61–70 of 142 posts
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People who break the social contract are the ones responsible for breaking the social contract, not the ones who take steps in response to social contract being broken.
“No, no, what was she wearing?”
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Its definitely the ones DDOSing websites while giving no attribution in any way to the original creators.
DDOSing websites seems to be an unrelated problem, and one that has traditionally been solved through response throttling and IP blocking. Attribution is often required even on MIT or BSD licenses where code is being redistributed, either in original or modified versions, but that would relate to this discussion only to the extent that one regards using LLMs whose training data included a certain bit of code as itsel…
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People who break the social contract are the ones responsible for breaking the social contract, not the ones who take steps in response to social contract being broken.
So the questions here are (a) is any generally accepted social contract actually being broken, and (b) if so, who are the ones who are breaking it?
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So the questions here are (a) is any generally accepted social contract actually being broken, and (b) if so, who are the ones who are breaking it?
Are you asking how AI coding agents, the companies selling them and the individuals using them break the FOSS social contract (copyleft, attribution, upstreaming), or are you disputing that they do?
There seems to be an implicit premise here that any work generated by an LLM whose training data includes a particular bit of code itself constitutes a redistribution of that code. I've yet to encounter any strong arguments substantiating this premise as a general principle, and my own suspicion is that it is not valid as a general principle, given the nature of how LLMs operate.
It's certainly possible that specific instances of LLMs lazily copy-pasting code from public repos may exist, and the extent to which this is happening is something that can be substantiated by empirical examples, so if you have any to point to, I'd be interested in looking at them. However, where this is happening, it ought to be regarded as a failure modality of LLMs, and not something that implicates the underlying nature of LLMs, given that their intended purpose is to function as stochastic generators that do not merely copy-paste input data.
My initial feeling here is that using open-source code to train LLMs is not per se a violation of the generally accepted FOSS social contract, but rather that attempting to restrict specific use cases of FOSS-licensed code on the basis of normative opinions unrelated to the license terms is a violation, or at least a rejection, of that social contract. I'm not fully committed to this position, though, and would welcome well-reasoned arguments to the contrary.
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Here is what the purveyors of AI don't seem to realise. You can bend copyright law all you want in order to train your models on whatever you can grab, but in the absence of genuine protection of their creative work authors are simply not going to be publishing at all .
I think they see it all too well. They still think they can make bank today while it lasts, whatever comes after is some other shareholder's problem. And if we're talking about open source, killing it might be a positive side effect, they'll be ready to sell you a closed source alternative when you no longer have options.
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DDOSing websites seems to be an unrelated problem, and one that has traditionally been solved through response throttling and IP blocking. Attribution is often required even on MIT or BSD licenses where code is being redistributed, either in original or modified versions, but that would relate to this discussion only to the extent that one regards using LLMs whose training data included a certain bit of code as itsel…
Why? You stole my stuff and now are pretending I need to argue for you to stop stealing it. It's a joke.
Are you now layering the old and tired "copyright infringement = stealing" argument on top of the still unsubstantiated premise that all LLM training is copyright infringement?
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Really hate to say it, but I’ve stopped publishing my work too for this reason. I spend most of my time now building my own little software ark, and I aspire to no longer think of programming in the next few years. I feel like the creative economy in general will be unrecognizable in the near future, maybe nonexistent. I wonder what modes of collaboration on ideas might form in the next few years.
The sad thing is I feel trapped on all sides of the debate, I wrote a book about LLMs and human creativity (spoiler Humans win for a long time) but I was going to do it as a blog series, instead I published https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GXCSY4W8 because I felt at least I might get a bit back for literally 100’s of hours of my life I poured into the book and my editor and friends who read and provided reviews. And I pus…
I think SWGEmu (cool project, just learned of it from you!) do represent some optimism though. Maybe these sorts of passion projects will take over the space?
Seems to me LLMs have changed some things. I'm not sure how it's best put, but it used to be: - Seeing code (or a blogpost or whatever) was a result from effort where thought had gone into it. The writer paid effort so the reader didn't have to. - There'd be some level of attachment to what you've put effort into. With LLMs, that's undermined: it's easy to produce thoughtless imitations. Code or comments where though…
But LLMs don’t seem particularly good at inventing new ways to code (or write, or…). It’s literally all derivative. So what happens in 10 years? Are we headed for a great stagnation?
People taking your work and not giving anything back was ALWAYS the risk you took when writing free software. LLM training doesn't change that much. That the us military no doubt is using gcc to compile embedded software for their icbm:s no doubt irks the gnu people. But you can't have it any other way. "You can only use my software for good things" just is not consistent with "free software".
There's an almost intergalactic level of irony in the extent to which open source has benefited giant corporations and the military at the expense of individuals, and ultimately contributed to the commercialised enclosure of software IP. I suppose you could argue it also indirectly led to the empowerment of non-developers to create their own vibe coded solutions. But we're not quite there yet. And the AI IP that make…