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GCC steering committee announces AI policy

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Re: GCC steering committee announces AI policy

#91

Post by AnimalMuppet »

jdw64 wrote: post #61

But looking at the history of the free software movement, it seems like they should actually be embracing LLMs. It's interesting how differently people think. The starting point of GNU was that Unix was expensive and costly for research labs, so they set out to build a free alternative that users could control from the ground up. So if LLMs are useful, shouldn't we be building a free LLM ecosystem where users can run…

Re 3: I'm old enough to remember the SCO lawsuits against Linux. If I were running a significant free software operation, I would worry about legal liability for AI-generated code (a few years or a couple decades down the road, after copyright holders win a major case or two against the AI companies).

Re: GCC steering committee announces AI policy

#92

Post by hananova »

etaioinshrdlu wrote: post #36

I wonder how they plan to detect it something is LLM generated. I think what this leads to is people just working hard to make their outputs appear human generated.

Long time contributors risk expulsion. First time contributors will face additional scrutiny. Slaving over your LLM extrusions to make it appear human made, thereby reading and reviewing it, is an acceptable outcome.

Re: GCC steering committee announces AI policy

#93

Post by tsimionescu »

olalonde wrote: post #22
fractorial wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do anti-LLM types expect to be vindicated in an orgy of copyright lawsuits that resets the industry back to 2022? What do people pushing expect to accomplish? You weren’t kidding, huh.

He's correct though. You would need 3 extremely low probability events to all occur simultaneously for the concern to actually manifest. 1) Courts reverse their previous decisions and declare LLM generated code as belonging to LLM labs. 2) LLM labs decide to assert their copyright and sue open source projects. 3) They are able to prove that the code was generated by an LLM and not just any LLM but their LLM.

The concern related to copyright is not that the AI labs would assert copyright over the code produced by their LLMs - that is a complete strawman.

The concern instead is that LLMs and all of their outputs may be found to be derivative works of their entire training set, and thus rendered unusable (as the training set is not distirbutable under any license).

I think this ship has long sailed and no court is going to dare give such a decision given the money involved, for better or for worse. But it's a much more realistic scenario, in principle, than LLM labs going mad and attacking their own customers.

Edit to add: there is another, completely different, copyright risk associated with LLMs - and one that is much more realistic. It is the fact that code generated by LLMs may not, in fact, be copyrightable at all. Which would mean that it can't be subject to the GPL. As long as it remains a minority of GCC code, this wouldn't matter much, but it could in time lead to significant portions of GCC becoming public domain, and thus cooyable, modifiable, and redistrubutable without providing the four freedoms.

Re: GCC steering committee announces AI policy

#94

Post by Cthulhu_ »

red_admiral wrote: post #49

2028: AI can generate a compiler suite to rival GCC overnight, but faster and with fewer bugs. That'll be fun. (Extra fun if the AI generated compiler is under BSD licence.)

The fun will be in proving those claims. I'm sure this can and has been done already today, but they won't get critical mass because a compiler is more than just the code. The GCC project represents not just a compiler, but decades of knowledge of people into programming languages and computer hardware. LLMs may be able to access and "know" the same thing, but they will never be the same thing.

Ultimately though, anyone can choose what to use. If an LLM generated compiler is better than GCC and people prefer it, so be it.

Re: GCC steering committee announces AI policy

#95

Post by miningape »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #82
sensanaty wrote: post #57

Why do the AI bros even care? Surely you can just make a better gcc with a prompt right, why care about one project disallowing your Thoughtful Contributions?

There was someone claiming they had already AI generated a better GCC that was 10x as fast. A bold claim, but they didn't provide evidence so who knows.

