As a researcher with many articles in the ACM library, I have to say this is a masterclass in hypocrisy. Obviously, lawyers can decipher the terms of ACM publishing contracts and Creative Commons licences to determine if this will be acceptable or not. But ACM is not a company, it's a non-profit founded in 1947 to represent scientists.

I would be surprised if a majority of ACM members were to say yes should we ask them (but ACM is not known for such democracy). Along with book authors, we are one of the many people that provide the knowledge and expertise on which large tech firms train their models, and get nothing in return. Actually, life is getting worse for us: extra workload in universities with students' AI use, a completely broken peer review system, etc. Hence the irony of ACM thinking about licensing, and only licensing, at a time where this is the least of our priorities.

How about we give humans access

I'm really not sure how this would work. I don't know how the ACM works, but in IEEE you would have to give them your publishing rights. However, training a LLM is not publishing by itself, it is a derivative work? Any way, at this point authors should be entitled to monetary compensation, not the publisher. The deal is totally different.

They probably already scraped it.

Blocking access only hurts people who follow the rules. Unblocking access lets them compete with those who break the rules.

I think the right choice is pretty clear...

Would you prefer a parquet dump of acm articles to hugging face?

A llm emulating a person is why many of my used sites banned llms due to scraping bandwith costs

Is this about access or accessibility to claude (for example)

I am sure the entirely of human computing knowledge is not that big.

Well if LLMs get access to it, we humans should get free access to it as well!

ACM has been leaning heavily into AI-generated content for their journals in the past year, and this article is no exception: it appears to be 100% AI generated and full of LLM verbiage.

There's something hilarious about that, but also, snake eating its own tail.

Something something Roko's basilisk

Are they in the position to do that?

What about the authors?

It's already in there

the digital library should have always been open access

now it will be fodder for the slop machine

(i think that LLMs are going to wreck the peer review system for all but hard-experimental papers)

ACM bureaucrats and AI shills are flagging dissent. Welcome to 2026. The entire Internet is just top down propaganda.

Now? That's cute.

TLDR: “we’re going to try to get money from LLM providers for access to our back catalog without getting permission from the authors or providing them with any share of the revenue”.

I don't want to be mean but if it's that hard to even recognize that LLMs are even a valid thing that could intersect with your business that you need some kind of campaign for it..

It's almost like, "don't hurt yourself unc, we will just search arxiv".