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Ownership of AI-Generated Code Hotly Disputed

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Re: Ownership of AI-Generated Code Hotly Disputed

#71

Post by wrs »

dahart wrote: post #54
wrs wrote: post #16

“…modify[ing] its AI model so that it traces attribution and gives credit to the original authors of the code, adding the associated copyright notices and license terms in the process…Biderman says is technologically feasible.” Is it really feasible? What does “traces attribution” even mean here? It’s not emitting “code”, it’s emitting individual tokens that each were found throughout the input corpus. The “code” is…

Why wouldn’t it be feasible? (Maybe this depends on what you mean by ‘feasible’.) There’s no technical reason you can’t back-track the weights and make a list of which tokens from which training data were sampled. The list might be long, it could be impractical, but that has little bearing on whether it’s technically possible, right? The problem here happens when the same source is sampled for many tokens in a row be…

The token “if” appears in a heck of a lot of inputs, and a heck of a lot of outputs. What you’re describing seems like basically building an inverted index of the input corpus and then doing a search for the output. If the answer comes back with a high relevance then you consider it “traced”. I wonder what the size of that inverted index would be compared to the size of the generative model.

Re: Ownership of AI-Generated Code Hotly Disputed

#72

Post by CodexArcana »

falcolas wrote: post #46
scotty79 wrote: post #6

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_wants_to_be_free

I propose that information naturally wants to degrade. Paper decomposes. Bits flip. File formats are replaced and lost. Storage mediums degrade. It's all an extension of the universe trending towards entropy. It actually takes quite a bit of effort to store, then distribute information precisely and broadly. There's a lot of infrastructure, effort, and money involved, and still information degrades and disappears ove…

AI is inherently incompatible with the notion of private property as a result of the way it is "trained". It unintentionally exposes how much of our creativity, exploration, and innovation we've commodified.

Re: Ownership of AI-Generated Code Hotly Disputed

#73

Post by oehpr »

dbspin wrote: post #40
aftbit wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Many artists the world over are rightfully furious about DALL-E and Stable Diffusion I struggle with this one. How are these models different from the typical human creative process of: 1. look at lots of existing art to get inspiration 2. select components from several different styles & add your own flair 3. call the output an "original" painting in your own style Of course I see the other side as well. These mode…

In a word scale. Scale matters. How is one locust different to a million? How is hand copying a manuscript (highly controlled in medieval Europe) different to a printing press. These models will and are already having a profound economic impact on the creative sectors they mimic. Whether existing law applies is a specialist question. But they're not remotely comparable from a pragmatic perspective with pieces manuall…

>A closer parallel would be the industrialisation of painting duplication

But they directly reproduce the source material.

AI art they clearly does not.

The luddites seem a better parallel when it comes to scale. Where a machine comes along capable of producing in much higher quantities and in much greater efficiencies.

Or perhaps photography? Also a fear of scale. For a long time photographers were not considered artists. And there were calls to tamp down on this innovation for the harm it would cause.

I don't suppose anyone back then could imagine now how photography is used. Perhaps they would feel it much better that a tiny artist quickly sketch out the thing my phone was looking at.

Re: Ownership of AI-Generated Code Hotly Disputed

#74

Post by profile53 »

padolsey wrote: post #10

Outside of AI models, copy/pasting snippets from the likes of StackOverflow is already on unsteady ground. The threshold to bother with (and win) legal fights is pretty high. AI is catalyzing some kind of slow revolution in what "ownership" is, but there doesn't seem to be any definition that would _always_ satisfy common sense. Even if github yields and adds attribution or filters on license types, there's still a m…

I don’t believe stack overflow is in the same grey area, they have a pretty clear TOS and license for the code snippets. I’m pretty sure it’s CC-BY-SA.

Re: Ownership of AI-Generated Code Hotly Disputed

#75

Post by visarga »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #56
falcolas wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It’s not emitting “code”, it’s emitting individual tokens ... The “code” is the arrangement of those tokens, but that is determined by the weighting of the whole network This theory of operation is not borne out in reality. It's been clearly displayed that these tools are emitting verbatim copies of existing code (and its comments) in their input. It's even being seen in image generation, where NatGeo cover images…

Well yes, if you’re asked to memorize someone’s code, you’ll get surprisingly far too. The fact that models can do this isn’t evidence of anything. It’s a capability (or “tendency” if you overfit too much). I think it’s pretty obvious that if you train a model to reproduce existing work in its entirety, it fails the “sufficiently transformative” test and thus loses legal protection. But there’s nothing stopping you f…

Are you sure you can do that? Because it is trivial to paraphrase code and text.

