Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

shujisado.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

241–250 of 314 posts

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

#241

Post by habinero »

pessimizer wrote: post #134
exasperaited wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I might be crazy, and I'd love to hear from somebody who knows about this, but I've been assuming that AI companies have been pulling GPL code out of the training material specifically to avoid this. Haha no. https://windsurf.com/blog/copilot-trains-on-gpl-codeium-does... And just in the last two days, AI generating LGPL headers (which it could not do if identifying LGPL code was pulled from the codebase) and misat…

Thanks for the links. That first link shows people actively pulling out GPL code in 2023 and marketing around that fact, though. That's not great evidence that they're not doing it now, especially if testing for if GPL code is still in there seems to be as easy as prompting with an incomplete piece of it. I'd think that companies could amass a collection of all known GPL code and test for it regularly in order to ref…

They also cited potential legal reasons, aka fraud and copyright.

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

#242

Post by mistrial9 »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #238
gizajob wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 funct…

fundemental architecture of networks, compilers, disk operating systems, databases and more are implemented in GPL family LICENSE code; high value targets to acquire and master.

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

#243

Post by tpmoney »

sfink wrote: post #235
tpmoney wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fa…

> LLMs definitely store pretty high-fidelity representations of specific facts and procedures

Specific facts and procedures are explicitly NOT protected by copyright. That's what made cloning the IBM BIOS legal. It's what makes emulators legal. It's what makes the retro-clone RPG industry legal. It's what made Google cloning the Java API legal.

> If you took some GPL code and renamed all the variables, is that suddenly ok?

Generally no, not sufficiently transformative.

> What if you mapped the code to an AST and then stored a representation of that AST?

Generally no, binary distribution of software is considered a violation of copyright.

> 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?

This starts to get a lot fuzzier. De-compilation is legal. Creating programs that are functionally identical to other programs is (generally) legal. Creating an emulator for a system is legal. Copyright protects a specific fixed expression of a creative idea, not the idea itself. We don't want to live in the world where Wine is a copyright violation.

> 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.

And yet, so far no one has brought a legal case against the AI companies for being able to extract their copyright protected material from the models. The few early examples of that happening are things that model makers explicitly attempt to train out of their models. It's unwanted behavior that is considered a bug, not a feature. Further the fact that a machine is able to violate copyright does not in and of itself make the machine itself a violation of copyright. See also Xerox machines, DeCSS, Handbrake, Plex/Jellyfin, CD-Rs, DVRs, VHS Recorders etc.

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

#244

Post by AnthonyMouse »

throwaway290 wrote: post #233
CamperBob2 wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"

That's the inverse. Mass surveillance is bad so it should be banned, vs. using AI to thwart proprietary lock-in is good and so shouldn't be banned.

But also, is the inverse even wrong? If some store has a local CCTV that keeps recordings for a month in case someone robs them, there is no central feed/database and no one else can get them without a warrant, that's not really that objectionable. If Amazon pipes the feed from every Ring camera to the government, that's very different.

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

#245

Post by AnthonyMouse »

dzaima wrote: post #217
CamperBob2 wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In said hypothetical world, though, the whatever-driver would also have been written by LLMs; and, if the printer or whatever is non-trivial and made by a typical large company, many LLM instances with a sizable amount of token spending over a long period of time. So getting your own LLM rewrite to an equivalent point (or, rather, less buggy as that's the whole point!) would be rather expensive; at the absolute very…

Now I'm kind of curious if you give an LLM the disassembly of a proprietary firmware blob and tell it to turn it into human-readable source code, how good is it at that?

You could probably even train one to do that in particular. Take existing open source code and its assembly representations as training data and then treat it like a language translation task. Use the context to guess what the variable names were before the original compiler discarded them etc.

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

#246

Post by sfink »

tpmoney wrote: post #243
sfink wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fa…

> LLMs definitely store pretty high-fidelity representations of specific facts and procedures Specific facts and procedures are explicitly NOT protected by copyright. That's what made cloning the IBM BIOS legal. It's what makes emulators legal. It's what makes the retro-clone RPG industry legal. It's what made Google cloning the Java API legal. > If you took some GPL code and renamed all the variables, is that sudden…

> Specific facts and procedures are explicitly NOT protected by copyright.

