Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

thelibre.news

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

611–620 of 631 posts

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#611

Post by salawat »

joquarky wrote: post #534
integralof6y wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That value is only great if it's shared equitably with the rest of the planet. I think this should be an axiom which should be respected by any copyright rule.

You are correct, but the real problem is that copyright needs complete reform. Let's not forget the basis: > [The Congress shall have Power . . . ] To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries. Is our current implementation of copyright promoting the progress of science and useful arts? Or wi…

The "publisher bootstrap kit + revenue sharing agreement" would become ubiquitous overnight.

Copyright isn't the problem. Over-financialization is the problem.

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#612

Post by wdkrnls »

consteval wrote: post #548
robertlagrant wrote: post #482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And that's the ultimate fail of capitalist ethics - the notion that we must all work just so we can survive. Look at how many shitty and utterly useless jobs exist just so people can be employed on them to survive. This isn't a consequence of capitalism. The notion of having to work to survive - assuming you aren't a fan of slavery - is baked into things at a much more fundamental level. And lots of people don't wo…

> This isn't a consequence of capitalism. Yes, it is. The fact we have welfare isn't a refutation of that, it's proof. The welfare is a bandaid over the fundamental flaws of capitalism. A purely capitalist system is so evil, it is unthinkable. Those people currently on welfare should, in a free labor market, die and rot in the street. We, collectively, decided that's not a good idea and went against that. That's why…

You have a very different definition of free than I do. Free to me means that people enter into agreements voluntarily. It's hard to claim a market is free when it's participants have no other choice...

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#613

Post by salawat »

bigfudge wrote: post #508
lukevp wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Capitalism is an unthinking, unfeeling force. The writing is on the wall that AI is coming, and being altruistic about it doesn’t do jack to keep others from the land grab. Their thinking is, might as well join the rush and hope they’re one of the winners. Every one of us sitting on the sidelines will be impacted in some way or the other. So who’re the smart ones, the ones who grab shovels and start digging, or the o…

This is a bleak view. How about the ones who work hard to shape the way we adopt the technology to societal benefit ?

Some technology is fundamentally incompatible with some societal architecture's implementation details; AI is one such technology.

Ubiquitous surveillance is another.

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#614

Post by dithered_djinn »

pabs3 wrote: post #578
3029aGfqgaF wrote: post #178

Open source licenses are no longer strong enough. The copyright laundering use case was not been anticipated when the licenses were written. All licenses need a clause like the following: This software is for humans. AI training is prohibited and carries a default penalty of $1 trillion.

Such a license would not meet the Open Source Iniative's Open Source Definition: https://opensource.org/osd/

That might indeed apply to open source software.

If we instead adopt the view of free software (https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point....), the fact that OpenAI and other large corporations train their large-language models behind closed doors - with no disclosure of their training corpus - effectively represents the biggest attack on GPL-licensed code to date.

No evidence suggests that OpenAI and others exclude GPL-licensed repositories from their training sets. And nothing prevents the incorporation of GPL-licensed code into proprietary codebases. Note that a few papers have documented the regurgitation of literal text snippets by large language models (one example: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.12367v2).

To me, this seems like the LLM-version of using coin-mixing to obscure the trail of Bitcoin transactions in the blockchain. The current situation also reminds me of how the generalization of the SaaS model led to the creation of the Affero GPL license (https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-affero-gpl.html).

LLM's enable the circumvention of the spirit of free software licenses, as well as of the legal mechanisms to enforce them.

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#615

Post by Ray20 »

forgetfreeman wrote: post #609
Ray20 wrote: post #604

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>who are willing to actually spend that money Money mean nothing. It is simply medium of exchange. The question is, is there anything to exchange? And the answer is yeas, and position of white collar workers doesn't affect availability of things for exchange. There's no reason for recession, there is nothing that can hinder ability of blue collar workers to create goods and services, all that things that when combine…

> Money mean nothing. You think so? Give me the contents of your checking, savings, and retirement accounts and then get back to me on that. > position of white collar workers doesn't affect availability of things for exchange. You appear to be confused about the concept of consumers, let me help. Consumers are the people who buy things. When there are fewer consumers in a market, demand for products and services dec…

>When there are fewer consumers in a market, demand for products and services declines.

No, demand is unlimited and defined by the amount of production.

>You don't get to unemploy big chunks of the population and expect business to continue thriving.

I mean, generally replaced worker with the instruments - is the main way to business (and society) to thrive. In other words, what goods and services will became less affordable to the blue collar workers?

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#616

Post by Ray20 »

forgetfreeman wrote: post #607
Ray20 wrote: post #603

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's value decreases I mean yeas, values of consumed goods will decrease, so blue color workers will be able to consume more. That's exactly what is called increase of income.

