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AI-powered open-source code laundering

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Re: AI-powered open-source code laundering

#21

Post by charcircuit »

smj-edison wrote: post #14
userbinator wrote: post #6

Hopefully the spread of AI will make more people realise that everything is a derivative work. If it wasn't an AI, it was a human standing on the shoulders of giants.

Yeah, this is where I find the copyright argument a little weak. Because how do artisans learn their craft? By observing others' work. Instead, I feel like the objections are (rightly) these two issues: 1. GenAI operates at a much larger scale than an individual artist. I don't think artists would have an issue with someone commissioning a portrait say in the style Van Gogh (copyright argument). They would have an is…

>Lack of giving back

I disagree. There is a ton of free AI generated text, code, images, and video available for completely free for people to learn from.

Re: AI-powered open-source code laundering

#22

Post by alganet »

hu3 wrote: post #18
alganet wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You forgot to mention that if things continue as they are, a very small group of people will have complete control over this giant library.

It's a concern. But there are open source models.

No, there aren't.

There is open source training and inference software. And there are open weights.

Those things are not enough to reproduce the training.

Even if you had the hardware, you would not be able to recreate llama (for example) because you don't know what data went into the training.

That's a very weird library. You can get their summaries, but you don't have access to the original works used when creating it. Sounds terrible, open source or not.

Re: AI-powered open-source code laundering

#23

Post by vineyardmike »

hu3 wrote: post #18
alganet wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You forgot to mention that if things continue as they are, a very small group of people will have complete control over this giant library.

It's a concern. But there are open source models.

Open source model, created at great expense… by a still small cohort of people.

There are like a dozen organizations globally creating anything close to state of the art models. The fact that you can use some for free on your own hardware doesn’t change that those weights were trained by a small cohort of people, with training data selected by those people, and fine-tuning and “alignment” created by those people.

Sure you can fine-tune the smaller ones yourself, but that still leaves you at the will of original creator.

Re: AI-powered open-source code laundering

#24

Post by visarga »

smj-edison wrote: post #14
userbinator wrote: post #6

Hopefully the spread of AI will make more people realise that everything is a derivative work. If it wasn't an AI, it was a human standing on the shoulders of giants.

Yeah, this is where I find the copyright argument a little weak. Because how do artisans learn their craft? By observing others' work. Instead, I feel like the objections are (rightly) these two issues: 1. GenAI operates at a much larger scale than an individual artist. I don't think artists would have an issue with someone commissioning a portrait say in the style Van Gogh (copyright argument). They would have an is…

1. If I wanted the "style of Van Gogh" I would simply download Van Gogh, why waste time and money on approximative AI. But if I want something Else, then I can use AI. But Gen AI is really the worst infringement tool, for example would anyone try to read bootleg Harry Potter from a LLM to avoid payment? Don't think so.

2. LLMs will give back what you put in + what they learned, it's your job to put in the original parts. But every so often this interaction will spark some new ideas. The LLM+human team can get where neither of them would get alone, building on each other's ideas.

Re: AI-powered open-source code laundering

#25

Post by visarga »

arthurofbabylon wrote: post #13

If we step back and examine LLMs more broadly (beyond our personal use cases, beyond "economic impact", beyond the underlying computer science) what we are largely looking at is an emerging means of collaboration. I am not an expert computer scientist, and yet I can "collaborate" (I almost feel bad using this term) with expert computer scientists when my LLM helps me design my particular algorithm. I am not an expert…

> what we are largely looking at is an emerging means of collaboration.

They surpass open source, "out-open source-opensouce" by learning skills everywhere and opening them up for anyone who needs them later.

Re: AI-powered open-source code laundering

#26

Post by _ea1k »

zdwolfe wrote: post #20
hu3 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a concern. But there are open source models.

I find it odd that any LLM could be considered open source. Sure the weights are available to download and use, but you can't reasonably reconstruct the output model as it's impractical for an individual to gather a useful dataset or spend $5,000,000+ of GPU time training.

Distillation can extract the knowledge from an existing model into a newly trained one. That doesn't solve the cost problem, but costs are steadily coming down.

Re: AI-powered open-source code laundering

#27

Post by beeflet »

hu3 wrote: post #10
userbinator wrote: post #6

Hopefully the spread of AI will make more people realise that everything is a derivative work. If it wasn't an AI, it was a human standing on the shoulders of giants.

This. AI is a magnificent way to make the entire world's codebase available as a giant, cross-platform, standard library. I welcome AI to copy my crap if that's going to help anyone in the future.

Except closed source software which it isn't trained on.

Re: AI-powered open-source code laundering

#28

Post by monero-xmr »

add-sub-mul-div wrote: post #19
userbinator wrote: post #6

Hopefully the spread of AI will make more people realise that everything is a derivative work. If it wasn't an AI, it was a human standing on the shoulders of giants.

Nothing subverts my defense of human creativity more than the cliched human defenses of AI.

For those of us who exceed the AI, it raises our value enormously. You see it in the pay of the AI engineers. But in the high interest rate world, those of us who continue to be employed, are commanding higher wages, as far as I can tell. It is a culling of the lesser-than.

One unfortunate side-effect is the junior engineers who cannot immediately exceed the AI are not being hired as often. But this era echos the dotcom boom, where very low-skilled people commanded very-high wages. Universities, which have always been white collar job training but pretended they weren't, are being impacted greatly.

https://registrar.mit.edu/stats-reports/majors-count

24% of undergraduate MIT students this year have Computer Science in the title (I asked chatgpt to calculate this from the difficult-to-parse website). 1/4 of all MIT undergraduates are not being trained to be future PhD researchers - they, like all other schools, are training the vast majority of their students for private sector workforce jobs.

The culling is happening all over. We will likely go down to This is a good thing. The cost of university degrees is far too high. We are in the midst of a vast transition. College should return to being the purview of the truly intelligent and the children of the rich, as it was for all time before WW2. This very weird experiment in human history is ending, and it cannot happen soon enough

Re: AI-powered open-source code laundering

#29

Post by bluefirebrand »

smj-edison wrote: post #14
userbinator wrote: post #6

Hopefully the spread of AI will make more people realise that everything is a derivative work. If it wasn't an AI, it was a human standing on the shoulders of giants.

Yeah, this is where I find the copyright argument a little weak. Because how do artisans learn their craft? By observing others' work. Instead, I feel like the objections are (rightly) these two issues: 1. GenAI operates at a much larger scale than an individual artist. I don't think artists would have an issue with someone commissioning a portrait say in the style Van Gogh (copyright argument). They would have an is…

> Because how do artisans learn their craft? By observing others' work

I don't think that computer systems of any kind should have the same right to fair use that humans have

I think humans should get fair use carve outs for fanart and derivative work, but AI should not

Re: AI-powered open-source code laundering

#30

Post by as1mov »

userbinator wrote: post #6

Hopefully the spread of AI will make more people realise that everything is a derivative work. If it wasn't an AI, it was a human standing on the shoulders of giants.

The offending repository is copying files verbatim while removing off the license header from the said files. It's not "standing on the shoulder of giants".
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