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GCC steering committee announces AI policy

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Re: GCC steering committee announces AI policy

#271

Post by compiler-guy »

a-french-anon wrote: post #41
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.

That guy is stupid, the part of human nature containing dishonesty also houses "following the path of least resistance", which means that these people will simply contribute to another leading compiler without these rules. So the real question is: what's LLVM policy?

Full text is linked below, but it is getting revised pretty regularly.

tl;dr: Requirement is that a human must be in the loop; the contributor must have reviewed the change by hand already; and is always accountable; the human must be able to answer questions about the change, such as strategy chosen, corner cases, etc. etc.

Even with this very permissive and well considered policy, they get a lot of slop submissions. Huge amounts of pure trash. And the debate continues about what to do about it.

Some are in favor of forbidding it simply because it would reduce the amount of slop they have to wade through, and the 10% good prs done with AI don't outweigh the 90% pure junk prs. Reviewer time is way too scarce.

But it is just as controversial there as it is over on lwn.

https://llvm.org/docs/AIToolPolicy.html

Re: GCC steering committee announces AI policy

#272

Post by compiler-guy »

Artoooooor wrote: post #254
wbolt wrote: post #148

I guess AI companies are actually super happy with major open source projects having such policies. It guarantees that their source code repositories will remain amazing assets for the training dataset construction. Open source projects don't buy massive licenses anyway - the paying customer is in the enterprise not in open source. So it's fine for open source to go without AI and by doing this contributing to AI mod…

Of course the trained models, being derived from GPL code, become derivative work, and by extension - also GPL? Right?

Maybe. The courts haven't exactly ruled yet. And it is the risk here that the GNU project wants to avoid.

Will things probably be OK? Sure. Probably. But GNU is particularly risk averse when it comes to licensing.

Re: GCC steering committee announces AI policy

#273

Post by compiler-guy »

natecodes wrote: post #267

Time to get the forks out! I mean, there is no stopping anyone from forking everything and just iterating off of that. But I dunno, look at zig. They tried to pull the whole "humans don't write slop, AI does, so ... humans only" thing, and it was so wrong that Bun got rewrote into rust. People who believe that bad code didn't exist before AI are not remembering the world before AI properly.

I have yet to see anyone at all claim that bad code didn't exist before AI. In fact, the famously viral "WTFs per minute" comic demonstrates that such an insightful joke resonates deeply with coders and code reviewers.

https://muhammad-rahmatullah.medium.com/wtf-per-minute-an-ac...

Re: GCC steering committee announces AI policy

#274

Post by eschaton »

olalonde wrote: post #262
tsimionescu wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Courts have already set a precedent on this (it's fair use) and even if these decisions were overturned, the liability would fall on the LLM creators for the initial training, not on their users. The outputs would keep being treated individually on their own merits.

Not really, no. There have been many settlements of lawsuits, which means they are very explicitly not precedents. The LLM companies likely prefer to settle because of the existential risk being found liable for copyright infringement would result in, whereas even an expensive settlement doesn’t upend their entire business model.

Furthermore, I don’t think you can really assume that the courts will rule a certain way on this just because of the money involved; there’s a lot of money involved when it comes to the copyright holders too, and they’ve long enjoyed a rather favorable status with the courts and legislators. (For example, in the days of P2P file sharing lawsuits and attempts to legislate P2P file sharing, the software industry was already many times the size of the media industry, but the media industry consistently won.)

Re: GCC steering committee announces AI policy

#275

Post by eschaton »

user43928 wrote: post #59
Retr0id wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't there also a concern that an LLM may reproduce copyrighted code verbatim (or close enough), and the original author asserts their copyright?

To my knowledge there is not a single known case where this happened. News back then were about intentionally prompting to output known copyrighted material. The parent comment still stands in my opinion: When, despite millions of developers using agentic AI already, are these lawsuits supposed to manifest?

I have personally seen this happen:

Someone tried to contribute “vibe-coded” device support to a project I’m involved with, they said they did it all based on the device documentation, the code their agents spit out was copied verbatim out of a (GPL’d) project with which I’m familiar which supports that device.

LLMs are not learning things and then using that learning to construct new things. They are essentially a form of lossy compression of their training set. And you don’t need to be explicit about trying to reproduce a portion of that training set for an LLM to output one.

Re: GCC steering committee announces AI policy

#276

Post by matheusmoreira »

olalonde wrote: post #263
LtWorf wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They do? Last I remember microsoft's license for copilot was saying that any copyright violation is on the user and they were disclaiming all responsibility (which would probably not hold up in court).

Yes, they do. > Specifically, if a third party sues a commercial customer for copyright infringement for using Microsoft’s Copilots or the output they generate, we will defend the customer and pay the amount of any adverse judgments or settlements that result from the lawsuit, as long as the customer used the guardrails and content filters we have built into our products. https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/202…

Wow, I didn't know that. Never seen a corporation do anything like it. Usually it's just "we guarantee nothing and you agree to fully idemnify us for any damages" legal boilerplate.

Re: GCC steering committee announces AI policy

#277

Post by loeg »

a1o wrote: post #99

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 d…

It's true no project wants that type of "contributions." But this policy also bans long-time contributors from thoughtful use of LLM-generated code.

Re: GCC steering committee announces AI policy

#278

Post by kristopolous »

a1o wrote: post #99

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 d…

I get these. I reject them basically like "look, you made Claude edit 2000 lines of code and now you want it to be my responsibility... No."

I'm not saying no AI, but just a large volume of crap for something that could have taken like 10 lines has always been an instant no.

The problem is I accept it then 18 months later you're off somewhere else and there's a bug so now it's my bug. The PR has to be small or else it's a no.

Doing this with AI is no different

Re: GCC steering committee announces AI policy

#279

Post by eschaton »

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…

The starting point of GNU was that Stallman was pissed he got in trouble when he got caught copying code from the Symbolics sources to the MIT and LMI sources, which was against the agreement Symbolics and LMI had with the AI Lab, which was that improvements could only flow one-way (AI Lab to commercial). Dan Weinreb (RIP) confirmed this publicly.

Of course, not long after starting GNU, Stallman got caught copying code from Unipress emacs sources into the then-new GNU emacs sources. Oops! That’s why it was difficult for quite a long time to find early GNU emacs sources online—they were purged from various archives because they were infringing.

Re: GCC steering committee announces AI policy

#280

Post by ModernMech »

esafak wrote: post #241
ModernMech wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the very first things the government used it for when they got their hands on it was for targeting missiles, and then they promptly bombed a school full of kids. It's like Idiocracy meets Terminator.

Because the AI relied on outdated data; it was not a hallucination.

Yeah that's the whole problem. Now the process is: take crappy data, shove it in the AI machine, and the jackboots do whatever the AI says to do. That's how the government works now, apparently.

Works great for them because whenever something goes wrong they can just blame "outdated data" and move on.

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