My gut is telling me you're being intentionally obtuse but I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt. To reiterate in detail: AI is poised to disrupt large swaths of the workforce. If large swaths of the workforce are disrupted this necessarily means a bunch of people will see their income negatively impacted (job got replaced by AI). Broke people by definition don't have money to spend on things, and will prior…

>This in turn cuts business to blue collar service providers.

No, it doesn't. Where's that is come from?

I mean, look at the situation from the perspective of blue collar service providers: what is exactly those goods and services, that they was be able to afford for themselves, but AI will make it unaffordable for them? Pretty obviously, that there's about none of those goods and services. So, in big picture, all that process that you described, doesn't lead to any disadvantage of blue collar workers.

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#617

Post by forgetfreeman »

Ray20 wrote: post #615
forgetfreeman wrote: post #609

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Money mean nothing. You think so? Give me the contents of your checking, savings, and retirement accounts and then get back to me on that. > position of white collar workers doesn't affect availability of things for exchange. You appear to be confused about the concept of consumers, let me help. Consumers are the people who buy things. When there are fewer consumers in a market, demand for products and services dec…

>When there are fewer consumers in a market, demand for products and services declines. No, demand is unlimited and defined by the amount of production. >You don't get to unemploy big chunks of the population and expect business to continue thriving. I mean, generally replaced worker with the instruments - is the main way to business (and society) to thrive. In other words, what goods and services will became less af…

> No, demand is unlimited and defined by the amount of production.

Enough of your trolling, go waste someone else's time.

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#618

Post by forgetfreeman »

Ray20 wrote: post #616
forgetfreeman wrote: post #607

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My gut is telling me you're being intentionally obtuse but I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt. To reiterate in detail: AI is poised to disrupt large swaths of the workforce. If large swaths of the workforce are disrupted this necessarily means a bunch of people will see their income negatively impacted (job got replaced by AI). Broke people by definition don't have money to spend on things, and will prior…

>This in turn cuts business to blue collar service providers. No, it doesn't. Where's that is come from? I mean, look at the situation from the perspective of blue collar service providers: what is exactly those goods and services, that they was be able to afford for themselves, but AI will make it unaffordable for them? Pretty obviously, that there's about none of those goods and services. So, in big picture, all th…

I literally described the mechanism to you twice and you're still acting confused. I'm not sure if we have a language barrier here or what but go check out a Khan Academy course on economics or maybe try running a lemonade stand for an afternoon if you still don't get it.

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#619

Post by ccgreg »

consumer451 wrote: post #530

I was wondering... Common Crawl [0] exists, why do "AI companies" do this on their own? Is Common Crawl data not fresh enough? Is there some other deficiency? Whatever the problem is, a single crawler which every AI company can reference seems like a compromise to solve this issue, doesn't it? [0] https://commoncrawl.org/

Many non-AI and AI research projects and companies do use Common Crawl. There's apparently only a small list of AI companies who don't.

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#620

Post by pabs3 »

dithered_djinn wrote: post #614
pabs3 wrote: post #578

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Such a license would not meet the Open Source Iniative's Open Source Definition: https://opensource.org/osd/

That might indeed apply to open source software. If we instead adopt the view of free software ( https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.... ), the fact that OpenAI and other large corporations train their large-language models behind closed doors - with no disclosure of their training corpus - effectively represents the biggest attack on GPL-licensed code to date. No evidence suggests that OpenAI…

I absolutely agree with you that the current big LLMs enable an attack on all FOSS licenses and especially copyleft ones. That doesn't mean that one couldn't create LLM code generators in a respectful way. Do license analysis on the input code and then train separate models on the different license buckets, with the outputs from each model considered derivative works of the input corpus.

Also I don't think a restriction on the FSF's freedom 2 "The freedom to study how the program works" based on what tools you use and how you use them fits with FSF philosophy, nor do I think it is appropriate. You should be able to run whatever analysis tools you have available to study the program. Being able to ingest a program into a local LLM model and then ask questions about the codebase before you understand it yourself is valuable. Or aren't a programmer and or aren't familiar with the language used, then a local LLM could help you make the changes needed to add a new feature. In that situation LLMs can enable practical software freedom, for those who can't afford to pay/convince a programmer to make the changes they want.

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html

In addition, OpenAI clearly do not respect copyrights and licenses in general, so would ignore any anti-AI clauses, which would make them ineffective and thus pointless. So, I think we should tackle the LLM problem through the law, and not through licenses. That is already happening with various caselaw in software, writing, artwork etc.

It isn't possible or practical to change the existing body of Free Software to use new anti-AI clauses anyway.https://juliareda.eu/2021/07/github-copilot-is-not-infringin...

BTW, LLMs could also in theory be used to licensewash proprietary software, see "Does free software benefit from ML models being derived works of training data?" by Matthew Garret:

https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/57615.html

Post reply on HN