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AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel

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Re: AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel

#161

Post by afro88 »

martin-t wrote: post #36
afro88 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 n…

Dude come on, I clearly wasn't saying LLMs are people. My point was it's a tool and it's the responsibility of the person wielding it to check outputs.

If it's too hard to check outputs, don't use the tool.

Your arguments about copyright being different for LLMs: at the moment that's still being defined legally. So for now it's an ethical concern rather than a legal one.

For what it's worth I agree that LLMs being trained on copyright material is an abuse of current human oriented copyright laws. There's no way this will just continue to happen. Megacorps aren't going to lie down if there's a piece of the pie on the table, and then there's precedent for everyone else (class action perhaps)

Re: AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel

#162

Post by CivBase »

pixel_popping wrote: post #16
ipython wrote: post #4

Glad to see the common-sense rule that only humans can be held accountable for code generated by AI agents.

[flagged]

In most cases I've seen it's because they get overwhelmed by sloppy contributions from developers who do not bother to review their AI's output. Code reviews are a lot of work.

Re: AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel

#163

Post by noosphr »

Joel_Mckay wrote: post #156
themafia wrote: post #82

> All contributions must comply with the kernel's licensing requirements: I just don't think that's realistically achievable. Unless the models themselves can introspect on the code and detect any potential license violations. If you get hit with a copyright violation in this scheme I'd be afraid that they're going to hammer you for negligence of this obvious issue.

US legal consensus has set the precedent that "AI" output can't be copyrighted. Thus, technically no one can really own or re-license prompt output. Re-licensing public domain uncopyrightable work as GPL/LGPL is almost certainly a copyright violation, and no different than people violating GPL/LGPL in commercial works. Linus is 100% wrong on this choice, and has introduced a serious liability into the foundation upst…

>Re-licensing public domain work as GPL/LGPL is almost certainly a copyright violation

Remember kids never get your legal advice from hn comments.

Re: AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel

#164

Post by Joel_Mckay »

kam wrote: post #160
Joel_Mckay wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

US legal consensus has set the precedent that "AI" output can't be copyrighted. Thus, technically no one can really own or re-license prompt output. Re-licensing public domain uncopyrightable work as GPL/LGPL is almost certainly a copyright violation, and no different than people violating GPL/LGPL in commercial works. Linus is 100% wrong on this choice, and has introduced a serious liability into the foundation upst…

> Being in the public domain is not a license; rather, it means the material is not copyrighted and no license is needed. Practically speaking, though, if a work is in the public domain, it might as well have an all-permissive non-copyleft free software license. Public domain material is compatible with the GNU GPL. https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#PublicDomain

Yes, if it is clearly labeled as such, than GPL/LGPL licenced works may be included in such products. However, this relationship cannot make such works GPL without violating copyright, and doesn't magically become yours to re-license isomorphic plagiarized code from LLM.

For example, one may use NASA public domain photos as you wish, but cannot register copyright under another license you find convenient to sue people. Also, if that public domain photo includes the Nutella trademark, it doesn't protect you from getting sued for violating Ferrero trademarks/patents/copyrights in your own use-case.

Very different than slapping a new label on something you never owned. =3

Re: AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel

#165

Post by Gigachad »

CivBase wrote: post #162
pixel_popping wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

In most cases I've seen it's because they get overwhelmed by sloppy contributions from developers who do not bother to review their AI's output. Code reviews are a lot of work.

Also “responsibility” and “accountability” mean little for anon contributors from the internet. You can ban them but a thousand more will still be spamming you with slop.

Re: AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel

#166

Post by NitpickLawyer »

nitwit005 wrote: post #95
jillesvangurp wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AIs are not human and therefore their output is a human authored contribution and only human authored things are covered by copyright. The work might hypothetically infringe on other people's copyright. But such an infringement does not happen until a human decides to create and distribute a work that somehow integrates that generated code or text. The solution documented here seems very pragmatic. You as a contribut…

That you can't copyright the AI's output (in the US, at least), doesn't imply it doesn't contain copyrighted material. If you generate an image of a Disney character, Disney still owns the copyright to that character.

> That you can't copyright the AI's output (in the US, at least),

It's also not really clear if you can or cannot copyright AI output. The case that everyone cites didn't even reach the point where courts had to rule on that. The human in that case decided to file the copyright for an AI, and the courts ruled that according to the existing laws copyright must be filed by a person/human/whatever.

So we don't yet have caselaw where someone used AIgen and claimed the output as written by them.

Re: AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel

#167

Post by Joel_Mckay »

noosphr wrote: post #163
Joel_Mckay wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

US legal consensus has set the precedent that "AI" output can't be copyrighted. Thus, technically no one can really own or re-license prompt output. Re-licensing public domain uncopyrightable work as GPL/LGPL is almost certainly a copyright violation, and no different than people violating GPL/LGPL in commercial works. Linus is 100% wrong on this choice, and has introduced a serious liability into the foundation upst…

>Re-licensing public domain work as GPL/LGPL is almost certainly a copyright violation Remember kids never get your legal advice from hn comments.

I hire specialized IP lawyers to advise me how to mitigate risk: One can't assign licenses on something no one can legally claim right to. You should do the same unless you live in India or China.

Don't become the cautionary tale kid, as crawlers like sriplaw.com will be DMCA striking your public repos eventually. =3

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xkzy_420hts

Re: AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel

#169

Post by KaiLetov »

The policy makes sense as a liability shield, but it doesn't address the actual problem, which is review bandwidth. A human signs off on AI-generated code they don't fully understand, the patch looks fine, it gets merged. Six months later someone finds a subtle bug in an edge case no reviewer would've caught because the code was "too clean."

Re: AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel

#170

Post by theptip »

pibaker wrote: post #136
qsort wrote: post #5

Basically the rules are that you can use AI, but you take full responsibility for your commits and code must satisfy the license. That's... refreshingly normal? Surely something most people acting in good faith can get behind.

I agree this is very sane and boring. What is insane is that they have to state this in the first place. I am not against AI coding in general. But there are too many people "contributing" AI generated code to open source projects even when they can't understand what's going on in their code just so they can say in their resumes that they contributed to a big open source project once. And when the maintainer call the…

I think them stating this very simple policy should also be read as them explicitly not making a more restrictive policy, as some kernel maintainers were proposing.
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