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AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

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Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#291

Post by ineedasername »

slg wrote: post #285
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.

>societal desire that generating IP continue to be a viable economic work product It is strange that you think the law is settled when I don't think even this "societal desire" is completely settled just yet.

Maybe I should clarify: Society, in general, supports the idea that writers, artists, film makers, coders, etc— everyone who creates IP- should have a place in the economy. Basically just that it should be possible to make a living and have a career at it. It can be spun different ways, and those differences are important, but this is the basic thing.

This doesn’t seem like a disputable statement to me. For anyone who thinks actors’ likenesses, authors’ words, all of it- that all and everything should be up for grabs once written or put anywhere in public, that is not a widely held opinion.

Once that’s established, it all comes down to implementation details.

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#292

Post by threecheese »

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…

The fact that GitHub’s Copilot has an enterprise feature that matches model output against code having certain licenses - in order to prevent you from using it, with a notification - suggests the model outputs are at least potentially infringing.

If MS were compelled to reveal how these completions are generated, there’s at least a possibility that they directly use public repositories to source text chunks that their “model” suggested were relevant (quoted as it could be more than just a model, like vector or search databases or some other orchestration across multiple workloads).

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#293

Post by lgas »

neilv wrote: post #26

There is also IP taint when using "AI". We're just pretending that there's not. If someone came to you and said "good news: I memorized the code of all the open source projects in this space, and can regurgitate it on command", you would be smart to ban them from working on code at your company. But with "AI", we make up a bunch of rationalizations. ("I'm doing AI agentic generative AI workflow boilerplate 10x gettin…

> If someone came to you and said "good news: I memorized the code of all the open source projects in this space, and can regurgitate it on command", you would be smart to ban them from working on code at your company.

If you find a human that did that send them my way, I'll hire them.

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#294

Post by raggi »

jedbrown wrote: post #286

Provenance matters. An LLM cannot certify a Developer Certificate of Origin ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Developer_Certificate_of_Origi... ) and a developer of integrity cannot certify the DCO for code emitted by an LLM, certainly not an LLM trained on code of unknown provenance. It is well-known that LLMs sometimes produce verbatim or near-verbatim copies of their training data, most of which cannot be used witho…

For a large LLM I think the science in the end will demonstrate that verbatim reproduction is not coming from verbatim recording, as the structure really isn’t setup that way in the models under question here.

This is similar to the ruling by Alsup in the Anthropic books case that the training is “exceedingly transformative”. I would expect a reinterpretation or disagreement on this front from another case to be both problematic and likely eventually overturned.

I don’t actually think provenance is a problem on the axis you suggest if Alsups ruling holds. That said I don’t think that’s the only copyright issue afoot - the copyright office writing on copyrightability of outputs from the machine essentially requires that the output fails the Feist tests for human copyrightability.

More interesting to me is how this might realign the notion of copyrightability of human works further as time goes on, moving from every trivial derivative bit of trash potentially being copyrightable to some stronger notion of, to follow the feist test, independence and creativity. Further it raises a fairly immediate question in an open source setting if many individual small patch contributions themselves actually even pass those tests - they may well not, although the general guidance is to set the bar low - but is a typo fix either? There is so far to go on this rabbit hole.

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#295

Post by geodel »

ToucanLoucan wrote: post #111
geodel wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not Engineer + AI = Now an Engineer Thats the reason for high valuation of AI companies.

Of all the things I would absolutely not trust the stock market to evaluate, "technical competence" is either near or at the top. The people deciding how much OpenAI is worth would probably struggle to run first-time setup on an iPad.

I agree. Seems like people took my comment above as my opinion. It was supposed to be argument of Linkedin type AI hype generators.

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#296

Post by s-lambert »

rane wrote: post #163
showcaseearth wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt a PR is going to be buried if it's useful, well designed, good code, etc, just because of this disclosure. Articulate how you used AI and I think you've met the author's intent. If the PR has issues and requires more than superficial re-work to be acceptable, the authors don't want to spend time debugging code spit out by an AI tool. They're more willing to spend a cycle or two if the benefit is you learning…

> I doubt a PR is going to be buried if it's useful, well designed, good code, etc, just because of this disclosure If that were the case, why would this rule be necessary, if it indeed is the substance that matters? AI generated anything has a heavy slop stigma right now, even if the content is solid. This would make for an interesting experiment to submit a PR that was absolute gold but with the disclaimer it was g…

The rule is necessary because the maintainers want to build good will with contributors and if a contributor makes a bad PR but could still learn from it then they will put effort into it. It's a "if you made a good effort, we'll give you a good effort" and using AI tools gives you a very low floor for what "effort" is.

If you make a PR where you just used AI, it seems to work, but didn't go further then the maintainers can go "well I had a look, it looks bad, you didn't put effort in, I'm not going to coach you through this". But if you make a PR where you go "I used AI to learn about X then tried to implement X myself with AI writing some of it" then the maintainers can go "well this PR doesn't look good quality but looks like you tried, we can give some good feedback but still reject it".

In a world without AI, if they were getting a lot of PRs from people who obviously didn't spend any time on their PRs then maybe they would have a "tell us how long this change took you" disclosure as well.

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#297

Post by stocksinsmocks »

jerf wrote: post #78
tick_tock_tick wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AI is only as smart as the human handling it. I think I'm slowly coming around to this viewpoint too. I really just couldn't understand how so many people were having widely different experiences. AI isn't magic; how could I have expected all the people I've worked with who struggle to explain stuff to team members, who have near perfect context, to manage to get anything valuable across to an AI? I was original pr…

I've been struggling to apply AI on any large scale at work. I was beginning to wonder if it was me. But then my wife sort of handed me a project that previously I would have just said no to, a particular Android app for the family. I have instances of all the various Android technologies under my belt, that is, I've used GUI toolkits, I've used general purpose programming languages, I've used databases, etc, but wit…

I have vibe coded things like a personal finance forecast with interactive graphs in less than 30min of effort. I have 3 kids and would never have considered learning React to do that as a hobby project.

There are so many unusual or one off use cases that would have normally required me to spend several hours locating and reading API documentation that I now just hand off to the AI. I am a big believer in their value. I’m getting more done than ever.

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#298

Post by phyzome »

geodel wrote: post #107
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

Not Engineer + AI = Now an Engineer Thats the reason for high valuation of AI companies.

"Engineer" and "someone who can produce code" are not the same thing.

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#299

Post by raggi »

eru wrote: post #248
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.

> 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. Well, AI can perhaps solve the problem it created here: generated IP with AI is much cheaper than with humans, so it will be viable even at lower payoffs. Less cynical: you can use trade secrets to protect your IP. You can host your softw…

In the US you can not generate copyrightable IP without substantial human contribution to the process.

https://www.copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-Intell...

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#300

Post by stocksinsmocks »

QuercusMax wrote: post #102
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

I recently watched a mid-level engineer use AI to summarize some our code, and he had it put together a big document describing all the various methods in a file, what they're used for, and so forth. It looked to me like a huge waste of time, as the code itself was already very readable (I say this as someone who recently joined the project), and the "documentation" the AI spit out wasn't that different than what you…

I hate to break it to you, but this guy probably wasn’t working at all. That sounds like a pretense to goof off.

Now I could believe an intern would do such a thing. I’ve seen a structural engineer intern spend four weeks creating a finite element model of a single concrete vault. he could have treated the top deck as a concrete beam used conservative assumptions about the loading and solved it with pen and paper in 30 minutes.

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