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The current state of the theory that GPL propagates to AI models

shujisado.org

171–180 of 314 posts

Re: The current state of the theory that GPL propagates to AI models

#171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not dictating how you use what you build? It's dictating how you redistribute what you build on top of other people's work.

Ok but I just have no interest in imposing restrictions on how people distribute what I build in such a manner either. That's just me.

What if they impose their own restrictions on people further down the line?

Re: The current state of the theory that GPL propagates to AI models

#172
post #107

Training is not redistribution. It's the exact same as you as a person learning to program from proprietary secret code, and then writing your own original code independently. Even if you repeat patterns and methods you've picked up from that proprietary learning material, it is by no means redistribution. The practical differentiator here is that you do not access the proprietary material during the creation of your…

so basically we download the sources files to the training weight and remove the LICENSE.MD as it's exactly the same as a person learning to program from proprietay secret code and outputing code based on that for millions of peoples in matter of seconds /s we also treat as however we want public goods found over the internet. as the World Intellectual Property Organization Copyright Treaty and Berne Convention for t…

If you download GPL source code and run `wc` on its files and distribute the output of that, is that a violation of copyright and the GPL? What if you do that for every GPL program on github? What if you use python and numpy and generate a list of every word or symbol used in those programs and how frequently they appear? What if you generate the same frequency data, but also add a weighting by what the previous symbol or word was? What if you did that an also added a weighting by what the next symbol or word was? How many statistical analyses of the code files do you need to bundle together before it becomes copyright infringement?

Re: The current state of the theory that GPL propagates to AI models

#173

[flagged]

https://gavinhoward.com/2023/12/is-source-available-really-t...

just a comment on this article, that may be unrelated to the point you want to make: gavin makes a fatal mistake in interpreting RMS intent. he claims that he only wanted control over his hardware. that is not true. he also wanted the right to share his code with others. the person who had the code for his printer was not allowed to share that code. RMS wanted to ensure that the person who has the code is also allowed to share it. source available does not do that.

Re: The current state of the theory that GPL propagates to AI models

#174
post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a stupid presupposition that LLMs are equivalent to human brains which they clearly are not. Stateless token generators are OBVIOUSLY not like human brains even if you somehow contort the definition of intelligence to include them

Even if they are not "like" human brains in some sense, are they "like" brains enough to be counted similarly in a legal environment? Can you articulate the difference as something other than meat parochialism, which strikes me as arbitrary?

All law is arbitrary. Intellectual property law perhaps most of all.

Famously, the output from monkey "artists" was found to be non-copyrightable even though a monkey's brain is much more similar to ours than an LLM.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput...

Re: The current state of the theory that GPL propagates to AI models

#175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if they are not "like" human brains in some sense, are they "like" brains enough to be counted similarly in a legal environment? Can you articulate the difference as something other than meat parochialism, which strikes me as arbitrary?

All law is arbitrary. Intellectual property law perhaps most of all. Famously, the output from monkey "artists" was found to be non-copyrightable even though a monkey's brain is much more similar to ours than an LLM. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput...

If IP law is arbitrary, we get to choose between IP law that makes LLMs propagate the GPL and law that doesn't. It's a policy switch we can toggle whenever want. Why would anyone want the propagates-GPL option when this setting would make LLMs much less useful for basically zero economic benefit? That's the legal "policy setting" you choose when you basically want to stall AI progress, and it's not going to stall China's progress.

Re: The current state of the theory that GPL propagates to AI models

#176
post #74

Great article but I don't really agree with their take on GPL regarding this paragraph: > The spirit of the GPL is to promote the free sharing and development of software [...] the reality is that they are proceeding in a different vector from the direction of code sharing idealized by GPL. If only the theory of GPL propagation to models walks alone, in reality, only data exclusion and closing off to avoid litigation…

The GPL arose from Stallman's frustration at not having access to the source code for a printer driver that was causing him grief. In a world where he could have just said "Please create a PDP-whatever driver for an IBM-whatever printer," there never would have been a GPL. In that sense AI represents the fulfillment of his vision, not a refutation or violation. I'd be surprised if he saw it that way, of course.

But that isn't the same code that you were running before. And like, let's not forget GPLv3: "please give me the code for a mobile OS that could run on an iPhone" does not in any way help me modify the code running on MY iPhone.

Re: The current state of the theory that GPL propagates to AI models

#177

We need a new license that forbids all training. That is the only way to stop big corporations from doing this.

So if you put this hypothetical license on spam emails, then spam filters can't train to recognize them? I'm sure ad companies would LOVE it.

Re: The current state of the theory that GPL propagates to AI models

#178
post #167
post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The spirit of the GPL is the freedom of the user, not the code being freely shared. who do you mean by "user"? the spirit is that the person who actually uses the software also has the freedom to modify it, and that the users recovering these modifications have the same rights. is that what you meant? and while technically that's the spirit of the GPL, the license is not only about users, but about a _relationship_…

I don't think you understand the GPL. > "the user is allowed to do with the software" The GPL does not restrict what the user does with the software. It can be USED for anything. But it does restrict how you redistribute it. You have responsibilities if you redistribute it. You must provide the source code, and pass on the same freedoms you received to the users you redistribute it to.

Thinking on though, if the models are trained on any GPL code then one could consider that they contain that GPL code, and are constantly and continually updating and modifying that code, thus everything the model subsequently outputs and distributes should come under the GPL too. It’s far from sufficient that, say, OpenAI have a page on their website to redistribute the code they consume in their models if such code becomes part of the model’s training data that is resident in memory every time it produces new code for users. In the spirit of the GPL all that derivative code seems to also come under the GPL, and has to be made available for free, even if upon every request the generated code is somehow novel or unique to that user.

Re: The current state of the theory that GPL propagates to AI models

#179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Virality is a very good feature of GPL and part of what makes it a meaningfully different choice than other open licenses, I don't know why you want attribute that to Microsoft of all places.

A key pillar of Microsoft's FUD campaign against open source was that if you use GPL software you run the risk of inadvertantly including some of it in your proprietary software and accidentally causing the whole thing to suddenly become open source against your horrified company's wishes. It was a lie then and it's a lie now. The comment I was replying to (along with many others on this post) indicates the brainworm…

Another key pillar of Microsoft's FUD campaign was you have to open source any code modifications you write to a GPL codebase even if you don't want to. That doesn't make that feature of GPL a fallacy others must be too stupid to understand, it just means Microsoft was trying to make the promises of GPL seem bad when they were actually good. I.e. what Microsoft tried to scare people with is irrelevant to a discussion about what's in the GPL itself. Ironically, it's more akin to FUD than anything else in this conversation.

I do miss groklaw, been far too long for something like that to appear again.

Re: The current state of the theory that GPL propagates to AI models

#180

I honestly think that the most extreme take that " any output of an LLM falls under all the copyright of all its training data" is not really defensible, especially when contrasted with human learning, and would be curious to hear conflicting opinions. My view is that copyright in general is a pretty abstract and artificial concept; thus corresponding regulation needs to justifiy itself by being useful , i.e. encoura…

Human learning is materially different from LLM training. They're similar in that both involve providing input to a system that can, afterwards, produce output sharing certain statistical regularities with the input, including rote recital in some cases – but the similarities end there.

>Human learning is materially different from LLM training [...] but the similarities end there.

Specifically what "material differences" are there? The only arguments I heard are are around human exceptionalism (eg. "brains are different, because... they just are ok?"), or giving humans a pass because they're not evil corporations.

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