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AI and the Ship of Theseus

lucumr.pocoo.org

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Re: AI and the Ship of Theseus

#11

Post by AberrantJ »

keithnz wrote: post #10
scuff3d wrote: post #6

The solution to this whole situation seems pretty simple to me. LLMs were trained on a giant mix of code, and it's impossible to disentangle it, but a not insignificant portion of their capabilities comes from GPL licenced code. Therefore, any codebase that uses LLM code is now GPL. You have a proprietary product? Not anymore. Not saying there's a legal precedent for that right now, but it's the only thing that makes…

if you train yourself by looking at GPL code then go implement your own things, is that code GPL?

Of course not, because everyone making these arguments wants people to have some magic sauce so they get to ignore all the rules placed on the "artificial" thing.

Re: AI and the Ship of Theseus

#12

Post by nkmnz »

scuff3d wrote: post #6

The solution to this whole situation seems pretty simple to me. LLMs were trained on a giant mix of code, and it's impossible to disentangle it, but a not insignificant portion of their capabilities comes from GPL licenced code. Therefore, any codebase that uses LLM code is now GPL. You have a proprietary product? Not anymore. Not saying there's a legal precedent for that right now, but it's the only thing that makes…

What about the code that wasn't even GPL, but "all rights reserved", i.e., without any license? That's even stronger than GPL and based on your reasoning, this would mean that any code created by an LLM is not licensed to be used for anything.

Re: AI and the Ship of Theseus

#14

Post by coldtea »

moralestapia wrote: post #2

[flagged]

>Licenses exists for a reason

Yes, and the choice of license for a project is made for a reason that not necessarily everybody agree with.

And the people who don't agree, have every right to implement a similar, even file-format or API compatible, project and give it another license. Gnumeric vs Excel, for example, or forks like MariaDB and Valkey.

But whether they do that alternative licensed project or not, it's perfectly rational, to not like the choice of license the original is in. They legally have to respect it, but that doesn't mean there's anything irational to disliking it or wishing it was changed.

And it's not merely idle wishing: sometimes it can make the original author/vendor to reconsider and switch license. QT is a big example. Blender. Or even proprietary to open (Mozilla to MPL).

"It's so disgusting to see people who are either malicious or non mentally capable enough to understand this"

Re: AI and the Ship of Theseus

#15

Post by measurablefunc »

nomdep wrote: post #7

In this emerging reality, the whole spectrum of open-source licenses effectively collapses toward just two practical choices: release under something permissive like MIT (no real restrictions), or keep your software fully proprietary and closed. These are fascinating, if somewhat scary, times.

If you listen to the people who believe real AI is right around the corner then any software can be recreated from a detailed enough specification b/c whatever special sauce is hidden in the black box can be inferred from its outward behavior. Real AI is more brilliant than whatever algorithm you could ever think of so if the real AI can interact w/ your software then it can recreate a much better version of it w/o looking at the source code b/c it has access to whatever knowledge you had while writing the code & then some.

I don't think real AI is around the corner but plenty of people believe it is & they also think they only need a few more data centers to make the fiction into a reality.

Re: AI and the Ship of Theseus

#16

Post by bakugo »

AberrantJ wrote: post #11
keithnz wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if you train yourself by looking at GPL code then go implement your own things, is that code GPL?

Of course not, because everyone making these arguments wants people to have some magic sauce so they get to ignore all the rules placed on the "artificial" thing.

If you genuinely believe that you are not above a literal text completion algorithm and do not deserve any more rights than it, that says more about you than anything else.

Re: AI and the Ship of Theseus

#17

Post by the_mitsuhiko »

moralestapia wrote: post #2

[flagged]

> "But I wish that car was free", sure pal, but it's not. Are you like, 8 years old?

Just because things are not as one wants, does not stop that desire to be there.

> When the author of a project choose a specific license s/he is making a deliberate decision.

Potentially, potentially not. I used to release software under GPL and LGPL but changed my mind a few years after that. I did so in part because of conversations I had with others that convinced me that my values are closer aligned with permissive licenses.

So engaging in a friendly discourse with a maintainer to ask them to relicense is a perfectly fine thing to do and an issue has been with chardet for many, many years on the license.

Re: AI and the Ship of Theseus

#19

Post by erelong »

hopefully this continues to show how awkward the idea of "intellectual property" (IP) is until people abandon it

IP sounds good in theory but enables things like "patent trolling" by large corps and creating all kinds of goofy barriers and arbitrary questions like we're asking about if re-implementations of ideas are "really ours"

(maybe they were never anyone's in the first place, outside of legally created mentalities)

ideas seem to fundamentally not operate like physical things so asserting they can be considered "property" opens the door for all kinds of absurdities like as pondered in the OP

Re: AI and the Ship of Theseus

#20

Post by estimator7292 »

keithnz wrote: post #10
scuff3d wrote: post #6

The solution to this whole situation seems pretty simple to me. LLMs were trained on a giant mix of code, and it's impossible to disentangle it, but a not insignificant portion of their capabilities comes from GPL licenced code. Therefore, any codebase that uses LLM code is now GPL. You have a proprietary product? Not anymore. Not saying there's a legal precedent for that right now, but it's the only thing that makes…

if you train yourself by looking at GPL code then go implement your own things, is that code GPL?

If you copy and paste one line from a thousand different GPL projects, is the resulting program GPL?

Let's be honest about what's happening here.

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