RSL (Really Simple Licensing) can extend RSS feeds to describe how content is licensed for AI. They’re launching with lots of backers and quotes. Some overlap with Creative Commons Signals, which I blogged about a few months ago. Found via John Spurlock.
@manton Somewhat related: I have a background in music, and yesterday I got an email from SAMI (the Swedish equivalent of SoundExchange, I believe, in the US). They explained that they’re launching “the world’s first AI license for music” (Google Translate version).
@birming Interesting, thanks for the link. I expect that a lot of people are moving in the same direction, hopefully there aren’t too many conflicting ways to handle this.
@manton Interesting: wonder if this could apply to Fediverse feeds, BlueSkyFeeds, podcast feeds, not just RSS?
@manton After a quick skim of the article, my inner skeptic has doubts of the viability if it means AI companies agree with it. Some will and some won’t, as we already see.
@tchambers Yes, technically I think it can be plugged in via robots.txt and a separate file. We’ll have to see in practice who adopts it.
@manton Interesting to see both these efforts. For a comparison, I see that Creative Commons was founded in 2001, relatively early, but already after a good deal of online content and users. I suppose these new efforts are on a comparable timeline, at least in terms of changing technologies and perceived needs.
@manton after you linked to this yesterday, I vibe-coded* up a WordPress plugin to add an appropriate AI licencing block into the header of each page on my dev site (defaulting to "allow"). Of course, RSL needs public support from the AI companies too to actually be useful. [* mainly as my first experiment with Gemini to do this.]
