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  • Something something Roko's basilisk
    by bezko
  • I'm really not sure how this would work. I don't know how the ACM works, but in IEEE you would have to give them your publishing rights. However, training a LLM is not publishing by itself, it is a derivative work? Any way, at this point authors should be entitled to monetary compensation, not the publisher. The deal is totally different.
    by estebarb
  • Are they in the position to do that?

    What about the authors?

    by croes
  • Don't you grant ACM a right to distribute your work when publishing? So doesn't ACM already have the right to grant access to AI?
    by em3rgent0rdr
  • The ACM sent around a nice query to members which made it clear that they were going to do it even if 100% of the members said "No, don't do that".

    I suppose they could be sued.

    by dsr_
  • I asked a mathematician the same question about whether we should allow AI systems to access all research papers and ideas, potentially putting their future careers at risk. He was very pessimistic about how human knowledge will compete with AI-generated proofs flooding the market.

    Especially in mathematics, many specialized areas have fewer than 100 people worldwide who are capable of determining whether a result is correct or not. The mathematics community will certainly be willing to use AI to assist with their research, but they may strongly object to a flood of AI-generated mathematics papers produced by others.

    by deepnlp-contact
  • Well if LLMs get access to it, we humans should get free access to it as well!
    by bitwize
  • Blocking access only hurts people who follow the rules. Unblocking access lets them compete with those who break the rules.

    I think the right choice is pretty clear...

    by spoaceman7777
  • It was so close! I could already see the end of all the predatory publishing and flourishing of open-access. Some even required by law. Knowledge was finally going to be free.

    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.)

    by jval43
  • So give it for free to the open weight models, and charge the closed weight models. Easy
    by rurban
  • They probably already scraped it.
    by juancn
  • Haha, agreed:)
    by computerdork
  • No doubt
    by pohl
  • Through scihub, probably.
    by amelius
  • Of course they did. There is open access to this library. These guys actually think they're offering new training data? It's kind of hilariously naive.
    by IAmGraydon
  • I think ACM should give everything away for free. US taxpayers pay for a lot of research and the previous administration required that government funded research be published and made freely available. See https://bidenwhitehouse.archives.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022...

    The back catalog at ACM isn't subject to this requirement and nor is research that's not funded by the US government, but I completely agree with the spirt of this law: research should be shared knowledge that other intelligences can build upon, whether human or machine. If you want to limit access to what you've done, don't publish it. Get a patent if that's an option, or keep it internal to a company as a trade secret.

    by jreynar
  • How about we give humans access
    by fsmv
  • This is called Sci-Hub and LibGen
    by Lockal
  • Do humans not have access? https://dl.acm.org/openaccess
    by m-hodges
  • As a researcher with many articles in the ACM library, I have to say this is a masterclass in hypocrisy. Obviously, lawyers can decipher the terms of ACM publishing contracts and Creative Commons licences to determine if this will be acceptable or not. But ACM is not a company, it's a non-profit founded in 1947 to represent scientists.

    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.

    by Cynddl
  • If you don't hold a patent for the use of the knowledge you published publicly, you can't prevent others from using the knowledge. You enjoy the prestige attached to the idea that you're an academic who participates in giving away their knowledge but then you play this game when that knowledge would actually be useful as opposed to being read by 3 other people in your special area who sit on your various committees in your career, now you want to forbid the use for culture war intra-elite signaling reasons.

    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.

    by bonoboTP
  • As long as we are going toward a world of abundance where money doesn't mean much and the main currency is time, I can't complain. I will subsidize that with my brain power turned into ink on paper.
    by aatd86
  • You mean the knowledge you gathered with public grants, with a public paid salary, yet don’t want to make freely available to the public?

    Yeah, too bad

    by moi2388
  • I’m pretty sure most people who have papers in the ACM digital library already have “preprints” in other freely accessible locations, especially for papers written in the last two decades. LLMS have been able to search/find most of my papers for long time now.

    The peer review system was broken before AI, so I’m not sure what your point is there.

    by seanmcdirmid
  • If it was a non profit that trained the model - would that change your mind?
    by maCDzP
  • How do you square away the idea that you do science for the increase in knowledge of human kind, but then say that a particular use of that knowledge is verboten?

    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)

    by joshka