Co-authored by Jenny Wallace and Rhiannon Hall
The breathtaking pace with which AI programs have swept across the internet and scooped up vast amounts of data has changed the way that all of us interact online. AI is everywhere – from Google’s Gemini search results to the now ubiquitous Copilot icon you’ll find in Microsoft products. As we learn more about how the presence of AI influences our work, we’re also learning how content creators and owners are affected by the unauthorised usage of work they have shared online. This includes how writers, artists and academics can now see their work via AI platforms, whether as a reproduction or as a template for someone else to leverage.
What will AI mean for the ongoing quality of creative content and how openly it is shared? In an attempt to address the concerns of content creators and capitalise on the prosocial purposes of AI, Creative Commons (CC) has recently introduced their new approach to influencing content sharing norms in the age of AI.
The role of Creative Commons
Non-profit organisation Creative Commons advocates for open and equitable access to the commons: natural and cultural resources and knowledge shared by and for a community’s benefit.
You might be most familiar with CC licences and their accompanying elements, which creators can apply to their original works to grant additional sharing and adaptation permissions on top of the existing copyright conditions. CC licenses promote open and creative collaboration between humans.
Content stewardship with CC Signals
On a much larger scale, AI models are using and adapting online content and creative works. There is a lot of concern on the part of content creators and stewards that their content can be scraped from the web by a bot, then funnelled into an AI product that allows users to generate reproductions that the original creator never intended or approved of. This can generate revenue for tech companies but does not necessarily lead to reciprocal benefit for the content creator. It could also result an overall decline in the quality of creative works, because as content is reused and homogenised, it becomes more generic and less useful over time.
As artificial intelligence (AI) transforms how knowledge is created, shared, and reused, we are at a fork in the road that will define the future of access to knowledge and shared creativity. One path leads to data extraction and the erosion of openness; the other leads to a walled-off internet guarded by paywalls.
Creative Commons
CC Signals is a proposed framework to allow stewards of large content collections to keep their work open to internet users, available to AI, and also to participate in the commons in an ethical and reciprocal way.
Collective action for shaping AI ethics
The CC Signals framework underpins CC’s campaign for “a new social contract”: a collective approach to shaping new norms for ethical AI use. Essentially, the CC Signals system is a set of criteria that allows content stewards to declare their preferences for how they would like their content to be used in a way that encourages reciprocity from AI systems.
There are four draft signals:
- Credit: attribution and provenance of content are required for use
- Direct Contribution: monetary or in-kind support are provided to the content steward
- Ecosystem Contribution: monetary or in-kind support are provided to the content ecosystem
- Open: the AI system used must be open (i.e. free to use, study, modify and share)
Be part of the conversation
The CC Signals proposal is intended to start a conversation around how we can begin shaping the norms of AI use and the commons. Our questions:
- What role might educators play in helping shape these norms?
- What impact could new norms have on equitable, accessible and inclusive education?
- How can learning designers and learning technologists use AI effectively but avoid homogenising content?
You can read through the full documentation and join the conversation over on the Creative Commons website. There is also a Town Hall session coming up in August.
Image attribution: CC Signals © 2025 by Creative Commons is licensed under CC BY 4.0