No argument there, and I'm grateful for the limits of copyright. That part was only for describing what LLM weights store -- just because the literal text is not explicitly encoded doesn't mean that facts and procedures aren't.

> Copyright protects a specific fixed expression of a creative idea, not the idea itself.

Right. Which is why it's weird to talk about the weights being derivative works. Weird but perhaps not wrong: if you look at the most clear-cut situation where the LLM is able to reproduce a big chunk of input bit-for-bit, then the fact that its basis of representation is completely different doesn't feel like it matters much. An image that is lossily compressed, converted to a bitstream, and encoded in DNA is very very different than the input, but if an image can be recovered that is indistinguishable or barely distinguishable from the original, I'd still call that copying and each intermediate step a significant but irrelevant transformation.

> This starts to get a lot fuzzier. De-compilation is legal.

I'm less interested in what the legal system is currently capable of concluding. I personally don't think the laws have caught up to the present reality, so present-day legality isn't the crucial determinant in figuring out how things "ought" to work.

If an LLM is completely incapable of reproducing input text verbatim, yet could become so through targeted ablation (that does not itself incorporate the text in question!), then does it store that text or not?

I'm not sure why I'm even debating this, other than for intellectual curiosity. My opinion isn't actually relevant to anyone. Namely: I think the general shape of how this ought to work is pretty straightforward and obvious, but (1) it does not match current legal reality, and more importantly, (2) it is highly inconvenient for many stakeholders (very much including LLM users). Not to mention that (3) although the general shape is pretty clear in my head, it involves many many judgement calls such as the ones we've been discussing here, and the general shape of how it ought to work isn't going to help make those calls.

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

#247

Post by archagon »

redox99 wrote: post #216
cardanome wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I view AI overlap under the same lense-- if current copyright rules would lead to undesirable outcomes (by making all AI training or use illegal/infeasible) then law/interpretation simply has to be changed Not sure about undesirable, I so wish we could just ban all generative AI. I feel profound sadness of having lost the world we had before generative AI became widespread. I really loved programming and seeing my…

In my opinion programming has never been this much fun. The vast vast majority of code is repetitive stuff that now is a breeze. I can build so much stuff now, and with more beautiful code because refactoring is effortless. I think it's like going from pre industrial revolution manual labor, to modern tools and machines.

If the vast majority of your code is repetitive stuff, you are not using the right abstractions.

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

#248

Post by uhfraid »

palata wrote: post #67

Genuine question: if I train my model with copyleft material, how do you prove I did? Like if there is no way to trace it back to the original material, does it make sense to regulate it? Not that I like the idea, just wondering. I have been thinking for a while that LLMs are copyright-laundering machines, and I am not sure if there is anything we can do about it other than accepting that it fundamentally changes wha…

> Like if there is no way to trace it back to the original material, does it make sense to regulate it?

Training data extraction has seen some success, tracing should be possible for at least some of it

https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.17035

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

#249

Post by jorl17 »

Brian_K_White wrote: post #225
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…

"If Microsoft misappropriates GPL code how exactly is that "stealing" from me, the user, of that code? I'm not deprived in any way." Yes you are. You are just deprived of something you apparently don't recognize or value, but that doesn't make it ok. The original author was also stolen from and that doesn't rely on your understanding or perception. The original author set some terms. Therm were not money but they are…

It is a tale as old as time, and one which no doubt all of us repeat at some point in our lives. There are hundreds of clichéd books, hundreds of songs, and thousand of letters that echo this sentiment.

We are rarely capable of valuing the freedoms we have never been deprived of.

To be privileged is to live at the quiet centre of a never-ending cycle: between taking a freedom for granted (only to eventually lose it), and fighting for that freedom, which we by then so desperately need.

And as Thomas Paine put it: "Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom, must, like men, undergo the fatigues of supporting it."

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

#250

Post by Retric »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #231
inlined wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mu…

> only foreseeable outcome to copyright maximalism

Nahh, AI companies had plenty of money to pay for access they simply chose not to.

Post reply on HN