The creative communes for non -profit, which led the license movement which allows creators to share their works while retaining copyright, is now preparing in the AI era. On Wednesday, the organization announced the launch of a new project, CC Signals, which will allow dataset holders to detail how their content can or cannot be reused by machines, as in the case of the formation of AI models.
The idea is intended to create a balance between the open nature of the Internet and the demand for data always more to supply AI.
As Creative Commons explains in a blog article, continuous extraction of current data could erode the opening on the Internet and see entities shaking their sites or keeping it with pay walls, instead of sharing access to their data.
The CC Signals project, on the other hand, aims to provide a legal and technical solution which would provide a framework for sharing data intended to be used between those which control the data and those which use it to form the AI.
The demand increases for such a tool, because companies confront the modification of their policies and their service conditions to limit the training of AI on their data or explain to what extent they will use user data for purposes linked to AI.
For example, X initially made a change that allowed third parties to train their models on its public data, then reversed this. Reddit uses its Robots.txt file, which is intended to indicate automated web robots if they can access its site, to prevent robots from scratching your data for AI training. Cloudflare turns to a solution that would charge robots for scratching, as well as tools to confuse them. And open source developers have also built tools to slow down and waste the resources of IA robots robots which did not respect their “narrative” directives.
The CC Signals project rather offers a different solution: a set of tools which offers a range of legal belongability and which has an ethical weight, similar to CC licenses which today cover billions of openly dismissed creative works online.
“The CC signals are designed to maintain the municipalities in the AI era,” said Anna Tumadóttir, CEO of Creative Commons, in an ad. “Just as CC licenses have helped build the open web, we believe that CC signals will help shape an open IA ecosystem based on reciprocity.”
The project is just starting to take shape. The first conceptions were published on the CC website and the GitHub page. The organization is actively looking for public comments before its plans for an Alpha launch (early test) in November 2025. It will also welcome a series of town hall for comments and questions.
