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

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

#231

Post by CamperBob2 »

inlined wrote: post #203
themafia wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The virality is a byproduct to ensure the software is not stolen from their users. If Microsoft misappropriates GPL code how exactly is that "stealing" from me, the user, of that code? I'm not deprived in any way, the author is, so I can't make sense of your premise here. > Freedom of software means nothing. Software is information. Does "freedom of information" mean nothing? I think you're narrowing concepts here…

As a user I suffer from not being able to freely use or derive my own work from Microsoft’s

At this point they've contributed a reasonably-fair share of open-source code themselves.

No one benefits from locking up 99.999% of all source code, including most of Microsoft's proprietary code and all GPL code.

No one.

When it comes to AI, the only foreseeable outcome to copyright maximalism is that humans will have to waste their time writing the same old shit, over and over, forever less one day [1], because muh copyright!!!1!

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act

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

#232

Post by CamperBob2 »

belorn wrote: post #199
CamperBob2 wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then we'd better stop fighting against AI, and start fighting against so-called "safeguards."

I wish you luck. The music industry basically won their fight in forcing safeguards against AI music. The film industry are gaining laws regulating AI film actors. The code generating AI are only training on freely accessible code and not proprietary code. There is multiple laws being made against AI porn all over the world (or possible already on the books). What we should fight is Rules For Thee but Not for Me.

The music industry basically won their fight in forcing safeguards against AI music. The film industry are gaining laws regulating AI film actors. The code generating AI are only training on freely accessible code and not proprietary code. There is multiple laws being made against AI porn all over the world (or possible already on the books).

Yeah, well, we'll see what our friends in China have to say about all that.

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

#233

Post by throwaway290 »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #188
belorn wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The safeguards will prevent the AI from reproducing the proprietary drivers for the IBM-whatever printer, and it will not provide code that breaks the DRM that exist to prevent third-party drivers from working with the printer. There will however be no such safeguards or filters to prevent IBM to write a proprietary driver for their next printer, using existing GPL drivers as a building block. Code will only ever go…

Then we'd better stop fighting against AI, and start fighting against so-called "safeguards."

"we better stop fighting against CCTVs everywhere and start fighting against them used for indiscriminate surveillance"

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

#234

Post by froh »

m463 wrote: post #167
froh wrote: 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.

first I thought you'd go into the nuance of gpl2 vs 3 or lgpl vs gpl vs agpl? patents, tivoization, cloud use?

:-)

I agree, I didn't make any statement what you can do with the software as long as you are licensed to use it

you are allowed to build atomic bombs, nuclear power plants, tanks, whatever.

but only as long as you comply i.e. give your downstream the freedom you've received.

if you fail at that, you're no longer allowed to use the software for anything.

see section 8 Termination for details

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html#license-text

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

#235

Post by sfink »

tpmoney wrote: post #223
sfink wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The line is somewhere between running wc on the entire input and running gzip on the entire input. The fact that a slippery slope is slippery doesn't make it not a slope.

Of course there is a line. And everything we know about how AI models work points to them being on the ‘wc’ side of the line

Not the way I see it.

The argument that GPL code is a tiny minority of what's in the model makes no sense to me. (To be clear, you're not making this argument.) One book is a tiny minority of an entire library, but that doesn't mean it's fine to copy that book word for word simply because you can point to a Large Library Model that contains it.

LLMs definitely store pretty high-fidelity representations of specific facts and procedures, so for me it makes more sense to start from the gzip end of the slope and slide the other way. If you took some GPL code and renamed all the variables, is that suddenly ok? What if you mapped the code to an AST and then stored a representation of that AST? What if it was a "fuzzy" or "probabilistic" AST that enabled the regeneration of a functionally equivalent program but the specific control flow and variable names and comments are different? It would be the analogue of (lossy) perceptual coding for audio compression, only instead of "perceptual" it's "functional".

This is starting to look more and more like what LLMs store, though they're actually dumber and closer to the literal text than something that maintains function.

It also feels a lot closer to 'gzip' than 'wc', imho.

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

#236

Post by marcus_holmes »

gizajob wrote: post #178
m463 wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Riffing on this:

If the LLM can reproduce the entire GPL'd code, with licence and attribution intact, then that would satisfy the GPL, correct?

If the LLM can invent new code, inspired by but not copied from the GPL'd code, that new code does not require a GPL licence.

This is essentially the same as we humans do: I read some GPL code and go "huh, neat architecture!" and then a year later solve a similar problem using an architecture inspired by that code. This is not copying, and does not require me to GPL the code I'm producing. But if I copy-paste a function from the GPL code into my code base, I need to respect the licence conditions and GPL at least part of my code base.

I think the argument that the author is talking about is if the model itself should be GPL'd because it contains copies of GPL'd code that can be reproduced. I don't buy this because that GPL code is not being run as part of the model's functioning. To use an analogy: if I create a code storage system, and then use it to store some GPL code, I don't have to GPL the code storage system itself. As long as it can reproduce the GPL code together with its licence and attribution, then the GPL is not being infringed at any point. The system is not using or running the GPL code itself, it is just storing the GPL code. This is what the LLM is doing.

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

#237

Post by d0mine »

themafia wrote: post #197
conartist6 wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why forbid it when you could do exactly what this post suggests: go explicit and say that by including this copyrighted material in AI training you consent to release of the model. And you clarify that the terms are contractual, and that training the model on data represents implicit acceptance of the terms.

Taken to an extreme: "Why forbid selling drugs when you can just put a warning label on them? And you could clarify that an overdose is lethal." It doesn't solve any problems and just pushes enforcement actions into a hopelessly diffuse space. Meanwhile the cartel continues to profit and small time users are temporarily incarcerated.

> cartel continues to profit

It doesn't follow. The reverse is more likely: If you end prohibition, you end the mafia.

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

#238

Post by AnthonyMouse »

gizajob wrote: post #178
m463 wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

If you ask a model to output a task scheduler in C, and the training data contained a GPL-licensed implementation of the Fibonacci function in Haskell, the output isn't likely to bear a lot of resemblance to that input. It might even be unrelated enough that adding that function to the training data doesn't affect what the model outputs for that prompt at all.

The nasty thing in terms using code generated by these things is that if you ask the model to output a task scheduler in C and the training data contained a GPL-licensed implementation of a task scheduler in C, the output plausibly could bear a strong resemblance to that input. Without you knowing that. And then if you go incorporate that into something you're redistributing, what happens?

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

#239

Post by octoberfranklin »

gruez wrote: post #180
wizzwizz4 wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Humans can generalize.

LLMs just predict the statistically-most-likely token.

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

#240

Post by strogonoff »

quotemstr wrote: post #170
voxl wrote: 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?

If LLMs are like human minds enough, then legally speaking we are abusing thinking and feeling human-like beings possessing will and agency in ways radically worse than slavery.

What is missing in the “if I can remember and recite program then they must be allowed to remember and recite proframs” argument is that you choose to do it (and you have basic human rights and freedoms), and they do not.

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