Comment by Cynddl
9 hours ago
As a researcher with many articles in the ACM library, I have to say this is a masterclass in hypocrisy. Obviously, lawyers can decipher the terms of ACM publishing contracts and Creative Commons licences to determine if this will be acceptable or not. But ACM is not a company, it's a non-profit founded in 1947 to represent scientists.
I would be surprised if a majority of ACM members were to say yes should we ask them (but ACM is not known for such democracy). Along with book authors, we are one of the many people that provide the knowledge and expertise on which large tech firms train their models, and get nothing in return. Actually, life is getting worse for us: extra workload in universities with students' AI use, a completely broken peer review system, etc. Hence the irony of ACM thinking about licensing, and only licensing, at a time where this is the least of our priorities.
How do you square away the idea that you do science for the increase in knowledge of human kind, but then say that a particular use of that knowledge is verboten?
I get the copyright aspect of this and I'm not arguing that here. I'm more asking about the moral / ethical idea of choosing who can benefit from your science.
Obviously there are the moral / ethical arguments about AI in general here to weigh against - those have been hashed out significantly elsewhere, and I'm not interested in debating them. What I'm asking about here is the impact on science by sharing it with tooling that distributes it in ways not generally considered when originally written.
A quick check of your post history suggests the frame that you work in strongly is privacy related research (observation - may be wrong). I'm curious how that impacts what you wrote here generally.
(Just to be perfectly clear, I'm not arguing your points here, trying to understand them better)
Good question. Unfortunately, academic knowledge is widely ‘verboten’ already. Everything under paywall, researchers having to pay up to $10,000 to publish in open access in some venues, rare books unavailable even to top universities. Access to knowledge and information is increasingly difficult for everyone.
That said, what matters here is the social contract, what do I bring to society and what do we get from tech companies. For most people around the world, access to the typical leading models is out of reach. Not many on this planet can pay the subscriptions (or even API keys) that offer access to the best models. So I'm not buying the argument that tech companies are broadening access. What we're creating is a increasingly discriminatory society where the few get access to information, and the many don't.
Thanks for the reply here.
I guess I have some perspectives on a bunch of this. I'm for open sharing of academic work for all (but I'm not an academic, so my perspective is a consumer), so inferring your perspective here I think we agree on that. I maintain many open source (MIT/Apache2 licensed) libraries, and I've also worked in big tech (Amazon, OpenAI). I believe both in the idea of collective commons but also in the ideas that there should be the ability of people to sell software. There's tension in that social contract similarly, and it gets more complex when you look at copyleft.
I guess I'd be disappointed if this was just allowing big labs access and not more broadly allowing access to the ACM library for smaller open source models. Very much in agreement with your last points there.
> most people around the world, access to the typical leading models is out of reach. Not many on this planet can pay the subscriptions (or even API keys) that offer access to the best models. So I'm not buying the argument that tech companies are broadening access. What we're creating is a increasingly discriminatory society where the few get access to information, and the many don't
I’m sorry, but I can’t buy this argument. Making information more available does not make it more discriminatory. Nobody is saying it will only be available in the best models and withheld from other models or services like the ChatGPT free plan. Nobody is saying we’re going to make the original content inaccessible through the previous means after the LLMs are trained on it. Nothing about this shrinks access or makes it more discriminatory.
I understand that you’re upset about the use of the content, but I think you need to admit that your stance is the one trying to restrain use of the content. Training LLMs on it can only bring knowledge to a wider audience, not restrict it.
Whether or not that’s a good or fair idea is a separate discussion, but arguing that this makes access to the knowledge more discriminatory and locked away is 180 degrees backwards.
If it was a non profit that trained the model - would that change your mind?
The issue here is ACM focusing on licensing. A non profit would not be able to pay ACM for access. Hence why this policy is hypocritical: it gives more power to the larger players and undermines smaller actors in the field who have fewer resources.
Everybody gives more power to the larger players. You won't work for me for $10/hr but you'll work for a guy who has more money for more. There's nothing wrong with that. Money is just a fungible unit representing value offered.
2 replies →
Why did you sign off your copyright to ACM then? If you kept the copyright and prevented others from distributing your work, you could be the sole distributor and negotiate the price with the AI company yourself.
2 replies →
Non Profit != No Money
A non profit could well pay, and there are plenty of reasons frontier models should be managed by non profit. After all, why allow a for profit to benefit from free contributions?
