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!
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