Re: Ownership of AI-Generated Code Hotly Disputed

#76

Post by falcolas »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #56
falcolas wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It’s not emitting “code”, it’s emitting individual tokens ... The “code” is the arrangement of those tokens, but that is determined by the weighting of the whole network This theory of operation is not borne out in reality. It's been clearly displayed that these tools are emitting verbatim copies of existing code (and its comments) in their input. It's even being seen in image generation, where NatGeo cover images…

Well yes, if you’re asked to memorize someone’s code, you’ll get surprisingly far too. The fact that models can do this isn’t evidence of anything. It’s a capability (or “tendency” if you overfit too much). I think it’s pretty obvious that if you train a model to reproduce existing work in its entirety, it fails the “sufficiently transformative” test and thus loses legal protection. But there’s nothing stopping you f…

> But there’s nothing stopping you from re-coding existing implementations of GPL’ed code.

There is if you've read the code. You can still violate copyright if you're hand-copying an implementation of a feature.

Lawyers recommend "clean room" re-implementations when reproducing copyrighted functionality (when folks bother to ask) precisely to avoid the risk of code being copied verbatim.

Functionality can be copied. Code can not.

Re: Ownership of AI-Generated Code Hotly Disputed

#77

Post by keewee7 »

Why have so many of these AI models been trained on GPL licensed code? Almost half the controversy could have avoided by ignoring GPL code.

I know that even non-copyleft licenses like the Apache and MIT licenses are copyrighted and require attribution however it would have caused far less controversy than training on GPL licensed code.

Re: Ownership of AI-Generated Code Hotly Disputed

#78

Post by rymate1234 »

falcolas wrote: post #69
rymate1234 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's been clearly displayed that these tools are emitting verbatim copies of existing code (and its comments) in their input. Which makes sense when you consider that the sort of code that is getting reproduced verbatim is usually library functions which developers may copy and paste verbatim comments and all into their project, especially when you prompt the AI with the header of a function that has been copied an…

So that should make it easy to attribute, yes?

Probably why, like the article says, they're planning to add that

> In an attempt to address the issues with open-source licensing, GitHub plans to introduce a new Copilot feature that will “provide a reference for suggestions that resemble public code on GitHub so that you can make a more informed decision about whether and how to use that code,” including “providing attribution where appropriate.” GitHub also has a configurable filter to block suggestions matching public code.

Re: Ownership of AI-Generated Code Hotly Disputed

#79

Post by thn-gap »

c7b wrote: post #22
marc_io wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, as long as it doesn't disregard the original creator's intentions in the formulation.

Even that notion is tricky in the context of text AI. It doesn't seem obviously clear to me what the implied stance towards AI training would be for many popular license types. It seems more like the creators of many licenses didn't explicitly consider this use case. And the more meta question is whether the creators' rights should even extend to that realm. Can you specify in a license "This text must not be read by…

Why is it fair use if you train a model on copyrighted material and use its transformative output, despite going against the will of the author?

Can we all legally pirate educational books since it's for self training and producing transformative outputs? Can I consume all media (books, movies, music) the same way, and call it fair use? Also for software?

Re: Ownership of AI-Generated Code Hotly Disputed

#80

Post by claytongulick »

breck wrote: post #59

Ideas cannot be owned. People can be owned, if you have slavery. Everyone must unlearn the term "Intellectual Property". These laws are anti-property rights. They are Intellectual Slavery laws ( https://breckyunits.com/an-unpopular-phrase.html ). The United States government employs more knowledge workers than all other companies (see NIH, DoD, CDC, NASA, NOAA, NWS, et cetera). Everything they produce is public domai…

People have a strange tendency to enjoy being rewarded for work they've done.

I suspect that the folks who invest hundreds of millions of dollars into production costs for a movie, rather enjoy the ability to recoup those costs by restricting access to only those who are willing to pay for the privilege.

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