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AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

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Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#381

Post by Borealid »

account42 wrote: post #366
Borealid wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 contaminat…

> 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 is assuming that you are only concerned with a particular work when you need to be sure that you are not copying any work that might be copyrighted without making sure to have a…

The "clean room" in "clean room reverse engineering" refers to a particular set of trade secrets, yes. You could have a clean room and still infringe if an employee in the room copied any work they had ever seen.

The clean room has to do with licenses and trade secrets, not copyright.

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#382

Post by eru »

raggi wrote: post #299
eru wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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...

Eh, they figured out how to copyright photographs, where the human only provides a few bits (setting up the scene, deciding when to pull the trigger etc); so stretching a few bits of human input to cover the whole output of an AI should also be doable with sufficiently well paid lawyers.

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#383

Post by sho_hn »

nullc wrote: post #351
blurbleblurble wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The false equivalence I pointed at earlier was "LLM code => no human on the other side". The person driving the LLM is a teachable human who can learn what's what's going on and learn to improve the code. It's simply not true that there's no person on the other side of the PR. The idea that we should be comparing "teaching a human" to "teaching an LLM" is yet another instance of this false equivalence. It's not inher…

The person operating the LLM is not a meaningfully teachable human when they're not disclosing that they're using an LLM. IF they disclose what they've done, provided the prompts, etc. then other contributors can help them get better results from the tools. But the feedback is very different than the feedback you'd give a human that actually wrote the code in question, that latter feedback is unlikely to be of much v…

Yep, true.

I've done things like share a ChatGPT account with a junior dev to steer them toward better prompts, actually, and that had some merit.

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#384

Post by withinboredom »

0points wrote: post #360
strogonoff wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the West you are free to make something that everyone thinks is a “derivative piece of trash” and still call it yours; and sometimes it will turn out to be a hit because, well, it turns out that in real life no one can reliably tell what is and what isn’t trash[0]—if it was possible, art as we know it would not exist. Sometimes what is trash to you is a cult experimental track to me, because people are different.…

There's an whole genre of musicians focusing only on creating royalty free covers of popular songs so the music can be used in suggestive ways while avoiding royalties. It's not art. It's parasitism of art.

There's several sides of music copyright:

1. The lyrics

2. The composition

3. The recording

These can all be owned by different people or the same person. The "royalty free covers" you mention are people abusing the rights of one of those. They're not avoiding royalties, they just havn't been caught yet.

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#385

Post by 0points »

strogonoff wrote: post #371
0points wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's an whole genre of musicians focusing only on creating royalty free covers of popular songs so the music can be used in suggestive ways while avoiding royalties. It's not art. It's parasitism of art.

> There's an whole genre of musicians focusing only on creating royalty free covers There is no such thing as a “royalty free cover”. Either it is a full on faithful cover, which you can perform as long as license fees are paid, and in which case both the performer and the original songwriter get royalties, or it is a “transformative cover” which requires negotiation with the publisher/rights owner (and in that case…

> Have you considered that it is simply singers-performers who like to sing and would like to earn a bit of money from it, but don’t have many original songs if their own?

Or, maybe you start to pay attention?

They are selling their songs cheaper for TV, radio or ads.

> Even pretending they were, if you compare between artists specialising in covers and big tech trying to expropriate IP

They're literally working for spotify.

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#386

Post by JoshTriplett »

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #330
JoshTriplett wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It does help with prior versions, since you can use CC BY-SA 3.0 material under CC BY-SA 4.0, which is GPLv3-compatible. (See https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/337742/308065 .) It doesn't necessarily help with future versions.

I stand corrected, thank you! I forgot that CC-by-sa included an automatic upgrade clause, unlike many other licenses that require an explicit "or any later version" to do that.

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#387

Post by computerfriend »

ants_everywhere wrote: post #217
armchairhacker wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. As someone who uses AI (completion and Claude Code), I'll disclose whenever asked. But I disagree that it's "common courtesy" when not explicitly asked; since many people (including myself) don't mind and probably assume some AI, and it adds distraction (another useless small indicator; vaguely like dependabot, in that it steals my attention but ultimately I don't care).

If you don't disclose the use of - books - search engines - stack overflow - talking to a coworker then it's not clear why you would have to disclose talking to an AI. Generally speaking, when someone uses the word "slop" when talking about AI it's a signal to me that they've been sucked into a culture war and to discount what they say about AI. It's of course the maintainer's right to take part in a culture war, but…

You should add citations to books, stack overflow posts and colleagues you consult with, yes.

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#388

Post by alfiedotwtf »

ivanjermakov wrote: post #238

Hot take: if you can't spot any issues in the code review it's either good code, code that needs further changes, or review was not done properly. I don't see how "I used LLMs" fit here, because it means nothing to the quality of the code submitted. If such mention would mean increased reviewer attention, then every code review should include it.

I feel like this is similar to the main-vs-master discussion years ago.

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#389

Post by simoncion »

smitop wrote: post #239
EarlKing wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just about how you got there. At least in the United States according to the Copyright Office... materials produced by artificial intelligence are not eligible for copyright. So, yeah, some people want to know for licensing purposes. I don't think that's the case here, but it is yet another reason to require that kind of disclosure... since if you fail to mention that something was made by AI as part of a co…

> if you fail to mention that something was made by AI as part of a compound work you could end up losing copyright over the whole thing The source you linked says the opposite of that: "the inclusion of elements of AI-generated content in a larger human-authored work does not affect the copyrightability of the larger human-authored work as a whole"

The quote you pulled suggests that if the work is majority machine-generated, then it loses copyright protection.

That is, it suggests that even if there are elements of human-generated content in a larger machine-generated work, the combined work as a whole is not eligible for copyright protection. Printed page iii of that PDF talks a bit more about that:

  * Copyright does not extend to purely AI-generated material, or material where there is insufficient human control over the expressive elements.
  * Whether human contributions to AI-generated outputs are sufficient to constitute authorship must be analyzed on a case-by-case basis.

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#390

Post by the_biot »

This policy, and most of the comments on here, miss the point entirely.

Open source is supposed to be primarily a labor of love, scratching your own itch, done for pride and a sense of accomplishment of having done it right.

Using an AI chatbot achieves none of that. It's an admission that you don't have the skills, and you're not wanting to learn them. Using AI to contribute to an open source project makes NO sense whatsoever. It's an admission of incompetence, which should be profoundly embarrassing to you.

I realize I'm screaming into the void here on HN, where so many people have bought into the "AI is just a tool" bullshit. But I know I'm not alone, even here. And I know that e.g. Linus Torvalds sees right through the bullshit as well.

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