1 reply →
>The issue here is ACM focusing on licensing. A non profit would not be able to pay ACM for access. Hence why this policy is hypocritical: it gives more power to the larger players and undermines smaller actors in the field who have fewer resources.
And when the open weights models distill all the content out of the majors anyway?
I’m pretty sure most people who have papers in the ACM digital library already have “preprints” in other freely accessible locations, especially for papers written in the last two decades. LLMS have been able to search/find most of my papers for long time now.
The peer review system was broken before AI, so I’m not sure what your point is there.
If you don't hold a patent for the use of the knowledge you published publicly, you can't prevent others from using the knowledge. You enjoy the prestige attached to the idea that you're an academic who participates in giving away their knowledge but then you play this game when that knowledge would actually be useful as opposed to being read by 3 other people in your special area who sit on your various committees in your career, now you want to forbid the use for culture war intra-elite signaling reasons.
You don't own the knowledge you put out there unless you have a limited time valid patent. The rest is absurdity. If you want to keep your findings to yourself, keep them secret.
The intellectual property law that governs ACM articles is copyright law, not patents. I don’t know who controls these (the ACM or the authors) or what rights might have been granted to the public.
The entire point of copyright law is so that people can make their writing public and still be able to control the right to make copies (for example, into your dataset for training an LLM).
Copyright protects against reprinting or reproducing the wording and expression, not using the idea expressed in there in novel contexts.
27 replies →
This makes no sense whatsoever. How would a philosopher of science, or a social scientist who publish in the ACM apply for a patent? Or someone who builds software (software patent not so easy to get ;)). I have applied for patents before and I'm pretty sure my patent application has been fed to countless LLMs by now.
The issue is not who owns knowledge, it's how it benefits humanity.
They can't apply for a patent in those categories, so they have no way of preventing others from reading their text (or using a program to process the text, and compute statistical properties), and using the ideas in other contexts (without re-expressing the same text).
If someone reads a philosophical essay, has a heureka moment from it, applies the principle to their work, and makes bank (commercial profit), they never have to pay a percentage to the author of the essay.
The world would be quite different if AI companies had to create the knowledge they trained on, rather than consume that knowledge freely given away. They're not known for freely giving away their produce either, I don't know why you think the ire should be pointing in this direction.
I like open models for sure. I support free software as well. But using published knowledge to solve new problems was never disallowed, even for profit. Today, a for-profit company, e.g. a gigantic Big Pharma company can have their employees read chemistry and biology papers and use the knowledge gained from it to improve their products and processes and make more profit without paying a cent to the authors (beyond what they may get - likely nothing - due to the potential paywall).
Patents shouldn’t exist.
Patents were invented to incentivize disclosure of inventions and prevent extended secrecy. In exchange for the public disclosure (which allows others to experiment with the idea without selling yet), you get to keep exclusivity for N years.
1 reply →
“If you don’t lock your bike, you can’t prevent others from taking it for a ride. You enjoy the mobility attached to the idea you’re a bike rider who rides a bike but then you play this game when that bike would actually be useful as opposed to sitting in the bike rack all day”.
Nope, and I'd also download cars.
[flagged]
You mean the knowledge you gathered with public grants, with a public paid salary, yet don’t want to make freely available to the public?
Yeah, too bad
This is about the ACM licensing it to for-profit AI companies, who will then make you pay a subscription to access the knowledge. Not about making it "freely available to the public."
As long as we are going toward a world of abundance where money doesn't mean much and the main currency is time, I can't complain. I will subsidize that with my brain power turned into ink on paper.
It’s pretty clear that the premise won’t be becoming reality.
Well, once there is no more jobs, or once a large enough number of people are made redundant, it will mechanically happen. Future is all about research and entertainment. That is why tiktok stars and soccer players get so much money. All that being based on DARPA research, I mean the internet. People just want to have fun. Du pain et des jeux.
well, we are not, so far it is just concentrating wealth and power in smaller and smaller subset of people
Yes and then continue your reasoning... Is this sustainable? What do you think it leads to?
Abundance for whom, exactly? And if the answer is everybody: who in charge has an incentive to do this?
Sorry to ruin your day, but if the people with money could have introduce equal society, you would have noticed their attempts by now.
Abundance for everyone or it is not abundance. With abundance, the field gets levelled because everything someone else can get, you can too. Society can't be equal when everyone is in survival of the fittest mode because resources (energy) are not infinite.