Creative Commons launches CC Signals

Open Source AI
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"CC signals are designed to make it easier for data stewards to express how they want their content to be used & how AI systems should give back. It’s about building reciprocity into the ecosystem.

This kick off follows years of research, workshops, and community conversations. Now we need your input.

Check out the blog to learn more and get involved: https://buff.ly/r4KBnRx "

This page actually explains better what it is: CC Signals: A New Social Contract for the Age of AI - Creative Commons

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This is an interesting project. I believe there are at least two more efforts to develop standards and tools to signal preferences by content creators… I think one is at W3C and at least another group is on this case. I know Software Heritage is also very interested in having a standard.

SWH’s problem is probably easier to solve, too because of all the training content in the public web, software is where the tools and processes are more mature. Think about how much discipline there is in software engineering, where every file has copyright notice, every repository has a license, each project is in version control to track individual contributors… At least ideally (I know, in practice it’s not easy), it’s possible to track all the rights owners and their preference signals for software files and repositories.

For other creative work I’m curious to see where they’ll start from: the typical Jpeg file found online doesn’t even have carry a copyright notice, let alone its license or the history of its modifications, am I wrong? I’m very curious to understand how CC is going to tackle it… Reading the post and the initial docs I couldn’t find a straight answer (it’s early in the project.)

Besides CC, what other preference-signaling efforts are ongoing? @zack @stellaathena do you have more visibility on this?

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Creative Commons already shared an update from early community feedback:

Also, it’s worth highlighting this recent white paper published by Open Future titled “Beyond AI and copyright”:

These developments are very much aligned with the white paper “Data Governance in Open Source AI” published by the OSI last year in collaboration with Open Future:

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tl;dr

Add this to Robots.txt;

User-Agent: *
Content-Usage: ai=n;exceptions=cc-op
Allow: /

Modify the value of the “Content-Usage:” key per your intent and the spec.

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