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GCC steering committee announces AI policy

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Re: GCC steering committee announces AI policy

#101

Post by jdw64 »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #91
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).

So I wonder if someday the GNU faction will release an LLM trained entirely on publicly available data. I'm a bit curious about that.

Re: GCC steering committee announces AI policy

#102

Post by mgulick »

NooneAtAll3 wrote: post #65
marginalia_nu wrote: post #58

Makes sense. The G in GCC is for GNU right, GNU as in Stallman-style Free Software. The GPL operates based on copyright licenses. If LLM output can not be copyrightable (as the courts seem to assert), then it can not be a significant part of Free Software.

courts assert LLM can't HOLD copyright, as in it is not an entity that can own something and go to court over such ownership nothing is said about you the user holding copyright over result of tool use

The GPL relies on copyright ownership for its effectiveness, and copyright ownership of LLM output is a legal gray area right now.

"...prompts alone do not provide sufficient human control to make users of an AI system the authors of the output." [https://www.congress.gov/crs_external_products/LSB/PDF/LSB10...]

If code generated by LLMs turns out to be effectively public domain, that could seriously water down the legal standing of copyleft licenses. Fortunately there is still enough human-authored code that long-standing projects as a whole are not at risk of losing all copyright control, but as more LLM-generated code is incorporated, and human authored code is deleted, the copyright slowly gets washed away.

Having said that, I suspect the big AI companies have enough lobbying power to influence the legal system and lawmaking in the future.

Re: GCC steering committee announces AI policy

#103

Post by jadar »

EvanAnderson wrote: post #69
tossandthrow wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You literally spend 99.999% og your time blindly trusting code - and that is only because I assume ymthat you write code yourself. For 99.999% of people, it is literally kthxbye on all code they execute on all their devices.

I don't think that's accurate. Until recently the code we rely on wasn't blindly trusted. People wrote and QA'd it. We may not have reviewed it personally, but that's one of the functions we outsource to software maintainers or "manufacturers". I'm not "blindly trusting" code on my computing devices. I'm trusting the vendors / maintainers to do their job. Until very recently the norm has been that the vast majority o…

A compiler is not an LLM, and I do not want to equivocate, but there are aspects of similarity. We do not assume people read the bytes of machine code to ensure it’s correct — there could be mistakes. We also write and run automated tests to ensure the code outputted from a compiler and an LLM behaves correctly. At some point, we won’t have to literally read every byte of code that comes out because we have a reasonable assurance that it’s correct.

Re: GCC steering committee announces AI policy

#104

Post by tossandthrow »

EvanAnderson wrote: post #69
tossandthrow wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You literally spend 99.999% og your time blindly trusting code - and that is only because I assume ymthat you write code yourself. For 99.999% of people, it is literally kthxbye on all code they execute on all their devices.

I don't think that's accurate. Until recently the code we rely on wasn't blindly trusted. People wrote and QA'd it. We may not have reviewed it personally, but that's one of the functions we outsource to software maintainers or "manufacturers". I'm not "blindly trusting" code on my computing devices. I'm trusting the vendors / maintainers to do their job. Until very recently the norm has been that the vast majority o…

> Until very recently the norm has been that the vast majority of code had human eyes and hands on it.

What quality does it have that humans had eyes on code?

Elite teams likely still produce code of better quality with a higher qa bar than agentic code. But that category is dimishing everyday.

The core point is that so much trust is reduced to "Joe in cubicle". Also a lot more than what he can carry.

Most of the code that is being executed on your behalf is far from written by elite teams.

Re: GCC steering committee announces AI policy

#105

Post by tines »

Supermancho wrote: post #87
incognito124 wrote: post #80

> The true purpose of AI is to allow wealth to access skill without allowing skill to access wealth. This is such a fire quote

This could be said of any technology or financial instrument. I can understand why someone would think this is fire, if they just discovered fire.

Not really, no.

Re: GCC steering committee announces AI policy

#106

Post by somenameforme »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #81
NooneAtAll3 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

courts assert LLM can't HOLD copyright, as in it is not an entity that can own something and go to court over such ownership nothing is said about you the user holding copyright over result of tool use

That is to the extent of my understanding, not correct. At least in the EU, "Given this framework, it follows that purely AI-generated outputs—those created automatically by an AI system without substantial human intervention—are not eligible for copyright protection in the EU. Such outputs are considered to fall into the public domain, making them freely available for anyone to use, reproduce, or adapt without seeki…

The last I read it's the exact same in the US. It requires 'substantial human intervention' which is going to be quite open to interpretation. The monkey selfie [1] issue is relevant. Setting up the gear to enable monkeys to take selfies was ruled ineligible for copyright: "only works created by a human can be copyrighted under United States law, which excludes photographs and artwork created by animals or by machines without human intervention."

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput...

Re: GCC steering committee announces AI policy

#107

Post by rurban »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #67
rurban wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Already happened. My AI coded C compiler already bypassed gcc in less failures, compiles 10x faster, and with their new policy they'll fall far behind.

A bold claim with no sources to back it up.

[flagged]

Re: GCC steering committee announces AI policy

#108

Post by khaelenmore »

haywalk wrote: post #66
khaelenmore wrote: post #47

It's extremely disturbing to see literally all foundational projects succumbing to the slop-monster. It's only a matter of time now until the critical mass of hard to detect bugs accumulate in the project, making gcc completely unusable for any practical purpose. What's worse - those will be subtle bugs The kind you get from having a defective RAM chip, somewhere in the upper addresses. And if we can't trust the comp…

> succumbing to the slop-monster So, in your view, banning vibecoded slop contributions is "succumbing to the slopmonster?" > critical mass of hard to detect bugs accumulate in the project Their announcement explicitly said LLMs are allowed for bug detection.

They only forbid what they name "legally significant". Which means that small scale contributions may still be produced by slop-machines. It's still possible to miss a bad line in this amount of code (15 lines they say).

They also allow ruining test cases by slop contributions:

> accept legally significant test cases that are generated by an LLM.

Re: GCC steering committee announces AI policy

#109

Post by rolandog »

m4tthumphrey wrote: post #73
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.

I like the top reply: > "The true purpose of AI is to allow wealth to access skill without allowing skill to access wealth."

Exactly; AI is to intellectual property or skills what shell corporations are to lobbying... they're a tool that won't benefit everyone equally and is unaffordable to most people.

It COULD be used for good (that's why its proponents use tone-deaf analogies comparing AI to seats on a rocket)... but we know that --- for the most part --- it WON'T be used for good... (It's already being used to spread more disinformation and to fan the flames of fascism).

Technically, you could argue that shell corporations could protect journalists, but you don't see journalists destabilizing democracies by fueling dark money to alt-right groups here and there.

Re: GCC steering committee announces AI policy

#110

Post by prologic »

duzer65657 wrote: post #33
prologic wrote: post #23

Do we have any idea what "legally significant" or "legally insignificant" means here?

I'm trying to be charitable here but a summary is literally the third sentence of the post, with the full definition linked: >> It uses the definition of "legally significant" from the GNU Project maintainer guidelines, which holds that the threshold is ""around 15 lines of code and/or text"" to qualify as significant for copyright purposes. GCC maintainers may, however, choose to accept legally significant test case…

I actually read one of the linked comments pointing to the source code of the page, not the article itself (until after) :D

And not to play the blind card, but you should try zooming in your screen (if you have the capability) and try to read where you can only see at most a line at a time and a few characters and see if you miss things too! Being blind isn't fun!

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