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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

#241

Post by tmalsburg2 »

XYen0n wrote: post #211
newsoftheday wrote: post #10

> All code must be compatible with GPL-2.0-only How can you guarantee that will happen when AI has been trained a world full of multiple licenses and even closed source material without permission of the copyright owners...I confirmed that with several AI's just now.

Even human developers are unlikely to have only ever seen GPL-2.0-only code.

Humans will not regurgitate longer segments of code verbatim. Even if we wanted to, we couldn’t do it because our memory doesn’t work that way. LLM on the other hand can totally do that, and there’s nothing you can do to prevent it.

Re: AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel

#242

Post by simonask »

abc123abc123 wrote: post #233
lrvick wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It cannot be understated how religiously opposed many in the Linux community are to even a single AI assisted commit landing in the kernel no matter how well reviewed. Plenty see Torvalds as a traitor for this policy and will never contribute again if any clearly labeled AI generated code is actually allowed to merge.

Doesn't matter. Linux today is a toy of corporations and stopped being community oriented a long time ago. Community orientation I think these days only exists among the BSD and some fringe linux distributions. The linux foundation itself, is just one big, woke, leftist mess, with CV-stuffers from corporations in every significant position.

The idea that something can simultaneously be "woke [and] leftist" and somehow still defined by its attachments to corporations is a baffling expression of how detached from reality the US political discourse is.

The rest of the world looks on in wonder at both sides of this.

Re: AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel

#243

Post by cinntaile »

dwedge wrote: post #236
cinntaile wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Social media has never been seen as a universal positive force? It's the same with AI. It has good and bad aspects as does any technology that has an impact on this scale, AI will arguably have a much bigger impact imo. People are generally against change that forces them to change the way they used to do things. I'm sure most will have their reasons why they are against this particular change, but I don't think it w…

It reminds me of something I read on mastodon: "genie doesn't go back in the bottle say AI promoters while the industry spends a trillion dollars a year to try to keep the genie out of the bottle"

Do you think the genie will go back in the bottle and why?

Re: AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel

#244

Post by greton7 »

martin-t wrote: post #225
lrvick wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because AI is also proving to be very good at reverse engineering proprietary binaries or just straight up cloning software from test suites or user interfaces. Cuts both ways.

Have you ever seen what obfuscation looks like when somebody puts the effort in? Not to mention companies will try to mandate hardware decryption keys so the binary is encrypted and your AI never even gets to analyze the code which actually runs. It's not sci-fi, it's a natural extension of DRM.

[dead]

Re: AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel

#245

Post by OtomotO »

Luker88 wrote: post #205
lrvick wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It cannot be understated how religiously opposed many in the Linux community are to even a single AI assisted commit landing in the kernel no matter how well reviewed. Plenty see Torvalds as a traitor for this policy and will never contribute again if any clearly labeled AI generated code is actually allowed to merge.

Just remember that "reviewed" is not enough to not be considered public domain. It needs to be modified by a human. No amount of prompting counts, and you can only copyright the modified parts. Any license on "100% vibecoded" projects can be safely ignored. I expect litigations in a few years where people argue about how much they can steal and relicense "since it was vibecoded anyway".

So, how are you gonna prove I didn't write some code?

How am I gonna prove I did?

Re: AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel

#246

Post by shakna »

martin-t wrote: post #221
shakna wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For those who might wonder how accurate this is, there is advice from the Federal Register to this effect. [0] Its quite comprehensive, and covers pretty much every question that might be asked about "What about...?" > In these cases, copyright will only protect the human-authored aspects of the work, which are “independent of” and do “not affect” the copyright status of the AI-generated material itself. [0] https://…

I cannot take seriously any politician or layer using the words "artificial intelligence", especially to models from 2023. These people have never used LLMs to write code. They'd know even current models need constant babysitting or they produce unmaintainable mess, calling anything from 2023 AI is a joke. As the AI proponents keep saying, you have to try the latest model, so anything 2 years old is irrelevant. There…

If monkeys can't hold copyright, which is an actual case discussed above, then no, an LLM probably can't either. "Human" is required.

Re: AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel

#248

Post by Marha01 »

sarchertech wrote: post #123
bitwize wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because contributions to Linux are meticulously attributed to, and remain property of, their authors, those authors bear ultimate responsibility. If Fred Foobar sends patches to the kernel that, as it turns out, contain copyrighted code, then provided upstream maintainers did reasonable due diligence the court will go after Fred Foobar for damages, and quite likely demand that the kernel organization no longer distri…

Anyone distributing infringing material can be liable, and it’s unlikely that this technicality will actually would shield anyone. Anyone who thinks they have a strong infringement case isn’t going to stop at the guy who authored the code, they’re going to go after anyone with deep pockets with a good chance of winning.

> Anyone distributing infringing material can be liable

There is still the "mens rea" principle. If you distribute infringing material unknowingly, it would very likely not result in any penalties.

Re: AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel

#249

Post by Marha01 »

martin-t wrote: post #87
supern0va wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>LLM-creation ("training") involves detecting/compressing patterns of the input. There's a pretty compelling argument that this is essentially what we do, and that what we think of as creativity is just copying, transforming, and combining ideas. LLMs are interesting because that compression forces distilling the world down into its constituent parts and learning about the relationships between ideas. While it's abso…

So? Why should it be legal? If people find this cool and wanna play with it, they can, just make sure to only mix compatible licenses in the training data and license the output appropriately. Well, the attribution issue is still there, so maybe they can restrict themselves to public domain stuff. If LLMs are so capable, it shouldn't limit the quality of their output too much. Now for the real issue: what do you thin…

The best answer to those issues is still Basic Income.

Re: AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel

#250

Post by dwedge »

Marha01 wrote: post #240
dwedge wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So is music free now? The record industry doesn't exist anymore, isn't ridiculously profitable? Artists are finally earning a fair share?

> So is music free now? Uhm... yes? The cost of downloading pirated music is essentially zero. The only reason why people use services like Spotify is because it's extremely cheap while being a bit more convenient. But jack up the price and the masses will move to sail the sea again.

The cost of stealing has always been essentially zero. Same argument can be made for streaming, and yet Netflix is neither cheap nor struggling for subscribers.
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