Comment by James_K
1 day ago
Would such a license fall under the definition of free software? Difficult to say. Counter-proposition: a license which permits training if the model is fully open.
1 day ago
Would such a license fall under the definition of free software? Difficult to say. Counter-proposition: a license which permits training if the model is fully open.
My next project will be released under a GPL-like license with exactly this condition added. If you train a model on this code, the model must be open source & open weights
In light of the fact that the courts have found training an AI model to be fair use under US copyright law, it seems unlikely this condition will have any actual relevance to anyone. You're probably going to need to not publicly distribute your software at all, and make such a condition a term of the initial sale. Even there, it's probably going to be a long haul to get that to stick.
Not sure why the FSF or any other organization hasn't released a license like this years ago already.
Because it would violate freedom zero. Adding such terms to the GNU GPL would also mean that you can remove them, they would be considered "further restrictions" and can be removed (see section 7 of the GNU GPL version 3).
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It isn't the difficult, a license that forbids how the program is used is a non-free software license.
"The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0)."
Yet the GPL imposes requirements for me and we consider it free software.
You are still free to train on the licensed work, BUT you must meet the requirements (just like the GPL), which would include making the model open source/weight.
Running the program and analyzing the source code are two different things...?
In the context of Free Software, yes. Freedom one is about the right to study a program.
But training an AI on a text is not running it.
And distributing an AI model trained on that text is neither distributing the work nor a modification of the work, so the GPL (or other) license terms don't apply. As it stands, the courts have found training an AI model to be a sufficiently transformative action and fair use which means the resulting output of that training is not a "copy" for the terms of copyright law.
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Model weights, source, and output.