival of the fittest mode because resources (energy) are not infinite.