Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

tuananh.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 408 posts

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#161

Post by Orygin »

orthoxerox wrote: post #128
shevy-java wrote: post #94

> In traditional software law, a “clean room” rewrite requires two teams So, I dislike AI and wish it would disappear, BUT! The argument is strange here, because ... how can a2mark ensure that AI did NOT do a clean-room conforming rewrite? Because I think in theory AI can do precisely this; you just need to make sure that the model used does that too. And this can be verified, in theory. So I don't fully understand a…

Clean room is sufficient, but not necessary to avoid the accusations of license violation. a2mark has to demonstrate that v7 is "a work containing the v6 or a portion of it, either verbatim or with modifications and/or translated straightforwardly into another language", which is different from demanding a clean-room reimplementation. Theoretically, the existence of a publicly available commit that is half v6 code an…

Please don't use loaded terms like "infect". The license does not infect, it has provisions and requirements. If you want to interact with it, you either accept them or don't use the project. In this case, the author of v7 is trying to steal the copyrighted work of other authors by re-licensing it illegally.

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#162

Post by carlob »

kshri24 wrote: post #122
carlob wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why settle on some private agreement between creators and ai companies where a tiny percentage is shared, let's just tax the hell out of AI companies and redistribute.

> let's just tax the hell out of AI companies and redistribute. That's not what I favor because you are inserting a middleman, the Government, into the mix. The Government ALWAYS wants to maximize tax collections AND fully utilize its budget. There is no concept of "savings" in any Government anywhere in the World. And Government spending is ALWAYS wasteful. Tenders floated by Government will ALWAYS go to companies t…

> What have Governments ever created except for laws that stifle innovation/progress every single time?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qc7HmhrgTuQ

In all seriousness without the government you would have no innovation and progress, because it's the public school system, functioning roads, research grants a stable and lawful society that allow you to do any kind of innovation.

Apart from that, you have answered to a strawman. I said redistribute, not give to the government. I explicitly worded things that way because I don't think we should not be having a discussion on policy.

I think we are moving to an economy where the share of profits taken by capital becomes much larger than the one take from labor. If that happens then laborers will have very little discretionary income to fuel consumption and even capitalists will end up suffering. We can choose to redistribute now or wait for it to happen naturally, however that usually happens in a much more violent way, be it hyperinflation, famine, war or revolution.

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#163

Post by airza »

pmarreck wrote: post #159
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/pmarrec…

By what means did you make sure your LLM was not trained with data from the original source code?

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#164

Post by pseudalopex »

nkmnz wrote: post #65
zodmaner wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The results would be the same: AI generated music and movies will be public domain.

So you’d lose all rights on pictures of yourselves if they were generated by AI? Would this be true even for nudes?

Copyright and privacy rights are different.

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#165

Post by GaryBluto »

mfabbri77 wrote: post #19

This has the potential to kill open source, or at least the most restrictive licenses (GPL, AGPL, ...): if a license no longer protects software from unwanted use, the only possible strategy is to make the development closed source.

If you'd be willing to close source your "libre" open source project because somebody might do something you don't like with it, you never wanted a "libre" project.

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#166

Post by ostacke »

pmarreck wrote: post #159
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/pmarrec…

Bu that's not really what danlitt said, right? They did not claim that it's impossible for an LLM to generate something different, merely that it's not a clean room implementation since the LLM, one must assume, is trained on the code it's re-implementing.

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#168

Post by buro9 »

and in a single moment, the value of software patents to companies is fully restored... the software license by itself is not enough to protect software innovation, a non-trivial implementation can now be (reasonably) trivially re-implemented.

I'm sure most people here would agree patents stifle innovation, but if copyright doesn't work for companies then they will turn to a different tool.

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#169

Post by dessimus »

kingstnap wrote: post #120
dessimus wrote: post #114

Interesting to see how this plays out. Conceivably if running an LLM over text defeats copyright, it will destroy the book publishing industry, as I could run any ebook thru an LLM to make a new text, like the ~95% regurgitated Harry Potter.

You could already do that before LLMs? Persumably there is already a law around why I cant just go borrow a book from my library, type out some 95% regurgitated varient on my laptop, and then try to publish it somewhere? Edit: I looked it up and the thing that stops you from publishing a bootleg "Harold Potter and the Wizards Rock" is this legal framework around "The Abstractions Test".

I agree, but I'm not the one claiming that an AI-Assisted rewrite is sufficient enough to now claim that one ignore copyright and change the license.

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#170

Post by zabzonk »

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…

> It does not mean "as long as you never read the original code, whatever you write is yours"

I think there is precedence that says exactly this - for example the BIOS rewrites for the IBM PC from people like Phoenix. And it would be trivial to instruct an LLM to prefer to use (say, in assembler) register C over register B wherever that was possible, resulting in different code.

Post reply on HN