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Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

tuananh.net

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Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#151

Post by jacquesm »

dathinab wrote: post #150
jacquesm wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humans can't claim ownership, but they are still liable for the product of their bot. That's why MS was so quick to indemnify their users, they know full well that it is going to be super hard to prove that there is a key link to some original work. The main analogy is this one: you take a massive pile of copyrighted works, cut them up into small sections and toss the whole thing in a centrifuge, then, when prompted…

> Humans can't claim ownership, but they are still liable for the product of their bot. sure, but that is completely unrelated to this discussion which is about AI using code as input to produce similar code as output not about AI being trained on code

> which is about AI using code as input to produce similar code as output

> not about AI being trained on code

The two are very directly connected.

The LLM would not be able to do what it does without being trained, and it was trained on copyrighted works of others. Giving it a piece of code for a rewrite is a clear case of transformation, no matter what, but now it also rests on a mountain of other copyrighted code.

So now you're doubly in the wrong, you are willfully using AI to violate copyright. AI does not create original works, period.

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#152

Post by pseudalopex »

dathinab wrote: post #149
pavlov wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If anything, the SCOTUS decision would seem to imply that generative AI transformations produce no additional creative contribution and therefore the original copyright holder has all rights to any derived AI works. (IANAL)

that is a very good formulation of what I have been trying to say but also probably not fully right as far as I understand they avoid the decision of weather an AI can produce creative work by saying that the neither the AI nor it's owner/operator can claim ownership of copyright (which makes it de-facto public domain) this wouldn't change anything wrt. derived work still having the original authors copyright but it…

The court avoided a decision of what the operator could have copyrighted because he said he was not the author.

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#153

Post by amelius »

josephg wrote: post #125
amelius wrote: post #111

I think you should interpret it like this: You cannot copyright the alphabet, but you can copyright the way letters are put together. Now, with AI the abstraction level goes from individual letters to functions, classes, and maybe even entire files. You can't copyright those (when written using AI), but you __can__ copyright the way they are put together.

> You can't copyright those anymore (when written using AI), but you __can__ copyright the way they are put together. Sort of, but not really. Copyright usually applies to a specific work . You can copyright Harry Potter. But you can't copyright the general class of "Wizard boy goes to wizard school". Copyrights generally can't be applied to classes of works. Only one specific work. (Direct copies - eg made with a ph…

You have good points regarding how copyright works.

> Software is usually obvious.

Hardware and mechanical designs are usually described in CAD programs nowadays, so it comes pretty close to software; it's just that LLMs are not the right tool to "GenAI" them but I've seen plenty of these kinds of design that I know for sure that they are often not any less obvious than a lot of software. Treating software as "obvious therefore not patentable" is not accurate and not fair and is probably not going to help the profession in the AI age. But I agree that patents are bad for innovation.

It is also not fair to claim that an AI-copy is fundamentally different from photocopying.

I mean, in both cases it is like you are picking the worst case interpretation for the field of software engineering.

> I think we'll have to wait for this stuff to shake out before anyone really knows what the rules will end up being.

Yes, but it will help if we think deeply about this stuff ourselves because what law-makers come up with may not be what the profession needs.

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#155

Post by altairprime »

oytis wrote: post #154

Is it just me, or HN recently started picking up a social media dynamics with contributions reacting/responding to each other?

It’s always happened occasionally. Sometimes you’ll also see informative supporting links popup in the feed, though those generally get minimal traction.

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#157

Post by d1sxeyes »

conartist6 wrote: post #124
d1sxeyes wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We still have no legal conclusion on whether AI model generated code, that is trained on all publicly available source (irrespective of type of license), is legal or not. That horse has bolted. No one knows where all the AI code any more, and it would no longer possible to be compliant with a ruling that no one can use AI generated code. There may be some mental and legal gymnastics to make it possible, but it will…

I hate that this may be true, but I also don't think the law will fix this for us. I think this is down the community and the culture to draw our red lines on and enforce them. If we value open source, we will find a way to prevent its complete collapse through model-assisted copyright laundering. If not, OSS will be slowly enshittified as control of projects slowly flows to the most profit-motivated entities.

But what tools do we have to stop this happening? I agree, we can (and should) all refuse to participate in licence laundering, but there will always be folks less principled.

I don’t know what happens next, honestly.

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#158

Post by m4rtink »

kshri24 wrote: post #17

> The ownership void: If the code is truly a “new” work created by a machine, it might technically be in the public domain the moment it’s generated, rendering the MIT license moot. How would that work? We still have no legal conclusion on whether AI model generated code, that is trained on all publicly available source (irrespective of type of license), is legal or not. IANAL but IMHO it is totally illegal as no per…

I would be totally fine with all code generated by LLMs being considered to be under GPL v3 unless the model authors can prove without any doubt it was not trained on any GPL v3 code - viral licensing to the max. ;-)

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#159

Post by pmarreck »

danlitt wrote: post #134

I am pretty sure this article is predicated on a misunderstanding of what a "clean room" implementation means. It does not mean "as long as you never read the original code, whatever you write is yours". If you had a hermetically sealed code base that just happened to coincide line for line with the codebase for GCC, it would still be a copy. Traditionally, a human-driven clean room implementation would have a vanish…

> With LLMs, the probability is much higher (since in truth they are very much not a "clean room" at all).

I beg to differ. Please examine any of my recent codebases on github (same username); I have cleanroom-reimplemented par2 (par2z), bzip2 (bzip2z), rar (rarz), 7zip (z7z), so maybe I am a good test case for this (I haven't announced this anywhere until now, right here, so here we go...)

https://github.com/pmarreck?tab=repositories&type=source

I was most particular about the 7zip reimplementation since it is the most likely to be contentious. Here is my repo with the full spec that was created by the "dirty team" and then worked off of by the LLM with zero access to the original source: https://github.com/pmarreck/7z-cleanroom-spec

Not only are they rewritten in a completely different language, but to my knowledge they are also completely different semantically except where they cannot be to comply with the specification. I invite you and anyone else to compare them to the original source and find overt similarities.

With all of these, I included two-way interoperation tests with the original tooling to ensure compatibility with the spec.

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#160

Post by bluGill »

jacquesm wrote: post #151
dathinab wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Humans can't claim ownership, but they are still liable for the product of their bot. sure, but that is completely unrelated to this discussion which is about AI using code as input to produce similar code as output not about AI being trained on code

> which is about AI using code as input to produce similar code as output > not about AI being trained on code The two are very directly connected. The LLM would not be able to do what it does without being trained, and it was trained on copyrighted works of others. Giving it a piece of code for a rewrite is a clear case of transformation, no matter what, but now it also rests on a mountain of other copyrighted code.…

Every programmer is trained on the copyrighted works of others. there a vanishingly few modern programs with available source code in the public domain.

it isn't clear how/if llm is different from the brain but we all have training by looking at copywrited source code at some time.

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