I hope many of you were able to attend yesterday’s webinar from Creative Commons to introduce the new CC Signals initiative
CC signals are a proposed framework to help content stewards express how they want their works used in AI training—emphasizing reciprocity, recognition, and sustainability in machine reuse. They aim to preserve open knowledge by encouraging responsible AI behavior without limiting innovation.
They reported over 800 people were in the room and from the chat there was wide global representation. A recording is available for those who may have missed it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdqYroZQ4rw
I am counting on some responses from this community. Is this viable, will it influence the AI makers? Can Signals make a difference? What is the relationship of CC licenses and CC signals?
While its about as far from easy as you can get, I respect Creative Commons for taking this on, as it is better than resigning oneself to indifference.
What signals do you have to share about CC Signals?
Wow! It is a tall order and a long way to go but essential to start on this path. Since it is more like a social order, it is an uphill task. So, if these are established and accepted as Universal ‘values’, nothing like it!
As I mentioned in my newsletter, it feels like a reversal for Creative Commons.
CC used to be about sharing your content. But CC Signals focuses on the opposite, on how to limit sharing of your content. Even more, it becomes like a really simple version of ODRL, enabling people to charge money for content.
To me, it reads like CC has been captured by commercial interests, both on the side of commercial content creation, and on the side of commercial AI (indeed, there is no option in CC Signals to limit use to non-commercial AI).
I do think it’s good that they’re trying to do something, and I can see in the discussion posts that they’re facing a lot of pushback and outright anger.
Unfortunately, until something like this is legally enforceable I don’t think it will do much good… especially when there are people who want to break things just because they can (thinking of this article: Rampant AI Cheating Is Ruining Education Alarmingly Fast).
The anger is so understandable, Amanda, though hardly warranted towards CC. I cannot claim to know their stakes here.
Not many educators sought this. This is where I object to the blithe comparisons to the start of the web, it was not jammed as much into people’s work as a you must do, at least in the early - mid 1990s it felt more like an invitation,
So many of educators are being squeezed on all sides by upper and outside interests, where is our agency?
I land more on the idealistic side and have never thought of sharing in having any reciprocity of credit, or exchange, so anything that every came back was purely a bonus. I remain more interested in what we do at the human scale
But of course what is being done by the owners of the Big Machines is at a gross scale of not caring one bit about individuals or being generous or even saying thank you.
Thanks for sharing my post @cogdog! I agree with what @agrey says about it feeling like they’re to do something - anything!
At the risk of repeating what I’ve already said (based on @Downes’ original post), the original Creative Commons licenses were a hack of copyright-by-default so that creators were enabled to share and remix things on the web.
Framing CC Signals as a ‘social contract’ misunderstands Creative Commons’ role in the ecosystem. People use CC licenses because they’re useful and don’t depend on everyone using them.
CC Signals, on the other hand, is redolent of well-intentioned techno-solutionism which depends on everyone agreeing with one another. It won’t succeed because it can’t succeed.
If you’d like an analogy, I see it as being like recycling yogurt pots while 90+ private jets fly into Venice for Jeff Bezos’ wedding. The issues here are systemic and require policy solutions, which Creative Commons are in a good position to advocate for, but not (I would argue) implement themselves.
Just out of a meeting of the Creative Commons Education Platform with a briefing of CC Signals from @Jennryn and @cable – they are very aware of the strong range of opinions but also wanted to note that its very very early and formative, its something in development.
However, it’s increasingly clear that the social contract that underpinned machine use of web data in the past no longer holds. Today, machines don’t just crawl the web to make it more searchable or to help unlock new insights—they feed algorithms that fundamentally change (and threaten) the web we know.
In response, some creators are choosing to take their content offline. Others are trying to block machines from accessing their works and erecting paywalls. Large rightsholders are pushing for legislators to expand the scope of intellectual property rights.
This isn’t sustainable, and it isn’t leading to the future we want. The impact of large AI models, combined with this understandable backlash, risks creating a world where people are no longer able or willing to share their works. Knowledge and creativity could be further locked up, and decades of progress made by the open movement reversed.
This matters, as universal access to knowledge and culture is a human right, and vital to our ability to address our most pressing challenges going forward. At this critical juncture, we believe CC must intervene to help drive towards a more equitable digital future.
We’re working on a first iteration of a preference signals framework, which we’re provisionally calling CC signals. CC signals are designed to offer a new way for stewards of large collections of content to indicate their preferences as to how machines (and the humans controlling them) should contribute back to the commons when they reuse and benefit from using the content.
Our intervention is based on the beliefs that there are many legitimate purposes for machine reuse of content that must be protected, and that an ecosystem that better addresses the legitimate concerns of those creating and stewarding human knowledge is both possible and necessary
