Earlier quoted context omitted.
[flagged]
And yet it puts a stop to the tsunami of slop and it's pretty much impossible to prove anything of value was lost.
but why? it's a human making the PR and you can shame/ban that human anyway.
AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel
31–40 of 464 posts
Re: AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not insane at all. Just a very useful shortcut. Not everyone wants to move fast and break shit.
I still think it's insane, why would you care about the "origin" of the code as long as there is a human accountable (that you can ban anyway)?
Because you don't want to deal with people who can't write their own code. If they can, the rule will do nothing to stop them from contributing. It'll only matter if they simply couldn't make their contribution without LLMs.
Re: AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
How could you do that though? You can’t guarantee that there aren’t chunks of copied code that infringes.
But the responsible party is still the human who added the code. Not the tool that helped do so.
In a court case the responsibility party very well could be the Linux foundation because this is a foreseeable consequence of allowing AI contributions. There’s no reasonable way for a human to make such a guarantee while using AI generated code.
Re: AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
I still think it's insane, why would you care about the "origin" of the code as long as there is a human accountable (that you can ban anyway)?
Because you don't want to deal with people who can't write their own code. If they can, the rule will do nothing to stop them from contributing. It'll only matter if they simply couldn't make their contribution without LLMs.
So tomorrow, if a model genuinely find a bunch of real vulnerabilities, you just would ignore them? that makes no sense.
Re: AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
If the output is public domain it's fine as I understand it.
Makes sense to me. But so anybody can take Public Domain code and place it under GNU Public License (by dropping it into a Linux source-code file) ? Surely the person doing so would be responsible for doing so, but are they doing anything wrong?
Linux code doesn't have to strictly be GPL-only, it just has to be GPL-compatible.
If your license allows others to take the code and redistribute it with extra conditions, your code can be imported into the kernel. AFAIK there are parts of the kernel that are BSD-licensed.
Re: AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
But then if AI output is not under GNU General Public License, how can it become so just because a Linux-developer adds it to the code-base?
Same as if a regular person did the same. They are responsible for it. If you're using AI, check the code doesn't violate licenses
As opposed to an irregular person?
LLMs are not persons, not even legal ones (which itself is a massive hack causing massive issues such as using corporate finances for political gain).
A human has moral value a text model does not. A human has limitations in both time and memory available, a model of text does not. I don't see why comparisons to humans have any relevance. Just because a human can do something does not mean machines run by corporations should be able to do it en-masse.
The rules of copyright allow humans to do certain things because:
- Learning enriches the human.
- Once a human consumes information, he can't willingly forget it.
- It is impossible to prove how much a human-created intellectual work is based on others.
With LLMs:
- Training (let's not anthropomorphize: lossily-compressing input data by detecting and extracting patterns) enriches only the corporation which owns it.
- It's perfectly possible to create a model based only on content with specific licenses or only public domain.
- It's possible to trace every single output byte to quantifiable influences from every single input byte. It's just not an interesting line of inquiry for the corporations benefiting from the legal gray area.
Re: AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
Makes sense to me. But so anybody can take Public Domain code and place it under GNU Public License (by dropping it into a Linux source-code file) ? Surely the person doing so would be responsible for doing so, but are they doing anything wrong?
> Surely the person doing so would be responsible for doing so, but are they doing anything wrong? You're perfectly at liberty to relicense public domain code if you wish. The only thing you can't do is enforce the new license against people who obtain the code independently - either from the same source you did, or from a different source that doesn't carry your license.
This is correct, and it's not limited to code. I can take the story of Cinderella, create something new out of it, copyright my new work, but Cinderella remains public domain for someone else to do something with.
If I use public domain code in a project under a license, the whole work remains under the license, but not the public domain code.
I'm not sure what the hullabaloo is about.
Re: AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel
#38This feels like the OSS community is giving up. LLMs are lossily-compressed models of code and other text (often mass-scraped despite explicit non-consent) which has licenses almost always requiring attribution and very often other conditions. Just a few weeks ago a SOTA model was shown to reproduce non-trivial amounts of licensed code[0]. The idea of intelligence being emergent from compression is nothing new[1]. Th…
On https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47356000, it looks like the user there was intentionally asking about the implementation of the Python chardet library before asking it to write code, right? Not surprising the AI would download the library to investigate it by default, or look for any installed copies of `chardet` on the local machine.
Re: AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
There’s no reasonable way for you to use AI generated code and guarantee it doesn’t infringe. The whole use it but if it behaves as expected, it’s your fault is a ridiculous stance.
If you think it's an unacceptable risk to use a tool you can't trust when your own head is on the line, you're right, and you shouldn't use it. You don't have to guarantee anything. You just have to accept punishment.
That’s just it though it’s not just your head. The liability could very likely also fall on the Linux foundation.
You can’t say “you can do this thing that we know will cause problems that you have no way to mitigate, but if it does we’re not liable”. The infringement was a foreseeable consequence of the policy.
Re: AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
How could you do that though? You can’t guarantee that there aren’t chunks of copied code that infringes.
But the responsible party is still the human who added the code. Not the tool that helped do so.
That's not going to shield the Linux organization.