Some people seem to think that adding a license to their comments will prevent LLMs from using them for training data. It won’t actually help at all, and is born out of a fundamental misunderstanding of how copyright law works.

It got to be pretty popular for a while when Reddit was announcing that they’re selling content as LLM training data. But these days it has become clear that it’s just virtue signaling. Most of us just side-eye the commenters who do it, because it’s basically the Reddit equivalent of one of those “Facebook will begin using all of your data unless you post this status on your page” chain letters.