The Training Data Question

The training data from which large language models learn constitutes, in institutional-economic terms, a commons: the accumulated textual, visual, and computational output of millions of individuals, contributed without explicit governance arrangements for this purpose to a shared pool from which value is now extracted by a small number of firms. The governance arrangements under which the data was originally contributed — the norms of the open internet, the terms of service of social platforms, the licensing frameworks of academic publishing — were designed for a world in which the data's primary use was human consumption. The appropriation of that data for AI training represents what Ostrom's framework identifies as a regime change in the commons.