Astute readers will note the return of our Classified Ads promotions to many spots in the McKinley Park News, including our own ad: "For Sale: AI Training Data."  

Be not surprised by this offer, including in the context of our decrying the theft of work product and livelihood in Letters from the Editor , as we've always felt that the problem is not the technology: It's the criminal behavior of those who scrape all away despite our clear terms against doing so .

AI training data is extremely valuable , and gets more so as Large Language Models (LLMs) require greater quantities from high-quality sources to power and improve capabilities. But right now, all of this AI training data is being stolen from us: Big players get paid, and everyone else gets robbed.

Offering our own AI training data for paid licensing makes it clear that this is a product of value in the market, including against those who peddle competing products built from our stolen intellectual property and services: a blatantly illegal practice and one of the primary tests against copyright.

Legal licensing of our AI training data also puts us in the drivers seat to ensure profitable and ethical use, for example:

• Licensing periods that ensure payment while our AI training data is in use, rather than the current standard of perpetual theft where AI gets to profit from the work it steals from us forever
  
• Use that aligns with our pro-user and pro-privacy standards, such as establishing scope of use only for AI training data from our published news content, and not our member profiles or contributed content
  
• Licensing that supports our journalism and news industry, such as a prohibition on using and intermixing our AI training data in services that contain illegal content and work product stolen from others
  
• Consideration for freelance contributors and control over the scope of use of their contracted work within AI training data 
  
• Mandates for proper environmental impact from our data within AI systems, such as offsetting the much larger power requirements for AI with green energy sources

Am I tilting at windmills? Too many seem to think that stealing and exploiting from local news is OK, especially and including the lickspittle in leadership at places like Medill (no longer an accredited journalism school) and LION Publishers , who normalize this theft and never in their cowardice have addressed the charge that they're harming our industry by training people to steal from us.

Regardless, it's free and fast for me to put out signposts stating our intent, and maybe, someday, we'll get the remuneration we deserve for what has been stolen from us, as well as a new revenue stream desperately needed to support local news.