@testing-for-ya when the network was created the founder had a social contract with the users to work toward a goal. Now the founder is gone and they are going back on that. And they can do that, there was no legal binding nor anything that keeps them in place. But they can't expect the users to be fine with it, they can't expect them to keep curating thing if they fell betrayed and they can't expect them to not whine about the unethical changes.

@testing-for-ya oh, I wasn't blaming you for anything, sorry if I gave that impression. The point was just that the reason of the change is pretty obvious despite all the "we are doing this to protect your work from the evil no-attribution LLM". Saying that they are not required to post any dump and that we should appreciate the act of charity is also forgetting that at the same time we are not required to help their site, we are not required to moderate or curate the content and we are not even required to vote reasonably (see Tim's key lemma) [cont]

@testing-for-ya Selling premium access to training material like they did with the recent partnership is a tasty low hanging fruit option. But obviously if you are trying to sell the fruits of a tree that has always been there free to take for anyone... you must build a wall. Even if that causes discomfort and kills some of the bees that have been pollinating the tree for years...

@testing-for-ya let's not fool ourselves. The reason for this change is blatant. There is no ethical concern, no charity effort to protect us from evildoers that always used our data to train LLM and will continue to do so (just browse Hugging Face). The only point is that someone high up realized there is little money do be made in the few dying and abandoned "product" the company has and therefore is now desperate for other sources of income. [cont]

@Frank the button has no legal significance. The content is under the CC license - you could redistribute it even if you bought the dump or as a book from the company. All the checkbox does is implementing a threat: the company is letting you know that they have gone back on their words about being a repository of knowledge and that they no longer live to the values Jeff had in mind when creating this site. They are treating people to stop providing them the content in a ready format should they dare to compete in the same business field they are already trying to monetize: selling our data.

I would also add that I still don't see HOW they can hope to prove that whoever downloaded a dump (the only person that signed the agreement) was the user who trained a specific LLM.

Well, the contact button there may end up in a nice article about this wonderful initiative.

@FranckDernoncourt To be clear, I also think they have no reasonable way to enforce the threat. But since Monica clearly showed the company doesn't need to be reasonable to smear someone, I prefer to make them realize their position before someone goes for M.A.D.

Even with watermarking (HOW can you watermark the actual question text without de facto editing some content that is also owned by the original poster? By doing so you are creating a false attribution too) they would still have no way to prove that the user was the one who trained the file, unless they admit it in the first place... +1 for the interesting article btw

As I said on the Tavern chatroom, I am pretty sure that right now you could even just use the developer tool to enable the button without clicking the checkbox and it would still work... This looks like the work of a team that did have to do something but didn't want to do something. I wonder what the employees general sentiment for these choices is.

@AMtwo to be fair you also have the side option of contacting the Creative Commons organization directly and ask their opinion on the issue.

@ThomasOwens I agree to disagree. Not a lawyer, but I don't think they can put in place a condition that basically says "you won't make use of the rights described in the CC or we may terminate your account or something".

@ThomasOwens The difference is that the conditions they put in place request you to give up some rights that the Creative Common license gives you. The fact that the only consequence of this "infringement" is a termination of your account and / or the ability to access the future dump is imho not part of the picture. That said, I don't care enough about my content here nor the site to want to start a bigger argument ... yet I can't hide that I am currently finding this mess quite entertaining.