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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 publis
by Cynddl 2mo 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.
- bonoboTP 2mo agoIf 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.
- sharts 2mo agoPatents shouldn’t exist.
- bonoboTP 2mo agoPatents 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.
- cwillu 2mo agoAnd? Currently patents are predominantly used to prevent interoperability and impose costs.
- dwattttt 2mo agoThe 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.
- bonoboTP 2mo agoI 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).
- 12387098 2mo ago[flagged]
- willy_k 2mo ago“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”.
- bonoboTP 2mo agoNope, and I'd also download cars.
- loumf 2mo agoThe 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).
- bonoboTP 2mo agoCopyright protects against reprinting or reproducing the wording and expression, not using the idea expressed in there in novel contexts.
- 20k 2mo agoAI reproduces copyrighted work exactly in many cases, so it clearly infringes copyright in this sense The output of it is also a derivative work, and derivative works also infringe copyright. Its only not a problem if you ignore copyright entirely Humans are the only entities that get to enjoy special idea-learning-exemptions, not AI
- bonoboTP 2mo agoThe verbatim reproduction is clearly a red herring and not the main use case. Nobody reads novels (or science papers) by prompting ChatGPT to give the next paragraph. Derivative work or transformative? It's not the same.
- hparadiz 2mo agoSuddenly it's "copyright infringement" to count the amount of times one word occurs after another word. I find this whole thing so amusing.
- 20k 2mo agoAI has the capacity to exactly reproduce its training data, just because something is a transformed representation does not mean that it isn't copying it in some fashion. The JPEG format 'just' counts the frequencies in an 8x8 block of pixels, and yes that's 100% copyright infringement
- Cynddl 2mo agoThis 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.
- bonoboTP 2mo agoThey 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.
- aatd86 2mo agoAs 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.
- PunchyHamster 2mo agowell, we are not, so far it is just concentrating wealth and power in smaller and smaller subset of people
- aatd86 2mo agoYes and then continue your reasoning... Is this sustainable? What do you think it leads to?
- puelocesar 2mo agoMajor social chaos, economic meltdown and extreme crackdown on dissent by ultra facist government powered by palantir surveillance.
- aatd86 2mo agoBut if no one has money nor a job, if the old model of economy is broken that way, can rich people stay rich? (so to speak) Isn't there some kind of mean reversal?
- layer8 2mo agoIt’s pretty clear that the premise won’t be becoming reality.
- aatd86 2mo agoWell, 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.
- maCDzP 2mo agoIf it was a non profit that trained the model - would that change your mind?
- Cynddl 2mo agoThe 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.
- bonoboTP 2mo agoWhy 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.
- kelnos 2mo agoBecause if you don't publish in academia, you might as well be dead. And the terms for most places to publish are similar. It's a racket.
- bonoboTP 2mo agoOk, then next question is why are you in academia? To share knowledge with humanity, bring the Promethean light to the mortals or something I guess. But then if they use it for productive things that make money, that's too smelly, that's too practical, too dirty, or what?
- darkwater 2mo agoWhat a petty view of others you have :( What should they do then? Just shrug and move on, the machine must continue to grind no matter what? Why there is always this request for 100% purity if you dare to criticize the system or part of it?
- moi2388 2mo agoYou 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
- hmry 2mo agoThis 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."
- PeterStuer 2mo agoSo why not license it for free to those model companies that also share their models with the public? Why would Moonshot not get free access?
- TeMPOraL 2mo agoIs there any major for-profit AI company that doesn't have generous free tier with access to SOTA models?
- joshka 2mo agoHow 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)
- Cynddl 2mo agoGood 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.
- joshka 2mo agoThanks 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.
- seanmcdirmid 2mo agoI’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.
- jval43 2mo agoMy ACM papers are published in full on my website. Not preprints. In fact thats the only reason I have a website, just in case someone actually wants to read them. The copyright agreement (actually copyright assignment/transfer) with ACM has had a carve-out for this case in it for a while, but it has to be a personal website.
- seanmcdirmid 2mo agoI thought it was more liberal than that but there was always a “preprint” exemption that would get you around it.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]