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GCC steering committee announces AI policy

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Re: GCC steering committee announces AI policy

#281

Post by nullorempty »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #239
overgard wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is such a ridiculous take I hear all the time. The shitty ethics of some people do not represent the ethics of an entire profession. Most programmers are not automating people out of jobs. I've been professionally employed as a software developer for 20 years and I don't think a single thing I've ever written has ever replaced anyone's job. Hopefully sometimes it improves their job.

> I don't think a single thing I've ever written has ever replaced anyone's job. Doubt. Whatever it is your app does, I bet corporations would have been forced to hire more people to do it for them, were it not for you. And there's absolutely nothing "unethical" about it either. Toil is meant to be automated away. What I can't take is programmers thinking they're somehow above this. The only crime here is stopping be…

Post scarcity society needs different operating principle. It will be a bumpy road to that after capitalism collapses.

Re: GCC steering committee announces AI policy

#282

Post by eschaton »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #182
jdw64 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There's still the licensing problem. If it generates code, is the code GPL licensed?

If someone were to train a coding-oriented LLM on only GPL code, I would assert that any code it outputs is covered by GPL because an LLM is fundamentally storing and reproducing its input, not understanding it and generating new things based on that understanding.

Re: GCC steering committee announces AI policy

#283

Post by [deleted] »

olalonde wrote: post #140
randusername wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The GCC stance seems reasonable to me, where do we think the rage is coming from in comments like this? Off the cuff, I would be surprised if the GNU project embraced AI, so I'm confused that people think so strongly otherwise.

Can't speak for others but I'm just tired of hearing far-fetched copyright concerns that mask the real motivation (ideological opposition to LLMs).

[deleted]

Re: GCC steering committee announces AI policy

#284

Post by matheusmoreira »

simonw wrote: post #259
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 just found a simple issue in one of my projects with FOUR agent-generated PRs all posing a fix for it: https://github.com/simonw/llm/issues/1466

I got some "security fixes" from AI companies on one of my projects too. Turned out to be an issue my own AI code reviews had already caught and which was already being tracked in my TODO list.

The fix itself looked good enough but I didn't merge it because the commit message was essentially an advertisement for the company that sent the fix.

Re: GCC steering committee announces AI policy

#285

Post by tom_ »

agentultra wrote: post #98
duskdozer wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It feels like we're witness to the possible appearance of a new archetype: a whole new kind of capital-P-Person! A hitherto-unnoticed plane in personality space is slowly becoming discernible.

(Time will tell. It's possible this will turn out to be just one of the same old People that you've already met, with just some minor tweaks to the specific details...)

This lobsters comment on the topic intrigued me: https://lobste.rs/s/omq8rt/vibecoding_gets_emacs_patch_rejec...

Re: GCC steering committee announces AI policy

#286

Post by matheusmoreira »

agentultra wrote: post #98
duskdozer wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Last time I interacted with people who push these "policies", I saw my projects be dismissed as slop because LLMs had touched them, was called a "slop fetishist" in public and was told to leave in no uncertain terms.

You bet it's a personal attack.

Re: GCC steering committee announces AI policy

#287

Post by olalonde »

eschaton wrote: post #274
olalonde wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I was referring to this decision:

"To summarize the analysis that now follows, the use of the books at issue to train Claude and its precursors was exceedingly transformative and was a fair use under Section 107 of the Copyright Act. And, the digitization of the books purchased in print form by Anthropic was also a fair use but not for the same reason as applies to the training copies. Instead, it was a fair use because all Anthropic did was replace the print copies it had purchased for its central library with more convenient space-saving and searchable digital copies for its central library — without adding new copies, creating new works, or redistributing existing copies."

https://fingfx.thomsonreuters.com/gfx/legaldocs/jnvwbgqlzpw/...

IANAL and don't know how significant this decision is, but it is, at the very least, how one judge views it.

Personally, I don't think judges will rule a certain way because of the money involved but because it seems clear that training a ML model is highly transformative.

Re: GCC steering committee announces AI policy

#288

Post by matheusmoreira »

compiler-guy wrote: post #271
a-french-anon wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is a very reasonable policy.

Re: GCC steering committee announces AI policy

#289

Post by asadotzler »

tonyhart7 wrote: post #26

how do enforce 'human only code' anyway ???? at some point, what's stopping people from lying or make the code like human writing one ????

You threaten to ban any existing contributors lying about their code and you increase scrutiny of new contributors. You can go a step further and reach out to any other projects that the lying contributor works on and let their leadership know about the lying. There's plenty of ways to use social pressure that you're pretending don't exist. Not everything is a code problem. Some things are people problems and we've got about half a million years of experience with that.

Re: GCC steering committee announces AI policy

#290

Post by pibaker »

olalonde wrote: post #140
randusername wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The GCC stance seems reasonable to me, where do we think the rage is coming from in comments like this? Off the cuff, I would be surprised if the GNU project embraced AI, so I'm confused that people think so strongly otherwise.

Can't speak for others but I'm just tired of hearing far-fetched copyright concerns that mask the real motivation (ideological opposition to LLMs).

There is nothing far fetched about this. GNU is an ideological organization and their ideology is "free software." Free software exists because of the copyright system. Now imagine if someone can just fork your GPL licensed software and distribute it under an incompatible license, and when you go to court, the judge tells you to punch sand because your codebase is all AI generated and therefore not copyrighted.

I am not saying this is not what will happen — the actual law seems to be still up in the air. But if it does happen it will be an existential threat to the GNU and the whole free software ecosystem.

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