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AI and the Ship of Theseus

lucumr.pocoo.org

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Re: AI and the Ship of Theseus

#151

Post by ncruces »

sigmar wrote: post #147
Splinelinus wrote: post #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…

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")

Agree. But then, the test suite was the input (chardet). So, is the test suite creative or functional in nature? And does the concept of fair use apply globally?

Re: AI and the Ship of Theseus

#152

Post by falcor84 »

andsoitis wrote: post #150

> I’m a strong supporter of putting things in the open with as little license enforcement as possible. > © Copyright 2026 by Armin Ronacher. Oooohkaaaay?

Licensing, and particularly copyleft is based on copyright - you cannot offer a license, if you don't have a copyright on the thing. You can put it in the public domain, but that is very different.

Re: AI and the Ship of Theseus

#153

Post by jagged-chisel »

magicalist wrote: post #131
jagged-chisel wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the correct understanding. Go back to the selfie of the monkey. Is the monkey the creator of the photo? Does he own the copyright? No. The photographer who created the opportunity for the monkey to take the selfie is the holder of the copyright on that image. Similarly, the operator of the LLM is the holder of the copyright of the LLM’s output.

> This is the correct understanding. Go back to the selfie of the monkey. Is the monkey the creator of the photo? Does he own the copyright? No. The photographer who created the opportunity for the monkey to take the selfie is the holder of the copyright on that image. This is incorrect. The monkey is unable to have a copyright on the photograph, but there was no court case suggesting the owner of the camera (Slater)…

I was indeed misremembering part of this.

The professional photographer claimed he engineered the situation that led to the photo and thus he owns the copyright on the images. That specific claim appears to not have been addressed by the court nor by the copyright office. Instead Slater settled by committing to donations from future revenue of the photos.

Re: AI and the Ship of Theseus

#154

Post by Aeolun »

kccqzy wrote: post #35
jmalicki wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who are you talking about? I can't find reference to this person.

He is the maintainer of chardet. The main topic of the article is the whole LGPL to MIT rewrite and relicense done by this person. https://github.com/chardet/chardet/releases/tag/7.0.0

I think the “I maintained this thing for 12 years” weighs a lot heavier than the “and then I even went through the trouble of reimplementing it” before changing it to a license that is more open. Seriously…

Re: AI and the Ship of Theseus

#155

Post by cheesecompiler »

randallsquared wrote: post #79
cheesecompiler wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not saying it’s the only force. But if it wasn’t instrumental what’s your take on the cause of proprietary software dominating until relatively recently?

The vast majority of running instances of operating systems are Linux or BSD. I don't think proprietary software has dominated for 15-20 years. The two places it has won out thus far is in retail and SaaS. The environment of 1980 when most important software was locked behind proprietary licenses is quite far behind us.

Since Linux is GPL this seems to support my point.

Re: AI and the Ship of Theseus

#156

Post by cheesecompiler »

Aeolun wrote: post #145
cheesecompiler wrote: post #22

> 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.

Inclined to think that why?

Re: AI and the Ship of Theseus

#157

Post by toyg »

josephg wrote: post #80
embedding-shape wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> or keep your software fully proprietary and closed. I guess it depends on your intention, but eventually I'm not sure it'll even be possible to keep it "fully proprietary and closed" in the hopes of no one being able to replicate it, which seems to be the main motivation for many to go that road. If you're shipping something, making something available, others will be able to use it (duh) and therefore replicate it…

I completely agree. Right now you can point claude at any program and ask it to analyse it, write an architecture document describing all the functionality. Then clear memory and get it to code against that architecture document. You can't do that as easily with closed source software. Except, if you can read assembly, every program is open source. I suspect we're not far away from LLMs being able to just disassemble…

You don't even need to go down to assembly - most commercial software is trivial to disassemble calling a few EXEs. In theory this is largely forbidden by licenses, but good luck enforcing them now.

Re: AI and the Ship of Theseus

#158

Post by glkindlmann »

sigmar wrote: post #147
Splinelinus wrote: post #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…

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")

Sure, a license can't create new legal understanding of "derived work", but I think the intent of what Splinelinus said still works: a license outlines the terms under which a licensee can use the licensed Work. The license can say "if you train a model on the Work, then here are the terms that apply to model or what the model generates". If you accept the license, those terms apply, even if the phrase "derived work" never came up. I hope there are more licenses that include terms explicitly dealing with models trained on the Work.

Also, for comparison, both GPL and LGPL, when applied to software libraries (in the C sense of the word), assert that creating an application by linking with the library creates a derived work (derived from the library), and then they both give the terms that govern that "derived work" (which are reciprocal for GPL but not for LGPL). IANAL but I believe those terms are enforceable, even if the thing made by linking with the library does not meet a legal threshold for being a derived work.

Re: AI and the Ship of Theseus

#159

Post by nkmnz »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #92
nkmnz wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Code created by an LLM cannot, in the USA, be copyrighted. No copyright, no license.

You get it wrong. Copyright is excluding you from using something, a license is allowing you to use something. So „no license“ does NOT mean „free to use“, but „not allowed to use“.

Re: AI and the Ship of Theseus

#160

Post by glkindlmann »

simonw wrote: post #84
duskdozer wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was instructed to look at the source...

It was instructed NOT to look at the source, with the one exception that it was told to look at this single file full of charset definitions: https://github.com/chardet/chardet/blob/f0676c0d6a4263827924...

Is there any visibility or accountability to record exactly what it did and not look at? I doubt it. So we're left with a kind of Rorschach test: some people think LLMs follow rules like law-abiding citizens, and some people distrust commercial LLMs because they understand that commercial LLMs were never designed for visibility and accountability.
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