The future of AI may depend on who controls the code.
The boom in generative AI continues to make a stir, this time within the free and open-source software community (FOSS), whose developers create and share software that anyone can use, edit and build on.
Many of today’s biggest AI tools have been trained or developed using open-source code, but critics say they’re not always giving credit where credit is due.
This has left developers wondering how their work is being used behind the scenes and whether AI companies are playing fair.
Researchers at Yale’s Digital Ethics Centre think they may have found a solution. Their study proposes “copyleft” licences, which are designed to keep software open and transparent.
This means that if someone uses open-source code to create something new, they must keep that new creation just as accessible to others, rather than locking it away behind closed doors.
Lead author Grant Shanklin, a de Vries-Sherif Junior Fellow at Yale University’s Digital Ethics Centre, said, “Our analysis showed that extending the copyleft concept to generative artificial intelligence has the potential to give open-source software developers meaningful control over how AI developers use their code.”
Copyright and intellectual property have been at the forefront of many people’s minds, particularly among creatives and scholars, as concerns grow around AI scraping and repurposing material without attribution.
Here, however, the conversation reaches the foundations of the programming itself.
Shanklin added, “Importantly, it would incentivize the formation of a community committed to building AI tools aligned with the values of the free and open-source movement, which could help ensure that AI models are developed openly and responsibly.”
As AI continues to evolve, society must focus on creating and implementing safeguards that reduce potential harms rather than ignoring the challenges it presents.
By tackling the issue at its source, the researchers at Yale are doing important work that could help society progress alongside AI, rather than in opposition to it.
