AI and Open Cultural Licensing (remarks to be presented at the SHARP plenary roundtable: AI In the Communications Circuit) | Martin Paul Eve | Professor of Literature, Technology and Publishing

"For many years, though, open culture advocates have been arguing for open licensing on cultural works, precisely so that others can take the work and do unexpected things with it. Examples in my own experience include format-shifting works (two of my books have had fan-made conversions to other formats) and amateur translations. But there has always been a subset of people for whom these unexpected re-uses are not a bonus, but a concern.

With the growth of machine learning and AI systems that have been trained on in-copyright material, we are likely to see a backlash against open cultural licenses and platforms, as these platforms will be seen as completely open fodder for AIs, which most, say, humanities scholars, have only encountered as aides to plagiarism and cheating. Wikipedia’s license, for instance, is the Creative Commons Attribution Sharealike 4.0 terms, which means that you are free to re-use the content on Wikipedia, so long as your downstream re-use is licensed under the same conditions. This, of course, does not preclude fair or transformative uses but it is a strong indication that, if AIs are trained on Wikipedia, they should themselves be releasing material under the CC BY-SA license....

In short: the actions of the large corporations who are training AI models on in-copyright material are provoking a backlash against the idea of open dissemination on the internet and web. This, in turn, will mean that such systems will be trained on data that contains falsehoods and that is of potentially lower quality, rather than the highest calibre of material. As a result, such systems might never live up to their promise. For some people, this is a desired outcome, but it also means that the general population will be unable to read the highest quality material without paying often unaffordable rates. Basically, we end up penalising society and culture just so that we can thwart the rise of the machines."