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Ask HN: Is there any license that is designed to exclude LLMs?

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Re: Ask HN: Is there any license that is designed to exclude LLMs?

#11

Post by GTP »

bilekas wrote: post #8
krapp wrote: post #6

You don't have a choice. Any content you put online will be harvested by LLMs regardless of your intent, or any license you post to the contrary. That's already the norm and it isn't going to change any time soon. hehehheh's comment is your best option - poison your content when possible. It's still going to be consumed but at least you can make the LLMs choke on it. Second best option is to never post content to the…

As bad as it sounds, this is definitely the best advice unless you actually have the funds and determination to bring legal action against the licensing breach I assume ?

I doubt a private citizen would have the resources to stand against these companies at the moment. The situation could get better in the future, in case some big company puts the resources to fight in court and wins. The precedent could be of great help in presenting similar cases.

Re: Ask HN: Is there any license that is designed to exclude LLMs?

#12

Post by krapp »

bilekas wrote: post #8
krapp wrote: post #6

You don't have a choice. Any content you put online will be harvested by LLMs regardless of your intent, or any license you post to the contrary. That's already the norm and it isn't going to change any time soon. hehehheh's comment is your best option - poison your content when possible. It's still going to be consumed but at least you can make the LLMs choke on it. Second best option is to never post content to the…

As bad as it sounds, this is definitely the best advice unless you actually have the funds and determination to bring legal action against the licensing breach I assume ?

I mean, if you have those kinds of funds, you probably also already have lawyers on retainer and lawsuits are already SOP. I don't know how effective that would be under the current legal climate.

Re: Ask HN: Is there any license that is designed to exclude LLMs?

#13

Post by [deleted] »

rcxdude wrote: post #7
urlwolf wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks, I suspect the LLM companies would ignore this, and of course getting into a legal battle is beyond the means of most content producers. so perhaps the license is not the solution, and we need to create a complete world outside http...

By their current interpretation of copyright law (which hasn't yet been successfully challenged), the license is almost completely irrelevant, because they believe it is fair use. You need to first establish that what they are doing is copyright infringement before you can apply any license terms.

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Is there any license that is designed to exclude LLMs?

#14

Post by burnt-resistor »

krapp wrote: post #6

You don't have a choice. Any content you put online will be harvested by LLMs regardless of your intent, or any license you post to the contrary. That's already the norm and it isn't going to change any time soon. hehehheh's comment is your best option - poison your content when possible. It's still going to be consumed but at least you can make the LLMs choke on it. Second best option is to never post content to the…

Yes, for the most part. While it's academically possible to attempt to control this through legal means, it is, in practice, unlikely to have much impact because LLM creators are effectively similar in operation to web crawlers for search engines. It's probably ineffective and wasteful use of webops/webadmin time and energy to obsess over attempting to control access or bikeshed about it because deploying well-intentioned "defenses" will likely end up creating false positives blocking ordinary users and costing time and effort to support these headaches that don't contribute any value. Perhaps it might be possible to notice the more honest LLM creators with user agent headers, but it's also entirely possible a nontrivial fraction of them spoof headers, run as batch jobs from AWS, and cache and store content for offline so they don't/wouldn't necessarily check for updates as often as search engines would to create a training corpus.

Re: Ask HN: Is there any license that is designed to exclude LLMs?

#16

Post by ranger_danger »

If you care about it being an OSI-approved license (or purists arguing that it's not really "open source"), then any restrictions on who/what can use the software violates the FSF's "freedom zero": https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html#four-freedoms

Re: Ask HN: Is there any license that is designed to exclude LLMs?

#17

Post by ranger_danger »

urlwolf wrote: post #3
DamonHD wrote: post #2

Any licence that requires attribution should be enough in principle , eg CC BY 4.0, Apache 2.0.

Thanks, I suspect the LLM companies would ignore this, and of course getting into a legal battle is beyond the means of most content producers. so perhaps the license is not the solution, and we need to create a complete world outside http...

In other words: Licenses are only as useful as your ability to enforce them in court.

And yes, the companies are fully aware of this and that's why they do it, they know you won't dare sue them.

Re: Ask HN: Is there any license that is designed to exclude LLMs?

#19

Post by hehehheh »

GTP wrote: post #11
bilekas wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As bad as it sounds, this is definitely the best advice unless you actually have the funds and determination to bring legal action against the licensing breach I assume ?

I doubt a private citizen would have the resources to stand against these companies at the moment. The situation could get better in the future, in case some big company puts the resources to fight in court and wins. The precedent could be of great help in presenting similar cases.

A class action may be one way.

Re: Ask HN: Is there any license that is designed to exclude LLMs?

#20

Post by GTP »

hehehheh wrote: post #19
GTP wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt a private citizen would have the resources to stand against these companies at the moment. The situation could get better in the future, in case some big company puts the resources to fight in court and wins. The precedent could be of great help in presenting similar cases.

A class action may be one way.

Yes, but whether that's an option depends on which country you're residing in.
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