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GCC steering committee announces AI policy

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Re: GCC steering committee announces AI policy

#321

Post by jimmaswell »

Jedd wrote: post #24

I don't use gcc directly - not in a long while - but almost everything I rely on uses it, and it's hugely encouraging to have the stewards of this project contemplate, and then determine to have this policy. Meanwhile, I don't know who quotemstr is, but they don't sound sane in any of the exchanges in this thread.

How is this encouraging? They're sticking their heads in the sand and dooming themselves to irrelevance. All but the most strongly and wrongly ideologically motivated will contribute to other projects like LLVM when GCC asks them to code with rocks and sticks instead of taking advantage of arguably the most important invention in human history.

Re: GCC steering committee announces AI policy

#322

Post by germandiago »

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.

Thanks for this idea. Seems reasonable.

I think this should be combined with banning people who cheat by trying to explain code without properly reviewing it and burning cycles from humans at the other side.

At least that would be my policy if AI is allowed.

Re: GCC steering committee announces AI policy

#323

Post by lowbloodsugar »

rswail wrote: post #303
loeg wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

LLM-generated code is not subject to copyright.

Unless there is significant human input and guidance. But IANAL.

Re: GCC steering committee announces AI policy

#324

Post by tsimionescu »

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.

I believe there are still ongoing lawsuits on this in various places, I don't believe it's fully settled law - though, as I mentioned in my post, I also don't expect there is any realistic chance for the courts to simply shut down a trillion dollar industry, as such a decision likely would.

I do believe though that, if the LLMs were found to be derivative works of their training set, it would follow almost directly that their output is also a derivative work of that same training set - given how these LLMs operate. And even if the liability fell with the LLM providers (which may not be so clear cut for, say, local models, fine tuning, etc), that would still mean everyone would have to excise any LLM generated content they are distributing.

Re: GCC steering committee announces AI policy

#325

Post by tsimionescu »

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…

> 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.

I don't think this is all that plausible, even though I agree with you that it's not settled law. The size of the AI industry is gigantic, and a ruling that they are infringing the copyright of every piece of content in their training set would essentially shut them down entirely. Such a decision, if final, would probably easily wipe out a few hundred billion dollars on the stock market. Even if any court was willing to go that far, almost certainly lawmakers would step in and modify copyright law to prevent this from happening - both in the USA and the EU.

I don't think there is any comparison to make with the file sharing battle. That was a much, much smaller industry, it was not a significant chunk of the total hardware and software industries. Plus, the software titans were not nearly as well connected politically as they are today.

Re: GCC steering committee announces AI policy

#326

Post by tsimionescu »

7e wrote: post #210
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…

In many timelines, non-copyrightable code in GPL project doesn’t restrict the user’s freedom, since an LLM can easily reimplement the functionality clean-room. AI has brought levels of freedom to users that GNU could never do. Practical levels of freedom, leading to real, positive outcomes. Software is finally free in the real world.

For certain use cases, probably. For others, no. For example, hardware that uses GNU software must be patchable by users (if it is patchable at all). Hardware running public software can be completely locked down to its users, regardless of how powerful of an LLM the user has access to.

Re: GCC steering committee announces AI policy

#327

Post by eschaton »

tsimionescu wrote: post #325
eschaton wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. I don't think this is all that plausible, even though I agree with you that it's not settled law. The size of the AI industry…

A couple of things: The “AI industry” is nowhere near as large as it pretends to be, most of its valuation is in the form of IOUs being traded back and forth. However, the bubble popping probably will wipe a few hundred billion of value from the stock market, because that’s what happens when a speculative bubble pops.

The second thing is that I’m not necessarily talking about whether _a specific LLM itself_ infringes copyright, but whether _its output_ is covered by the copyright of _its training material_. Whether training an LLM is an activity that infringes copyright is not well-settled in any precedential way, whether the trained LLM as an artifact infringes copyright is even less settled, and whether the output of that LLM is either infringing or covered by copyright is also not settled. These are all still extremely open questions.

That means anyone doing reasonable risk management should not just blithely race ahead and assume that there’s no infringement, which appears to be the approach the GCC project is taking explicitly and which also appears to be the approach projects like Linux and LLVM are taking implicitly (mostly through weasel-language like accepting responsibility for code you’re submitting).

Re: GCC steering committee announces AI policy

#328

Post by charcircuit »

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…

There's nothing wrong with training on AI generated code. Synthetic data is common for training LLMs. The important thing is that the project maintains a level of quality that it still compiles, is functional, is relatively bug free, etc.

Re: GCC steering committee announces AI policy

#329

Post by ChulioZ »

Interesting. As someone who's not that experienced when it comes to interacting with large open-source projects, I can't say much about how this protects against being flooded with no-effort PRs by bots/people not really interested in contributing. If it does, then sure, this is understandable.

Also, I assume that the license question played a big part in this; and again, this is understandable then.

However, I do feel that this policy is unrealistic in this day and age when it comes to your valued contributors. With software development being changed so much through AI, telling your contributors that they may not use AI to write the code they want to contribute feels off.

If this is only meant as "we know you'll be using AI to generate the code anyway, and that's fine; we just have to write it in the policy to protect against flooding and licensing issues", I would find that very dishonest.

Re: GCC steering committee announces AI policy

#330

Post by josefx »

loeg wrote: post #277
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.

It explicitly allows research, tests and third party tools. I am sure that any contributer can still find plenty of use for AI with that.
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