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

AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

271–280 of 482 posts

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#271

Post by Filligree »

asdff wrote: post #245
Filligree wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's ridiculous and impractical, honestly. A single AI-generated PR would likely involve at least 10-20 prompts, interspersed with testing, manual edits to context / guideline files without which those prompts don't have the same effect, manual coding, and more. A screen recording would do better.

Is there really no logging capability with these tools that would track all of that prompting/testing/editing/inputting?

Sure, screen recorders exist.

And if contributions are that unwelcome, then it's better not to contribute. There has to be some baseline level of trust that the contributor is trying to do the right thing; I get enough spying from the corporations in my life.

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#272

Post by [deleted] »

ozfive wrote: post #254
ineedasername wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If you have code that happens to be identical to some else's code or implements someone's proprietary algorithm, you're going to lose in court even if you claim an "AI" gave it to you. Not for a dozen lines here or there, even if it could be found and identified in a massive code base. That’s like quoting a paragraph of a book in another book, non infringing. For the second half of your comment it sounds like you’re…

What will happen when company A implements algorithm X based on AI output, company B does the same and company A claims that it is proprietary code and takes company B to court?

[deleted]

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#273

Post by anp »

shkkmo wrote: post #264
ineedasername wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Courts (at least in the US) have already ruled that use of ingested data for training is transformative. There’s lots of details to figure, but the genie is out of the bottle. Sure it’s a big hill to climb in rethinking IP laws to align with a societal desire that generating IP continue to be a viable economic work product, but that is what’s necessary.

> Courts (at least in the US) have already ruled that use of ingested data for training is transformative Yes, the training of the model itself is (or should be) a transformative act so you can train a model on whatever you have legal access to view. However, that doesn't mean that the output of the model is automatically not infringing. If the model is prompted to create a copy of some copyrighted work, that is (or…

This also matches my (not a lawyer) intuition, but have there been any legal precedents set in this direction yet?

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#274

Post by mattbee »

otterley wrote: post #246
mattbee wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd extrapolate that the OP's view would be: you've still put in less effort, so your PR is less worthy of his attention than someone who'd done the same without using LLMs. That's a pretty nice offer from one of the most famous and accomplished free software maintainers in the world. He's promising not to take a short-cut reviewing your PR, in exchange for you not taking a short-cut writing it in the first place.

> in exchange for you not taking a short-cut writing it in the first place. This “short cut” language suggests that the quality of the submission is going to be objectively worse by way of its provenance. Yet, can one reliably distinguish working and tested code generated by a person vs a machine? We’re well past passing Turing tests at this point.

LLMs can't count letters, their writing is boring, and you can trick them into talking gibberish. That is a long way off the Turing test, even if we were fooled for a couple of weeks in 2022.

IMO when people declare that LLMs "pass" at a particular skill, it's a sign that they don't have the taste or experience to judge that skill themselves. Or - when it's CEOs - they have an interest in devaluing it.

So yes if you're trying to fool an experienced open source maintainer with unrefined LLM-generated code, good luck (especially one who's said he doesn't want that).

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#275

Post by makeitdouble »

ants_everywhere wrote: post #222
andruby wrote: post #108

> I try to assist inexperienced contributors and coach them to the finish line, because getting a PR accepted is an achievement to be proud of I really appreciate this point from mitchellh. Giving thoughtful constructive feedback to help a junior developer improve is a gift. Yet it would be a waste of time if the PR submitter is just going to pass it to an AI without learning from it.

Junior developers are entering a workforce where they will never not be using AI

The rules can be finely adjusted when it actually becomes problematic, they're not trying to pass a law through Congress.

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#276

Post by typpilol »

popalchemist wrote: post #113
alfalfasprout wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Courts (at least in the US) have already ruled that use of ingested data for training is transformative This is far from settled law. Let's not mischaracterize it. Even so, an AI regurgitating proprietary code that's licensed in some other way is a very real risk.

No more so than regurgitating an entire book. While it could technically be possible in the case of certain repos that are ubiquitous on the internet (and therefore overrepresented in training data to the point that they are "regurgitated" verbatim, in whole), it is extremely unlikely and would only occur after deliberate prompting. The NYT suit against Open AI shows (in discovery) that the NYT was only able to get p…

It's also why some companies do clean room design.

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#277

Post by btucker »

aydyn wrote: post #89
btucker wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been starting to think of it like this: Great Engineer + AI = Great Engineer++ (Where a great engineer isn't just someone who is a great coder, they also are a great communicator & collaborator, and love to learn) Good Engineer + AI = Good Engineer OK Engineer + AI = Mediocre Engineer

Is there a difference between "OK" and "Mediocre"?

I probably should have written it as “OK Engineer--“

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#278

Post by JoshTriplett »

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #206
JoshTriplett wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"see" and "copy" are two different things. It's fine to look at StackOverflow to understand the solution to a problem. It's not fine to copy and paste from StackOverflow and ignore its license or attribution. Content on StackOverflow is under CC-by-sa, version depends on the date it was submitted: https://stackoverflow.com/help/licensing . (It's really unfortunate that they didn't pick license compatible with code ;…

CC BY-SA 4.0 is "compatible with code". It is, for example, GPL-compatible (see https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/ShareAlike_compatibili... ). It's just not designed for code.

That's a fair distinction. For the specific case of CC-by-sa 4.0, it's possible to convert to GPLv3. That doesn't help with prior versions of CC-by-sa.

So, for the specific case of material contributed to StackOverflow on or after 2018-05-02, it's possible to use it under GPLv3 (including appropriate attribution), so any project compatible with GPLv3 can copy it with attribution. Any material before that point is not safe to copy.

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#279

Post by neilv »

ineedasername wrote: post #208
bsder wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Courts (at least in the US) have already ruled that use of ingested data for training is transformative. If you have code that happens to be identical to some else's code or implements someone's proprietary algorithm, you're going to lose in court even if you claim an "AI" gave it to you. AI is training on private Github repos and coughing them up. I've had it regurgitate a very well written piece of code to do a p…

>If you have code that happens to be identical to some else's code or implements someone's proprietary algorithm, you're going to lose in court even if you claim an "AI" gave it to you. Not for a dozen lines here or there, even if it could be found and identified in a massive code base. That’s like quoting a paragraph of a book in another book, non infringing. For the second half of your comment it sounds like you’re…

> Not for a dozen lines here or there, even if it could be found and identified in a massive code base. That’s like quoting a paragraph of a book in another book, non infringing.

It's potentially non-infringing in a book if you quote it in a plausible way, and properly.

If you copy&paste a paragraph from another book into yours, it's infringing, and a career-ending scandal. There's plenty of precedent on that.

Just like if you manually copied a function out of some GPL code and pasted it into your own.

Or if you had an LLM do it for you.

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#280

Post by 0x6c6f6c »

ants_everywhere wrote: post #258
eru wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think using AI at all is forbidden, he just doesn't want AI to do the whole PR?

The requirement is explicitly > If you are using *any kind of AI assistance* to contribute to Ghostty, it must be disclosed in the pull request. This is sufficiently confusing that someone is asking if this applies to tab completion. They commit actually says > trivial tab-completion doesn't need to be disclosed, so long as it is limited to single keywords or short phrases. So if you take this literally you're going…

Disclosing doesn't mean it will be declined, it's just a signal for reviewers.
Post reply on HN