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.
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.
Anything short of free access to the acm would ensure I'll fight ti burn down the acm instead. Not that they ever asked or cared what their members think. The organization can either choose to side with humanity or against it
> 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.
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.
I think your example hinges more on the fact that $10/hr is a desperation wage. It's not enough to buy you a life where you're not stepped on by others. The further up that chain you move the more other things start to matter, at least for most people.
If you're offering me $300/hr and the other guy is offering me $400/hr, a whole lot of things start to matter more than the differential.
That gets at the "fungibility" notion you refer to. Money has the same nominal value everywhere, but different real value based on how much of it you already have. Which is to say that the marginal value of money drops pretty precipitously several times at certain thresholds that relate to the particulars of the economy (when you can afford to eat, when you can afford a house, when you can afford to not work anymore, and so on).
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.
Ok, 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?
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?
>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.
My 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.
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).
Are you a lawyer that has tested this in court, or is this just what you want the reality to be?
As someone with lots of open source code out there that has likely been used as LLM training data, I'm very sympathetic to this point of view, but that doesn't seem to be the legal reality. Much of this has not been fully tested in court, but it seems likely that LLM training is not copyright infringement, as long as the training material itself was acquired legally.
The 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.
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 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.
“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”.
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.
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.
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.
It was so close! I could already see the end of all the predatory publishing and flourishing of open-access. Some even required by law. Knowledge was finally going to be free.
But no, it will presumably get much worse as LLMs are inserted into this equation as yet another and new gatekeeper.
(Disclaimer: I have publications with ACM, non open-access. And ACM wasn't even too bad, it's the others that give me pause.)
It seems that the "open access" is more marketing than something reality based they actually want to do.
https://dl.acm.org/openaccess ---> So how to access the content? Do I have to register or what? It the "open access" only for academic org's people or for everyone in the world?
https://dl.acm.org/ ---> Okay, nice simple search field without loggin in, but when you try to search something, you get thousands of results, even if you search specific author and the exact name of paper, you will get hundreds of results and the thing you want is buried somewhere on page 247. Filters of authors, years etc. are for Premium subscription. But just googling the thing finds the link to ACM... And want to get the actual PDF? Hope it says "free access"...
Google scholar has become the way to search papers (which is somewhat worrisome). What people want from there is a download for all the stuff that does not list an author copy. Open access IMHO is just a reaction to the fact that mostly you would not need a subscription anyhow. Now the authors are paying upfront or universities are paying flat for all their researchers. The problem is now the incentives are not increasing the number of subscriptions but increasing the number of papers published.
Of course they did. There is open access to this library. These guys actually think they're offering new training data? It's kind of hilariously naive.
I'm really not sure how this would work. I don't know how the ACM works, but in IEEE you would have to give them your publishing rights. However, training a LLM is not publishing by itself, it is a derivative work? Any way, at this point authors should be entitled to monetary compensation, not the publisher. The deal is totally different.
ACM has been leaning heavily into AI-generated content for their journals in the past year, and this article is no exception: it appears to be 100% AI generated and full of LLM verbiage.
There's something hilarious about that, but also, snake eating its own tail.
Since starting to use AIs seriously for search in the last 3 months I have read and referenced more published papers and academic primary sources then I think I did in the previous 5 years. They're fantastic for pointing at some claim and asking for the primary source for it, and then it does the work of following things through the layers of backref to the original, assuming it's online. Opening the library up to AI access makes it far more accessible and usable then it was before.
AIs, at least in their current form, make you more who ever you were. If you want snap, glib answers of dubious accuracy, they'll give them to you, more easily than ever before. If you want to dig back into primary sources and get the original content, they'll do that for you, more easily than ever before.
Can't speak to how the science infrastructure is going to handle them, but if it takes down the peer review system, which I think has been worthless for probably going on two decades and has just given the entire enterprise a false sense of assurance, it'll probably be a net gain in the end. Peer review is a source of more problems then it is solving right now.
TLDR: “we’re going to try to get money from LLM providers for access to our back catalog without getting permission from the authors or providing them with any share of the revenue”.
I don't want to be mean but if it's that hard to even recognize that LLMs are even a valid thing that could intersect with your business that you need some kind of campaign for it..
It's almost like, "don't hurt yourself unc, we will just search arxiv".
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.