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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.
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)
It is good for their business model; but it may lead to monopoly unlike anything acm ever had and very dubious prospect for academia.
The OP didn't say that.
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
Without material values, you will be lost and confused.
Granted, the ACM is hardly a bastion of anything but self interest and greed.
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?
And when the open weights models distill all the content out of the majors anyway?
The peer review system was broken before AI, so I’m not sure what your point is there.
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.
Yeah, too bad
Sorry to ruin your day, but if the people with money could have introduce equal society, you would have noticed their attempts by now.
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 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).
The issue is not who owns knowledge, it's how it benefits humanity.
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.
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.
https://authors.acm.org/open-access/acm-open-for-authors-hom...
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.)
I think the right choice is pretty clear...
A llm emulating a person is why many of my used sites banned llms due to scraping bandwith costs
Is this about access or accessibility to claude (for example)
I am sure the entirely of human computing knowledge is not that big.
Does the ACM really think LLMs haven't already consumed 90% of the content through other sources?
There's something hilarious about that, but also, snake eating its own tail.
What about the authors?
I suppose they could be sued.
Either way, I'll pirate.
now it will be fodder for the slop machine
(i think that LLMs are going to wreck the peer review system for all but hard-experimental papers)
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.
> Beginning January 2026, all ACM publications and related artifacts in the ACM Digital Library will be made open access.
I think I may be shadowbanned, but at what point do we start viewing LLMs as a national security threat?
It's almost like, "don't hurt yourself unc, we will just search arxiv".