Cessation of public development of Kefir C compiler

There are stochastic compression algorithms (e.g. https://github.com/kaydotdev/sqic) and it would be insane to claim they don't produce derivative works. And as a general rule, a work based on multiple other works is derivative of all af them.

> If I build a Markov chain based on a statistical analysis of word sequences in Hamlet, and then use it to produce a new sentence that isn't found in the text of that work, I have not created a derivative work of Hamlet under any applicable sense of that term.

No, but your generated text is also useless if you want to read Hamlet. The danger I'm speaking of is people generating Hamlets but paraphrased - that's a derivative, especially if you use an automated tool that got original Hamlet as its input. Except the Hamlet in question is the Linux kernel but not bound by GPL. Also, your Markov chain itself is a derivative work.

> I don't think that is generally true. There's always been a hope and expectation that some subset of users would contribute back to the project in the ways you're describing, but never a sense of there being any obligation to do so. Only a fraction of FOSS users have ever contributed to back to the projects whose software they use.

True, but that fraction of a huge number is still big enough to be meaningful help. Plus the recognition. Most users respect the attribution clause. AI legally-distinct clones drop the fraction of helpers and the number of attributions straight down to 0. That changes the equation, what previously made sense now straight up doesn't.

> But in cases where LLMs actually are acting in ways similar to the former, I agree that they should be held accountable both socially and legally.

And because OpenAI et al. hold all the money and all the lawyers, the only way to hold them accountable is to stop publishing open source altogether. That's the only leverage OSS community has.

Because it does include content from the original work -- this is just a translation, and isn't comparable to how LLMs work.

> To me the answer is simply that humans are special.

I don't disagree, but I also view LLMs as tools that extend human capacities and not autonomous entities unto themselves. LLMs are still just software, and can't really be regarded as anything other than instruments that humans use to broaden their capacity to see, appreciate, understand, and draw on that experience in what they create.

> That may seem remarkably unfair to the machines, or like a cop-out.

No, it's unfair to the humans. The machines are just tools that they use. The "double standard" is really a set of inconsistent standards applied to the same underlying moral agents.

> After all, if you want to treat a machine exactly like a human who learns from prior art to create new art, then the ownership of the new art would also belong to the machine. Not to the person who prompts it.

No, it always belongs to the person who prompts it. The machine is not a conscious entity, bears no intentions, and has no capacity to act on its own initiative. The machine is always just a tool that extends human capacity, as all machines always have.

For a good comparison here, we've never not credited a photographer as the author of a photograph. But the photographer is in a sense merely prompting the camera by framing the shot, selecting the exposure, adjusting the lighting, etc. -- the hard work in actually creating the photograph is being done by the camera itself, with the photographer playing no role in directly constructing the final image, and with the many of the qualities of the final image being determined by pre-existing features of the camera's functional design and components that the photographer also played no role in defining, apart from choosing which camera to use.

LLMs are like cameras in this way. And the fact that they rely on external data for model training no more disclaims the user as the author of the resulting work than looking things up in a dictionary or encyclopedia does the same for the author of an essay.

But this has never been a condition in the FOSS world, as far as I'm aware. I've only ever seen attribution requirements attach to redistribution of source, not usage of the software.

I understand that the crux of the debate here is whether training an LLM is redistribution of the underlying code, but to me, it seems to be fairly clear that it is not.

> Luckily, FOSS is specific published works, and unless LLMs actually reasonably-provably do such decomposing into ideas/facts (good luck reasoning about that), that part is also irrelevant.

That's literally all LLMs do. That's what tokenization is. And it's trivially provable, since if you compare LLM models with the copyrighted works you're claiming they replicate, all you'll see on the LLM side is probability matrices representing correlations between decomposed units of knowledge aggregated across the entire dataset as an integrated whole.

> Depending on intent, that very much can happen, it's called plagiarism. Good luck proving an LLMs intent.

The only intent ever in play is that of the user. LLMs are just software.

I'd expect them to say "we don't like this, but since it's not actually a derivative work, we can't do anything about it". As long as you're not directly copying things like characters, dialogue, etc., it's not a derivative work.

That's why Armageddon is not a derivative work of Deep Impact, the Shark Attack series is not a derivative work of Jaws, the more famous Titanic is not a derivative work of 1979's S.O.S. Titanic, and the Harry Potter series is not a derivative work of Teen Witch.

Using the same story themes, plot points, and setting as another work does not implicate that other work's copyright. Only substantial copying of specifics does.

Define a character. Is another lion prince named Simba the same character? Is a lion prince named something else the same character? Is a human prince named Simba the same character? I'm no copyright expert, but from what I know about fanfics and fanart, the US courts ruled all of these violate copyright (you can win a book plagiarism lawsuit even if the other book has all names changed and every sentence went through thesaurus). The few cases where the obvious stand-in was ruled non-infringing were on the grounds of parody exception, not on the grounds of being non-derivative.

The many Titanic movies are not each other's derivatives because none of them are based on each other. They're all based on the historical events directly. Now, if the original Titanic was fictional like the famous Nautilus, then yes, the 1997 movie would be derivative, but not of the 1979 series.

Which part of Harry Potter is directly rips off Teen Witch the way Lion King directly rips off Hamlet? I'm not familiar with that movie.