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AI and the Ship of Theseus

lucumr.pocoo.org

141–150 of 203 posts

Re: AI and the Ship of Theseus

#141
Porting code from one programming language to another will be one of the most important tasks of code gen A.I.

Imagine doing the same with vehicle engines. Less fuel consumption, less pollution, less weight and who knows how many more benefits.

Just letting the A.I. do it by itself is sloppy though. The real benefit is derived only when the resulting port is of equal or better quality than the original. It needs a more systematic approach, with a human in the loop and good tools to index and select data from both codebases, the original and the ported one. The tools are not invented yet but we will get there.

Re: AI and the Ship of Theseus

#142
post #87
post #19

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 mentalit…

the issue with this Stallmanian view on IP is that IP predates software and solves an actual issue. I don't think Stallman has a real proposal to how innovation can be incentivized and compensated. Take the example of medical innovations, sure big pharma is bad, but if they don't get to monetize their inventions, how will R&D get funded? If you destroy IP and allow everyone to clone whatever, you will have a great re…

I think getting rid of IP shifts economic focus on to tangible physical goods which you can exclusively own: you can sell the physical medical devices, just not claim a specific design is "yours exclusively"

IP has always had awkward things like, what if you discover the sole treatment for a disease and can restrict people from making use of it... kind of weird, especially when people can "independently" draw the same conclusions so they truly obtain an idea that is "their own" but which then they are legally restricted from making use of in such an example

Re: AI and the Ship of Theseus

#143

> I personally think all of this is exciting. I’m a strong supporter of putting things in the open with as little license enforcement as possible. I think society is better off when we share, and I consider the GPL to run against that spirit by restricting what can be done with it. I like sharing too but could permissive only licenses not backfire? GPL emerged in an era where proprietary software ruled and companies…

Also, towards the bottom of the page: > Content licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

Re: AI and the Ship of Theseus

#144
I'm waiting for AGPL to become AIGPL: If you train a model with some or all of the licensed work, you agree that the weights of that model constitute a derivative work, and further for the weights, as well as any inference output produced as a result of those weights to be bound by the terms of the license. If you run a model with the licensed work in part or in full as input, you agree that any output from the model is bound by the terms of the license.

Re: AI and the Ship of Theseus

#145

> I personally think all of this is exciting. I’m a strong supporter of putting things in the open with as little license enforcement as possible. I think society is better off when we share, and I consider the GPL to run against that spirit by restricting what can be done with it. I like sharing too but could permissive only licenses not backfire? GPL emerged in an era where proprietary software ruled and companies…

I dunno, I’m inclined to think the WTFPL and MIT did more to help open source. And for a while during my youth there was indeed no distinction between publically accessible code and free and unencumbered code.

Re: AI and the Ship of Theseus

#146

I'm waiting for AGPL to become AIGPL: If you train a model with some or all of the licensed work, you agree that the weights of that model constitute a derivative work, and further for the weights, as well as any inference output produced as a result of those weights to be bound by the terms of the license. If you run a model with the licensed work in part or in full as input, you agree that any output from the model…

Bingo. I can see this is a possible future, and probably desirable scenario for anyone with preference for free software.

Re: AI and the Ship of Theseus

#147

I'm waiting for AGPL to become AIGPL: If you train a model with some or all of the licensed work, you agree that the weights of that model constitute a derivative work, and further for the weights, as well as any inference output produced as a result of those weights to be bound by the terms of the license. If you run a model with the licensed work in part or in full as input, you agree that any output from the model…

You can't change the law with a license agreement and redefine what constitutes a derivative work. If that was possible, people could have done it pre-LLMs.

also how would you prove it was in the training set? re: your last sentence, the licensed work wasn't in the input in the chardet example ("no access to the old source tree")

Re: AI and the Ship of Theseus

#148
post #82
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.

The latter will become MIT sooner or later with Ghidra plus LLM-assisted reverse engineering. https://reorchestrate.com/posts/your-binary-is-no-longer-saf... https://reorchestrate.com/posts/your-binary-is-no-longer-saf... Even SaaSS isn't safe from that type of process: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47259485

I see you submitted that as a link, it deserves a lot more than the current 4 upvotes I see. What a fascinating article. It gives me much hope that dead old games are not in fact dead. If there is still a binary somewhere and current trends continue then they can probably be resurrected cheaply and with relatively unskilled people.

Re: AI and the Ship of Theseus

#149

AI is merely a sophisticated tool. If your original thoughts achieve a tangible result through this tool, the ownership should reside with the thinker. Reverse-engineering, in this context, shouldn't be seen merely as an infringement on AI-generated code, but as a violation of the human intellect and systemic design that orchestrated that code. We need to move past protecting 'lines of code' and start protecting the…

> the ownership should reside with the thinker.

Assuming that you are a programmer, when you think back to your contract, you will have noticed something like "The employee agrees to that any works created during employment will be solely owned by $company_name"

Copyright _should_ be about allowing workers to make money from the non physical stuff that they produce.

Google spent many many millions undermining that so they could run youtube, the news service and google books (amongst other things.

Disney bought most of congress to do the opposite.

At it's heart copyright is a tool that allows you and me to make a living. However its evolved into a system that allows large corporations to make and hold monopolies.

Now that large corporations can see an opportunity to cut employees out of the system entirely, they are quite happy with AI companies undermining copyright, just so long as they can keep charging for auto generated content.

TLDR: copyright is automatically assigned to the creator of the specific work, not the thinker.

ie thinker: "build me a box with two yellow rabbit ears"

The text is copyright of the "thinker"

maker: builds a box with yellow rabbit ears Unless the yellow rabbit ears are a specific and recognisable of the thinker's work, its not infringement.

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