[Discussion] How do Papirus devs feel about their work in AI?

[treymerkley]

I was having a conversation with my partner about the use of AI, contending that if something is creative commons, copyleft licensed, or other semi-public licensed, that it's fair game to ingest and produce with AI, because the artists have released their work to be mixed. Whether it's by a human hand or a bot is besides the point. The counterargument was that the choice to publicize their work was made before we had modern algorithms. The best we had when Papirus was released was probably DeepDream, after all. I hadn't considered it, and I think it's a fair point.

So, devs who have contributed substantial content to Papirus, one of the most popular icon packs and a large piece of the paper/flat design era: How do you feel about the idea of your work being used for AI? Or a model composed entirely of works produced as copyleft or otherwise free to use? Would you rather it be free to use manually, rather than AI, or does it not matter to you?

[morganist]

in my personal opinion, this is the same debate the free and open source community had about AI training on their code. the thing is, we can't protect the icon pack from AI scraping from a technical perspective, right? even if the project gets off GitHub, the pack is not compiled and freely released.

[achadwick]

I put my tiny contributions into Papirus to make desktop environments nicer to use for humans. Yeah I consider the scrapers to be going too far, beyond probably all of our original intents contributors. That said, there's nothing in place to technically or legally stop them in either the licencing (which strips moral rights in favour of free distribution, which was done by humans at the time of licensing) or the current hosting situation (which is very obviously run as an ingest frontend for LLM and genAI these days).

That's an admission of powerlessness in the face of potential licensewashing and brand dilution, of course. It's quite dispiriting, really.

I'd definitely support a move to Codeberg, Disroot or similar¹ with a "for visibility" read-only branch here, and a no-slop contributions policy if one were proposed.

Footnotes

1. it'd have to be compatible with the state censorship and firewalls all our contributors have to live with. Ain't the modern world grand? ↩