Mastodawn

David Revoy Jun 25

Dear @creativecommons ,

I read your article about your initiative for new licenses for dataset holders in the AI industry.

Let’s be clear: I do not want to re-license my hundreds of CC-By comic pages to please AI giants.

I wish you would support CC artists suffering from massive plagiarism. You should enforce your own existing licenses against AI mass crawling. It seems you’ve joined the battle only after the casualties and still managed to side with the wrong people.

https://creativecommons.org/2025/06/25/introducing-cc-signals-a-new-social-contract-for-the-age-of-ai/

Introducing CC Signals: A New Social Contract for the Age of AI - Creative Commons

CC Signals © 2025 by Creative Commons is licensed under CC BY 4.0 Creative Commons (CC) today announces the public kickoff of the CC signals project, a new preference signals framework designed to increase reciprocity and sustain a creative commons in the age of AI. The development of CC signals represents a major step forward…

Creative Commons

DansLeRuSH ᴱᶰ Jun 26

@creativecommons Psss! After reading all those comments here, I just had to channel my inner artist. So, here’s my new logo for you; because clearly, you need all the help you can get in your new mission. You're welcome! 😂

I like that, mind if I add it to my article here https://wok.oblomov.eu/tecnologia/ai-signal/ when it's published online? 8-D

@creativecommons

AI signal

Let's do what the Creative Commons people haven't done

wok

David Revoy Jun 26

@oblomov Thank you and sure! Feel free to reuse it. I can't apply a CC license to it because the CC logo is trademarked, but let's say it's for 'fair use' and only on a non commercial and humorous purposes. 😉

@davidrevoy oh definitely, satire *is* one of the allowed fair uses 8-)

BetaRays Jun 26

@oblomov Did you mean to write "LLVMs" here? Does it have another meaning besides https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LLVM or is it just a typo?

LLVM - Wikipedia

@BetaRays oh damnit, I'm so used to working with LLVM that sometimes it slips in even when I mean LLM. Let me fix it. 8-D

DansLeRuSH ᴱᶰ Jun 26

@davidrevoy Voire Creative Crawling

David Revoy Jun 26

@danslerush Oh, celle-ci est bien aussi! 😆

Serge from Babka Jun 26

I don't want to "debate", I want to understand. I think/worry there are important issues going on beneath the surface of this discussion that I worry are being channeled through "Do you love big corporate AI or not?"

These questions are things like:

1. What do you see is the purpose and role of Public Domain?
2. What do you see as the boundaries of Freedom 0?
3. What is the role of attribution in this discussion?
4. What is the role of labeling generally here, eg would an "AI" label help?
5. What is the role of the license of the AI model? Would you feel more comfortable with a Free model ingesting your work than a proprietary model?
6. What options do you feel CC had in this? You feel they should have incremented their licenses with this new restriction under the "or newer" clause?
7. What is impersonation vs copying an art style?

Where can people who care about Free Culture discuss these and similar topics?

@creativecommons

David Revoy Jun 26

@serge @creativecommons So many interesting questions, but I'm limited to 500 characters here on my instance (and I'm also limited by my 'french artist's brain' 🤣).

Ping @doctormo , who is also interested in creating a discussion about the Free Culture Challenge in the era of AI.

@davidrevoy @serge @creativecommons

Thanks for the tag in.

There's a lot of questions to ask, although I admit to being interested in different ones centred on consent, the social implication of being abused without recourse, and of course then the active discussion on "signalling" can happen on top of those resolutions.

So I guess we need a bunch of perspectives because we are not on the same page (might not even be the same book!)

David Revoy Jun 26

@doctormo @serge @creativecommons Right. 👍

Serge from Babka Jun 26

When I was at QuestionCopyright.org, they had an idea that I think never got the right level of endorsement. The idea was called the Creator Mark, and the way it would work is that it would let anyone produce a work, even for profit, under a very Free license, but then if you wanted to support the artist, only when the artist agreed, they'd be able to use the Creator Mark.

For example, let's say that I wanted to make a book of P&C. Nothing stops me from doing so.

But if my neighbor wants to make the same book, he'd come to you and say "I'll give you 25% of the profits", you agree, and then he can use the "Creator Mark" to show that if you buy from him (vs me), it supports you.

I wonder if so much of the issue with "AI" isn't "AI", but other issues you raised such as (your word) "plagiarism". Is it someone pretending the work is yours? Can we use attribution to address that? Should AI be required to attribute itself in the output? etc.