Yeah I highly doubt that claim, if it were true, buddy would be getting a massive signing bonus from OpenAI/Anthropic + endless press noise about it

Re: GCC steering committee announces AI policy

#96

Post by 01100011 »

INTPenis wrote: post #52

I think if the submitter can answer questions about the code, and exhibit understanding for every line then it should be indistinguishable. But I don't maintain any busy projects. The moderating should focus on good user participation, and a reputation to give old users leeway. I'd be as specific as requesting new users to respond as succinctly as possible to avoid AI ranting

Yeah, there's quite a range between an experienced dev who reviews and understands everything the LLM generates and a coder-clown who blindly trusts it.

One of the big AI companies recently presented to our company. They sent one of the clowns. "I don't even review the code because it would slow me down. Human code also has bugs, so why bother?" These people scare me, but they're also the first type of coder who will be unemployed by AI, so at least we won't have to put up with them for much longer.

Software is a big umbrella. There are people who vomit out code because they can just push another update later in the day and will keep doing that until the bug reports stop. They are often gleefully ignorant that much of software is not designed that way, and that the reason any of their code works is that it is built on software very much not designed that way.

Re: GCC steering committee announces AI policy

#97

Post by Supermancho »

olalonde wrote: post #14
broodbucket wrote: post #3

This is a pretty good middle ground, I think. You can't prevent LLM usage and there's significant downsides to doing so universally, so restricting contributions to things that a human needs to demonstrably understand circumvents a lot of problems.

You can use an LLM and demonstrably understand the code it produces.

> You can use an LLM and demonstrably understand the code it produces.

Obviously.

Chatgpt: Write a bubble sort in java.

Now ask questions about what you don't understand.

The problem is comparing trivial examples to complex multi-agent hands-off workflows. Scale until you are at the edge of your comfort zone.

Pretending that all LLM codes is dangerous because you cant understand a solution to a problem you offloaded to a black box, is disingenuous.

Re: GCC steering committee announces AI policy

#98

Post by agentultra »

duskdozer wrote: post #68
beepbooptheory wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Currently the top one has a nice kind of supervillain flair to it: > Denying it is denying human nature, Mr. Bond, and the gods tend to punish the hubris of denying nature.

It's nuts how strong the reactions are. This is a rather permissive policy: tests and changes 15 lines are fully allowed.

I believe there’s a small minority of LLM users who will show up to any comment thread and scream bloody murder if you post any kind of policy limiting LLM use. They seem to feel like it’s a personal attack and must justify their use of LLMs… for absolutely no reason. It’s wild.

Re: GCC steering committee announces AI policy

#99

Post by a1o »

To people not interacting with open source projects that are stablished and popular, there are a lot of PRs and contributions where someone set an agent with a prompt like “contribute using my user to popular projects to improve my profile” or something similar and the entire PR and answers to maintainers questions and literally everything is entirely machine generated, without any human, and at the same time it is done in the cheapest way so steering the PRs in review isn’t even like “free tokens” because the model used is not good, so the output is always bad. The policies help point the agent to what is not allowed and shutdown the contribution, and so far the agents seems to respect it. Shutting down an agent without a policy to point to them make them very reactive. Note, there is no human involved in the other side! The person that set up the agent is not even aware of the specific PRs that are going.

Re: GCC steering committee announces AI policy

#100

Post by newswasboring »

INTPenis wrote: post #52

I think if the submitter can answer questions about the code, and exhibit understanding for every line then it should be indistinguishable. But I don't maintain any busy projects. The moderating should focus on good user participation, and a reputation to give old users leeway. I'd be as specific as requesting new users to respond as succinctly as possible to avoid AI ranting

I am not a major contributor or anything but I have a hobby of watching issues and pull requests for "coding drama". These AI policies seems to be targeting the average AI PR, which is basically one or two shot implementations. In some projects which are more AI positive (like AI agent projects) I have seen people's code reviews are also AI. It just looks like one AI config checking the output for other AI configs. In my own contributions I have at least had a couple of instances where I didn't know I was talking to an LLM or a person.

Of course as people understand how to use these tools their quality of output may increase. But what will also improve is our own processes around handling AI work.

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