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).
@futureisfoss @quarknova Yes, but somehow Disney is able to demand that Google stop pirating Disney works for its LLM: https://arstechnica.com/google/2025/12/disney-says-google-ai-infringes-copyright-on-a-massive-scale/
Wikipedia could have presented a legal challenge to the LLM providers, or simply stated that "you are indexing our servers, we can see it - if you don't stop, we will sue to protect our community".
Instead, they got paid to sell out the community.
It would be interesting to see how a license like Creative Commons be applicable in the case of LLMs, does it mean all of the LLM's output must also be licensed under the same? Yeah it would've been nice if Wikipedia had fought back legally, even if they might fail it would've lead to some interesting discussions about copyright laws and LLMs.
@futureisfoss @quarknova Unfortunately (and I am blogging about this in a few days, so follow me if you are interested), since LLM outputs are uncopyrightable, I don't think there is any legal way for LLMs to train on share-alike and in turn to produce share-alike contributions.
Copyright can only be assigned to human authors.
See the monkey selfie dispute for some prior context: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_dispute
Open to more thoughts here!
This assumes the businesses training those models wouldn't scrap that data anyway, though.
That… doesn't strike me as particularly realistic, tbh.
After all, the whole mess began because they were doing exactly that.
Now, at least they're paying to Wikimedia, and thanks to the policy not making it worse…
@yenndc That doesn't assume that. Wikipedia could have sued to protect the license and community, rather than making a deal to opt the community out of share alike.
You are right that the policy doesn't make it worse, if you think the role of community contributors is to provide free human labor to power the big tech slop bots. If you do. the policy is perfect.
Instead, we should demand that the slop generators generate their own knowledge.
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!
@indutny Also, isn't there a huge issue around GenAI'd content not being able to be copyrighted in the first place? And if not copyrightable, how could it even be submitted under an open source license?
or
https://www.congress.gov/crs_external_products/LSB/PDF/LSB10922/LSB10922.8.pdf
"Similar to the AI Guidance’s emphasis on “creative control,” the report concludes that,
“given current generally available technology, prompts alone do not provide sufficient human control to
make users of an AI system the authors of the output.” The report contends that the Copyright Act’s
distinction between copyrightable “works” and noncopyrightable “ideas” precludes copyrightability for
works generated by AI in response to user prompts."
This is what started the discussion on that PR! Developer's Certificate of Origin of Node.js loosely says that the author is the author of the code, or knows where they got the code from and under what license.
With AI - generated code is neither!
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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