David Revoy Jun 26

@serge As you know, it's not an issue with LLMs, AI or the technique itself (src: even before the AI boom https://www.davidrevoy.com/article642/ , or more recently, Krita's and GMIC's own neural network experimentation on a small ethic dataset with consent).

I have more of a problem with the abuse of the 'fair use', the impossibility of expressing a non-consenting opinion, and how my work, which has been crawled, contributes to something that infringes my moral and political beliefs (and threaten my own job).

Scientific Paper: Sketch to Line-art by Waseda University

David Revoy

Serge from Babka Jun 26

I know, that's why I'm wondering what CC could have done differently to not bring up your ire! :)

The issue of consent models is a key component for sure. One thing that I see as a core issue here is the idea of "default yes" or "default no".

It sounds like you would have preferred CC take a "default no" position regarding AI use, and CC's position is "This is already allowed so in order to make it not allowed, we must be explicit"

David Revoy Jun 26

@serge Yes...

Serge from Babka Jun 26

I genuinely don't think they could have done this legally with confidence that it would have worked in court.

David Revoy Jun 26

@serge Yes, maybe they're waiting for a precedent-setting court case, probably involving major copyright issues, before trying anything with a CC licence.
A big trial like the recent one where Disney and Universal are suing AI firm Midjourney¹ might unlock many things if they win.

How ironic this is! I'm now rooting for a Disney intellectual property case. 🙃

(¹) https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cg5vjqdm1ypo

Artificial intelligence: Disney and Universal sue Midjourney over copyright

The Hollywood studios allege Midjourney's image generator is a "bottomless pit of plagiarism".

Serge from Babka Jun 26

There's an argument to be made that a win by Disney would be good for Freely-Licensed work.

There's an equally strong argument to be made that a win there will turn into "regulation" which will mean that only the wealthy will be able to create AI.

BetaRays Jun 26

@davidrevoy Wait, what does a language model have to do with Krita? Do you have a link with more information about this?

David Revoy Jun 26

@BetaRays Sure, the experimentation was fully transparent https://krita.org/en/posts/2024/fast_sketch_plugin/ , and on the forum https://krita-artists.org/t/introducing-a-new-project-fast-line-art/94265

I was around to help (giving feedback, sometime) Tiar, the sole developer on this project, with her progress. Many artists on the forum provided a selection of artwork, including sketches and corresponding line art, under an ethical licence to create a dataset that only Krita could use to train this 'filter on steroids' experiment.

New: the Fast Sketch Plugin for Krita

Together with Intel, we have been working a new plugin for Krita: the fast sketch plugin, or maybe, better, a fast inking plugin. This is an experimental plugin that makes it (sometimes) possible to automatically ink a sketch, using neural networks.

Krita

Bret Carmichael 🇺🇦Jun 26

@davidrevoy @creativecommons Unfortunately for artists, it looks like AI scraping for model training will be a legally allowed practice in the context of fair use, regardless of license. Protecting your work will need to be a technical effort. For your own site, you can put it behind Cloudflare. It has free tools that block scrapers.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jun/26/meta-wins-ai-copyright-lawsuit-as-us-judge-rules-against-authors

Meta wins AI copyright lawsuit as US judge rules against authors

Writers accused Facebook owner of breach over its use of books without permission to train its AI system

The Guardian

4c31 🐏Jun 26

@bretcarmichael @davidrevoy @creativecommons Not really “This ruling does not stand for the proposition that Meta’s use of copyrighted materials to train its language models is lawful,” Chhabria said. “It stands only for the proposition that these plaintiffs made the wrong arguments and failed to develop a record in support of the right one.”

Bret Carmichael 🇺🇦Jun 26

@4c31 I get what you’re saying, but there’s some precedent, “Chhabria said using copyrighted work without permission to train large language models…would be unlawful in ‘many circumstances’, **splitting with another federal judge…**” As copyright law is today, devaluation may be the most best argument. Consuming copyrighted works as inspiration to create something new does not violate law. Artists have been inspired other areas for years. What’s different is scale and zero marginal cost.

Ted Gould Jun 26

@davidrevoy @creativecommons not sure this is a good use of @inkscape 😉

@ted @davidrevoy @creativecommons @inkscape i think it's a phenomenal use of Inkscape actually 😛

@davidrevoy the icon we made for https://github.com/mothdotmonster/wtfgfy-license may come in handy here (in response to the crawlers and spammers, of course)

@davidrevoy @creativecommons

Nice one! My own thughts went more towards how CC Signals sounds like CCS (Carbon Capture and Storage) that bullshit tech that governments love because it allows them to burn things.

@davidrevoy @creativecommons 🔥