Ask HN: Is there a no-LLM license yet?

If you use a non-standard license, I will pass on your project, legal is not going to take the time to review and will just reject. It can be counterproductive to your project depending on your goals

You are looking for "ethical" / "permissioned" licenses (as many as there are people's gripes or causes), versus permissionless like MIT / Apache-2 / BSD-3

There is no legal way to prevent things. Bad actors will not care about your license. If you catch them, you can pay lawyers to try and have it enforced, but these licenses have not been tested in court yet, so no one knows who will win.

You may find https://github.com/manyfold3d/manyfold/blob/main/AGENTS.md useful ;-)

I look at this pretty similar to licenses that attempt to say something can't be used in some specific way, such as a "no evil" license. Famously, the JSON license:

    Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of
    this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in
    the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to
    use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of
    the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so,
    subject to the following conditions:

    The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all
    copies or substantial portions of the Software.

    The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil.

    THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR
    IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS
    FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR
    COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER
    IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN
    CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

(Source: https://www.json.org/license.html)

This seemingly pointless yet straightforward addition of the license has caused problems, because it's highly subjective and therefore makes compliance with the license impossible to objectively measure - which is really important for a license!

I think LLM training seems right now a simple objectively measurable thing - and maybe it will always be that simple - but I could also see it becoming a subjective thing. At the very least the interpretation of copyright law has yet to be upheld, which historically was one of the most "powerful" license-like things in existence.

I think the problem is that even if you have a "no training" license AI companies will just ignore it and you'll be left having to take legal action.

If the big publishing firms couldn't win an action against Meta for using pirated copies of their books you probably have no chance either.

Would this even work legally?

I remember the case of books used for training, where the court found training to be fair use, but the material has to be legally obtained (=Bought instead of pirated the books).

> and usage on it

What do you mean by "usage on it"?

Not an objection, you're fully within your rights to invent a license, just remember that a license with such clause would not be an open source license as per the Open Source Definition [1].

  6. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor

  The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research.

There's also 5. which probably isn't relevant here but possibly might depending on the definition of person (e.g. a legal person).

  5. No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups

  The license must not discriminate against any person or group of persons.

And then there's the obvious aspect of AI foundries blatantly ignoring copyright anyway (copyright law grants the the author the rights which he then gives away by way of a license).

[1] https://opensource.org/osd

"Bots strictly prohibited."

Some lawyers may try to weasel their way around but if it comes to a court case you should have a pretty straightforward interpretation of the phrase:

Are you financially able to take on open ai, anthropic, Facebook, etc? If not, then it doesn't matter what licence you use.

The only real no LLM license is keep your code private, I think it is that easy.

Do what Linus does: Focus on code quality!

Could we take this idea further and design a new programming language in which all LLM training would be prohibited? Any LLM capable of producing code for this language will have effectively violated this license... and incidentally, it will create a language where the joy of coding will remain :)