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

301–310 of 482 posts

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#301

Post by kazinator »

WhyNotHugo wrote: post #126
kazinator wrote: post #116

I think that in the FOSS environmment, it is assumed that when you submit something upstream, that you are the copyright holder. Some projects like GNU require you to sign papers legally attesting this. It would be a lie to sign those papers for something you vibe coded. It's not just courtesy; you are committing fraud if you put your copyright notice on something you didn't create and publishing that to the world. I…

I know that purely AI-generated content is copyright-free, but I don't think that AI-assisted is also copyright free. If I use iOS's spellchecker which "learns" from one's habit (i.e.: AI, the really polished kind), I don't lose copyright over the text which I've written.

It's a question of how much.

If AI told you have a missing semicolon and it regenerated an almost exact copy of your code, with only the added semicolon being different, then the case is very strong that the fixed code is a derived work of only your code. (Moreover, side point: you could burn that session, keeping the fix, and nobody would ever suspect.)

If it's purely generated, then there is no question it's a derived work of unknown works used without permission.

Those are the extreme endpoints. I think that the bulk of the intermediate area between steers toward infringment; the contribution from AI has to be very low or trivial to have a clear case that the work is still clean.

This is because a small amount of illegal material taints the whole work; it's not a linear interpolation whereby if you wrote 90% of it, it's 90% in the clear. E.g. one GPL-ed source file in a work with 50,000 source files requires the whole thing to be GPLed, or else that file removed.

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#302

Post by thombles »

tick_tock_tick wrote: post #179
neilv wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't think anyone who's not monetarily incentivize to pretend there are IP/Copyright issues actually thinks there are. Why do you think that about people who disagree with you? You're responding directly to someone who's said they think there's issues, and not pretending. Do you think they're lying? Did you not read what they said? And AFAICT a lot of other people think similarly to me. The perverse incentives t…

No, I think they have a monetary incentive they have failed to disclose or a limited at best understanding of basic copyright law. They can have a moral view that AI is "stealing" but they are claiming there is actually a legal issue at play.

Putting aside the notion that a monetary incentive is invalid for some reason, there are also plenty of open source authors who are pretty unimpressed that they only ask for attribution and even that's being laundered away via weights. If their licence isn't being respected that's certainly a legal issue.

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#303

Post by kazinator »

eschaton wrote: post #134
kazinator wrote: post #116

I think that in the FOSS environmment, it is assumed that when you submit something upstream, that you are the copyright holder. Some projects like GNU require you to sign papers legally attesting this. It would be a lie to sign those papers for something you vibe coded. It's not just courtesy; you are committing fraud if you put your copyright notice on something you didn't create and publishing that to the world. I…

Exactly. Yet some here are saying that this just serves as an incentivize to hide AI use.

That's eerily reminiscent of the argument that girls turning down advances from losers incentivizes sexual assault.

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#304

Post by Borealid »

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…

An LLM can be used for a clean room design so long as all (ALL) of its training data is in the clean room (and consequently does not contain the copyrighted work being reverse engineered).

An LLM trained on the Internet-at-large is also presumably suitable for a clean room design if it can be shown that its training completed prior to the existence of the work being duplicated, and thus could not have been contaminated.

This doesn't detract from the core of your point, that LLM output may be copyright-contaminated by LLM training data. Yes, but that doesn't necessarily mean that an LLM output cannot be a valid clean-room reverse engineer.

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#305

Post by j4coh »

raggi wrote: post #294
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…

So if you can get an LLM to produce music lyrics, for example, or sections from a book, those would be considered novel works given the encoding as well?

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#306

Post by nullc »

wahnfrieden wrote: post #288
nullc wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We may be talking cross purposes. I read the grandparent poster discussing provably untested patches. I have no clue in ghostty but I've seen plenty of stuff that doesn't compile much less pass tests. And I assert there is nothing but negative value in such "contributions". If real effort went into it, then maybe there is value-- though it's not clear to me: When a project regular does the same work then at least the…

This whole original HN post is about ghostty btw Having the original prompts (in sequence and across potentially multiple models) can be valuable but is not necessarily useful in replicating the results because of the slot machine nature of it

> This whole original HN post is about ghostty btw

Sure though I believe few commenters care much about ghostty specifically and are primarily discussing the policy abstractly!

> because of the slot machine nature of it

One could use deterministically sampled LLMs with exact integer arithmetic... There is nothing fundamental preventing it from being completely reproducible.

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#307

Post by sumeno »

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 author explains why

> While we aren't obligated to in any way, 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. But if it's just an AI on the other side, I don't need to put in this effort, and it's rude to trick me into doing so.

If it's bad code from a person he'll help them get it fixed. If it's bad code from an AI why bother?

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#308

Post by Marsymars »

Forgeties79 wrote: post #101
aydyn wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

“Ok” I generally associate with being adequate but could obviously be better. “Mediocre” is just inadequate.

“Mediocre” is one of those words where common parlance doesn’t quite line up with the textbook definition. e.g. from the Oxford English Dictionary: “Of middling quality; neither bad nor good...”

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#309

Post by furyofantares »

Forgeties79 wrote: post #101
aydyn wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

“Ok” I generally associate with being adequate but could obviously be better. “Mediocre” is just inadequate.

Some synonyms for mediocre: decent, middling, ordinary, so-so. It can mean inadequate, but it can also mean adequate.

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#310

Post by hombre_fatal »

I see two things here.

1. The world has fundamentally changed due to LLMs. You don't know where a code submission falls between "written thoroughly with eternal vigilance" vs "completely vibe-coded" since it's now trivially to generate the later. There's no going back. And a lot of comments here seem stuck on this point.

2. The maintainer naively or stubbornly imagines that he can get everyone to pre-sort their code between the two buckets through self-reporting.

But that's futile.

It's like asking someone if they're a good person on a date because you don't want to waste your time with bad people. Unfortunately, that shortcut doesn't exist.

Now, maybe going forward we will be forced to come up with real solutions to the general problem of vetting people. But TFA feels like more of a stunt than a serious pitch.

Post reply on HN