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

441–450 of 482 posts

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#441

Post by jhanschoo »

martin-t wrote: post #394
jhanschoo wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An AI model's output can be transformative, but you can be unlucky enough that the LLM memorized the data that it gave you.

I don't see why verbatim or not should matter at all. How complex does a mechanical transformation have to be to not be considered plagiarism, copyright infringement or parasitism? If somebody writes a GPL-licensed program, is it enough to change all variable and function names to get rid of those pesky users' rights? Do you have to change the order of functions? Do you have to convert it to a different language? Sur…

> How complex does a mechanical transformation have to be to not be considered plagiarism, copyright infringement or parasitism?

Legally speaking, this depends from domain to domain. But consider for example extracting facts from several biology textbooks, and then delivering those facts to the user in the characteristic ChatGPT tone that is distinguishable from the style of each source textbook. You can then be quite assured that courts will not find that you have infringed on copyright.

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#442

Post by jakelazaroff »

rerdavies wrote: post #431
jakelazaroff wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This would be the first time ever that an LLM has discovered new knowledge, but the far reach is that the information does appear in the training data?

https://medium.com/@deshmukhpratik931/the-matrix-multiplicat... And it's not an accident that significant percentage (40%?) of all papers being published in top journals involve application of AIs.

This article is about the same thing I mentioned in a sibling comment. I personally don't find an unreplicated Google white paper to be compelling evidence.

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#443

Post by eschaton »

Aeolun wrote: post #376
eschaton wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not just common courtesy to disclose, it’s outright fraud not to disclose.

That's nonsense. It's like feeling you need to disclose that your IDE has autocomplete. Nobody discloses that, since it's ridiculous. You only disclose that you used Claude Code if you are not certain of the result (e.g. you think it is correct, but the maintainer might be a better judge). If it's exactly the same as what you'd have written manually, and you are confident it works, then what's the point of disclosure…

It’s completely different from an IDE’s autocomplete because autocomplete in an IDE is only helping you type identifiers that already exist in your codebase or in any SDKs you’re using.

An LLM is regurgitating things from outside that space, where you have no idea of the provenance of what it’s putting into your code.

It doesn’t just matter that the code you’re contributing to a project is correct, it matters quite a lot if it’s actually something you’re allowed to contribute.

- You can’t contribute code that your employer owns to a project if they don’t want you to. - You can’t contribute code under a license that the project doesn’t want you to use. - And you can’t contribute code written by someone else and claim it’s your intellectual property without some sort of contract in place to grant that.

If you use an LLM to generate code that you’re contributing, you have both of the latter two problems. And all of those apply *even if* the code you’re contributing is identical to what you’d have written by hand off the top of your head.

When you contribute to a project, you’re not just sending that project a set of bits, you’re making attestations about how those bits were created.

Why does this seem so difficult for some supposed tech professionals to understand? The entire industry is intellectual property, and this is basic “IP 101” stuff.

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#444

Post by hoppp »

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #411
hoppp wrote: post #207

I support this idea. All the prompts and responses should be committed to git

What if you did not use a prompt, but, for example, the fancy auto-complete feature in Visual Studio that for example GitHub Copilot provides (i.e. accept huge code completion automatically suggested by Copilot via tab key)?

Well, that one is trouble especially if the code is not reviewed completely

I dont use it personally. I think there should be a tight code review or disallow large auto completes altogether.

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#445

Post by aspenmayer »

martin-t wrote: post #395
aspenmayer wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To a certain reading, this is user-centric: it’s increasing the size of the audience pool beyond that of shared language speakers and readers to the entire literate human race. This is an important point to acknowledge, because every silver lining has its cloud.

User-centric would be giving users choice. It really is that simple. Forcing something on people from a position of power is never in their favor.

I don’t think having a Reddit account is mandatory.

As a user of Reddit, I think it’s cool, and also raises some concerns.

I think most sites that handle user data are going to have rough edges. Making money off of user content is never without issues.

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#446

Post by rerdavies »

jakelazaroff wrote: post #442
rerdavies wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://medium.com/@deshmukhpratik931/the-matrix-multiplicat... And it's not an accident that significant percentage (40%?) of all papers being published in top journals involve application of AIs.

This article is about the same thing I mentioned in a sibling comment. I personally don't find an unreplicated Google white paper to be compelling evidence.

It's a fast matrix multiply! (A decades-old human problem). What exactly do you need to replicate??! Just count the multiplies, fer goodness sake.

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#447

Post by [deleted] »

aspenmayer wrote: post #327
raggi wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Tell that to Reddit. They’re AI translating user posts and serving it up as separate Google search results. I don’t remember if Reddit claims copyright on user-submitted content, or on its AI translations, but I don’t think Reddit is paying ad share like X is, either, so it kind of doesn’t matter to the user, as they’re (still) not getting paid, even as Reddit collects money for every ad shown/clicked. Even if OP did…

[deleted]

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#448

Post by QuercusMax »

stocksinsmocks wrote: post #300
QuercusMax wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Well, said engineer is no longer working at my company. He wasn't exactly the best developer...

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#449

Post by rovr138 »

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…

This is how sqlite handles it,

> Contributed Code

> In order to keep SQLite completely free and unencumbered by copyright, the project does not accept patches. If you would like to suggest a change and you include a patch as a proof-of-concept, that would be great. However, please do not be offended if we rewrite your patch from scratch.

source, https://www.sqlite.org/copyright.html

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#450

Post by jakelazaroff »

rerdavies wrote: post #446
jakelazaroff wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This article is about the same thing I mentioned in a sibling comment. I personally don't find an unreplicated Google white paper to be compelling evidence.

It's a fast matrix multiply! (A decades-old human problem). What exactly do you need to replicate??! Just count the multiplies, fer goodness sake.

> What exactly do you need to replicate??!

The AI coming up with it? When Google claimed their Wizard of Oz show at the Las Vegas Sphere was AI-generated, a ton of VFX artists spoke up to say they'd spent months of human labor working on it. Forgive me for not giving the benefit of the doubt to a company that has a vested interest in making their AI seem more powerful, and a track record of lying to do so.

Post reply on HN