As we’re nearing the three year anniversary of The New York Times filing its lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft, Wikipedia has decided to join the fray, on the side of… Wikipedia. The Wikimedia Foundation explains on its website this morning that it has filed an amicus brief urging the court to find some kind of middle ground in the lawsuit, which focuses on whether OpenAI and Microsoft engaged in copyright infringement by training on Times articles and by reproducing portions of those articles. As the Foundation sees it, there are times when this should be allowed, and times when it shouldn’t.
Today’s blog post reads, “Wikimedia Foundation’s amicus brief argues that a ruling for a too restrictive version of fair use could inhibit technological innovation, which would limit the availability of tools that benefit open source projects like Wikipedia; while a ruling in favor of blanket fair use could lead to a more closed web where knowledge online is weakened due to a lack of available secondary source materials.” In essence, the foundation argues that LLMs should be allowed to train on copyrighted materials, but that those copyrighted materials should not be allowed to be used in retrieval-augmented generation, which would represent something like a chatbot or the Google AI overview. Writes Wikimedia Foundation’s General Counsel Stephen LaPorte, “A ruling that does not apply fair use principles carefully could threaten the sustainability of free knowledge, and stifle the development of open source technologies, ultimately impacting access to information for everyone in both cases.”
As The Verge points out in its coverage, Wikipedia itself has had this kind of tenuous relationship with AI for a while. These LLMs have been training on the hard work of Wikipedia contributors while also pulling traffic away from the free encyclopedia, and may reproduce copyrighted material that’s licensed in Wikimedia’s Creative Commons without adhering to the licenses that Wikipedia must. Earlier this year, Wikipedia took the step to outright ban AI-generated content on its pages. That said, Wikipedia says that LLMs and AI tools have helped editors (perhaps ironically) detect plagiarism and vandalism.
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