![Abstract blue art. Samantha E. Harvey [SEH], A drop of water floated outside of my belly button, 2026 CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 License](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!R5uH!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F90ab70e0-6455-4999-b9b6-e9730473c429_2500x1313.png "Abstract blue art. Samantha E. Harvey [SEH], A drop of water floated outside of my belly button, 2026 CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 License")
I’ve been using Creative Commons licenses in my work for a while.
The licenses enable you to choose permissions for others to use and remix your work.
Creative Commons is an international nonprofit organization dedicated to defending and nurturing a commons of shared knowledge and culture that powers human creativity, equity, and innovation.
Tools for building the commons
The CC licenses and public domain tools give everyone from individuals to large institutions a standardized way to grant the public permission to use their work under copyright law.
Used by Wikipedia, Flickr, The Met, Khan Academy, and millions more globally!
This is the license I tend to use;
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/deed.en
I recently revisited Creative Commons website to find out their thoughts on AI.
They have launched CC Signals: A New Social Contract for the Age of AI.
AI is being built on the largest unregulated extraction of knowledge in history. The datasets powering today’s AI systems are drawn largely from publicly available information: research papers, educational resources, cultural works, images, and data shared by millions of people and institutions around the world. A significant portion of this knowledge exists because of CC licenses and the global movement for open sharing.
— Creative Commons
I have to admit that I haven’t been using these licenses as much lately.
Instead opting for All Right Reserved which means no one is able to use or remix it.
I think this has something to do with AI and feeling like I have no control about how my content is used.
"All rights reserved" is a phrase that originated in copyright law as part of copyright notices. It indicates that the copyright holder reserves, or holds for their own use, all the rights provided by copyright law, such as distribution, performance, and creation of derivative works; that is, they have not waived any such right.
However, I would prefer my content be available for others to use non-commercially.
To remix and share, as this is what being creative is all about.
But we definitely need clearer laws surrounding how private AI companies are using this data.
Consent, credit and ability to opt in/out are the building blocks.
If a platform has an option to at least toggle on/off whether your content is used for AI training is the starting point.
Without a healthy commons, knowledge becomes more closed, power becomes more concentrated, and both society and technology suffer. The result is a world where knowledge is controlled by a few instead of shared by everyone.
— Creative Commons
This is the starting CC Signals Framework:
Clear rules for the AI era: New norms and governance so shared knowledge isn’t simply extracted without credit, consent, or responsibility.
Tools that give creators agency: Ways for people and institutions to communicate how their work can be used in AI systems.
Transparency and attribution: Systems that recognize where knowledge comes from and who contributed it.
Strong public infrastructure for sharing: Legal, technical, and community systems that keep knowledge accessible while protecting trust.
CC signals offers a flexible, values-driven framework for communicating expectations around AI use of content or data. Just as our licenses offer choices between all and no rights reserved, our hope is that CC signals will offer creators a spectrum of preferences for when their work is used in AI. True openness means participation with fairness and respect, not unchecked extraction.
— Creative Commons
https://creativecommons.org/cc-signals
Join in a couple of weeks when I will share more artwork to use under a Creative Commons CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license
Content quoted by Creative Commons in this article except where otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license
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