My #Wikipedia request for comment just closed, finally banning #AI content in articles! "The use of LLMs to generate or rewrite article content is prohibited"
Kudos to all who participated in writing the guideline (especially Kowal2701) and the whole WikiProject AI Cleanup team, this was very much a group effort!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Writing_articles_with_large_language_models/RfC
My genuine hope is that this can spark a broader change. Empower communities on other platforms, and see this become a grassroots movement of users deciding whether AI should be welcome in their communities, and to what extent. On their own terms.
A pushback against the #enshittification and forceful push of AI by so many companies in these last few years.
@quarknova I would say that the battle was lost when Wikipedia allowed big tech to buy access to copyleft content without needing to share alike.
Your new policy simply enforces "fresh meat" for the models, without any requirement for reciprocity back to the commons.
Wikipedians then, are signing up to work for free to feed the models, while people downstream from the models can use their labor entirely for free without giving back.
I think the truth is that it is a total mess when it comes to AI and copyright regulation, we know big tech companies have literally used pirated books to train their AI and nothing was done about it. So I don't know if saying "Wikipedia allowed it" make any sense, to me it seems like they would've scraped the data anyway like they did with the books (and the entire internet for the most part).
I completely agree. This is not just excellent news for en.Wikipedia, it's also a symbol of holding to a high intellectual standard for other communities, many who are tempted by #TyrannyOfConvenience arguments.
@quarknova will do!
The vote is in two weeks, and I'm doing all I can to gather support for AI opposition with the petition I created.
Thank you for support!
Click to view the GIF
@quarknova I think that unfortunately, this policy is exactly what big tech wants - fresh training knowledge and training data from humans, which the tech companies are free to remix into new public domain works that are not protected by share-alike.
With this policy, Wikipedia demands that humans work for the bots for free, and the humans can't even take advantage of the bots to work against the theft of the commons.
@yoasif @quarknova You have no idea what you're talking about. There is no way for humans to "take advantage of the bots to work against the theft of the commons". Slop-spewing bots cannot magically create new knowledge of the real world. All they can do is remix things that were already written and scooped up into their training set to make something that sounds plausible but that has no provenance.
Yes, malevolent capitalists will continue to scrape and attempt to enclose the commons. We fight them and continue to maintain the things we need and that nourish us. We don't destroy our own treasures to keep them from copying.
@dalias @quarknova I don't actually believe that the bots can generate knowledge, but that is what we are told.
The lie is revealed with the demand for real human knowledge.
It isn't "malevolent capitalists" -- it is Wikipedia that has sold out its community: https://www.avclub.com/wikipedia-ai-partnerships-meta-amazon-microsoft
If it is good for the goose, why isn't good enough for the gander?
More precisely, why continue to contribute to Wikipedia when they have preemptively sold out the commons?
@dalias @quarknova I mean, forks could exist.
Forks wouldn't have a deal for big tech to opt out of share-alike, so we could conceivably see better stewards for this repository of knowledge than the Jimmy Wales crew.
As it is, contributing directly to Wikipedia constitutes a tacit acknowledgement of a rejection of the license that your contributions are nominally contributed under; Wikipedia has opted you out, even if you haven't.
@dalias @quarknova I agree - I am simply trying to make people aware of the fact that your contributions are no longer protected by share-alike when contributing to Wikipedia, since Wikipedia has opted you out.
If you don't think your contributions should be helping drive the slop that we all bemoan, it is probably a good idea to not continue to fund it for free.
Big Tech can hire people to edit a Wikipedia-like corpus that could conceivably better than Wikipedia; they've got the money.
@dalias @quarknova I don't agree that the commons is preserved, FWIW - I think continuing to contribute acknowledges that your contributions are given as a kind of dual-license - share-alike for the commons, proprietary (and paid for) for big tech.
Downstream from that, since the license is ignored when the trained LLMs output the contributions as public domain, you have preserved the contribution in a very different way than intended -- kind of a monkey paw effect.
@dalias @quarknova I'm talking about contributing - this whole thread is about contributing.
If you are talking about something else, I'm happy to discontinue discussing.
@dalias @quarknova How is slop inserted into Wikipedia?
Contributions.
@yoasif your right the internet should be read only
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