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AI and the Ship of Theseus

lucumr.pocoo.org

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Re: AI and the Ship of Theseus

#161

Post by pixl97 »

qsera wrote: post #70
pixl97 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, it sounds kinda like you're the one making religious arguments. My response is one mocking how poorly egotistical people deal with the AI effect. Evolution built man that has intelligence based on components that do not have intelligence themselves, it is an emergent property of the system. It is therefore scientific to think we could build machines on similar principles that exhibit intelligence as an emerge…

>It is therefore scientific to think we could build machines on similar principles that exhibit intelligence as an emergent property of the system. Sure, but this ain't it. Actually, I think LLMs are a step in the wrong direction if we really want to reach true AI. So it actually delays it, instead of bringing us close to true AI. But LLMs are a very good scam that is not entirely snake oil. That is the best kind of…

>Actually, I think LLMs are a step in the wrong direction if we really want to reach true AI.

Any particular reason beyond feelings why this is the case.

We already know expert systems failed us when reaching towards generalized systems. LLMs have allowed us to further explore the AI space and give us insights on intelligence. Even more so we've had an explosion in hardware capabilities because of LLMs that will allow us to test other mechanisms faster than ever before.

Re: AI and the Ship of Theseus

#162

Post by andsoitis »

falcor84 wrote: post #152
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.

I understand that. It was just curious to me why, if one holds the position that information ought to be as open as possible, the author still chooses to copyright their won writing. It seems to me, that the ideal is putting it in the public domain, i.e. no copyright. But maybe I'm missing something.

Re: AI and the Ship of Theseus

#163

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

nkmnz wrote: post #159
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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“.

If you do not hold copyright, you cannot prevent someone from copying a thing. If you cannot prevent someone from copying the thing, then "licensing" it is somewhere between pretty weird and pretty stupid, no?

Re: AI and the Ship of Theseus

#164

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

nl wrote: post #95
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #90

US courts have ruled that machine generated code cannot be copyright. Ergo, it cannot be licensed (under any license; nobody owns the copyright, thus nobody can "license" it to anyone else). You cannot (*) use LLMs to generate code that you then license, whether that license is GPL, MIT or some proprietary mumbo-jumbo. (*) unless you just lie about this part.

This oversimplifies it. You can't copyright a work that is only generated by a machine: "In February 2022, the Copyright Office’s Review Board issued a final decision affirming the refusal to register a work claimed to be generated with no human involvement" But human direction of machine processes can be copyright: "A year later, the Office issued a registration for a comic book incorporating AI-generated material."…

I have no doubt that I was oversimplifying it. The court case that determines whether code written by an LLM in response to various types of prompts has not yet been launched (AFAIK; if it has, it has not yet been decided).

But it will be a shitshow either way.

Re: AI and the Ship of Theseus

#165

Post by sigmar »

glkindlmann wrote: post #158
sigmar wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"…

Yeah, that's possible, but seems to me more about contract law and creating an EULA for the code, than it is about copyright-derived enforcement. maybe 'copyleft' stuff will move in that direction.

it's barely tangential to the topic but worth pointing out, I don't think there's firm legal consensus on your library point, that is just the position of the FSF that that's true. IANAL tho. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License#Lib...

Re: AI and the Ship of Theseus

#166

Post by Splinelinus »

glkindlmann wrote: post #158
sigmar wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"…

This is also my thinking. A(ffero)GPL does something similar by saying a user of an API to AGPL code is bound by the AGPL license. You can always choose not to use the code, and not to use the license.

For the parent comment on discoverability, I honestly don't know. Some models list their data sources, others do not. But if it came down to a dispute it may be that a court order could result in a search of the actual training data and the system that generated it.

For the second case of derived work through context inclusion, it may end up in a similar situation with forensic analysis of the data that generated some output.

Re: AI and the Ship of Theseus

#167

Post by vintagedave »

raincole wrote: post #83
vintagedave wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or GPL. Which I’m increasingly thinking is the only license. It requires sharing. And if anything can be reimplemented and there’s no value in the source any more, just the spec or tests, there’s no public-interest reason for any restriction other than completely free, in the GPL sense.

I highly recommend read the post in question first before commenting.

I'm sorry, I don't understand this. I read it in full. If you're referring to the author dismissing GPL, my comment is, I think in converse they have missed something and the GPL is the best license, for the reasons I noted.

Re: AI and the Ship of Theseus

#168

Post by Smith42 »

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…

So write it! Shouldn't be much extra to add to the AGPL licence?

Re: AI and the Ship of Theseus

#169

Post by nkmnz »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #163
nkmnz wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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“.

If you do not hold copyright, you cannot prevent someone from copying a thing. If you cannot prevent someone from copying the thing, then "licensing" it is somewhere between pretty weird and pretty stupid, no?

No, because OP implied that the AI generated content inherits the LICENSE: in their view, if the input has been GPL, The output must be GPL. So if the input hasn’t been licensed at all, the output cannot be licensed. The inheritance of „no license“ is not „no copyright“, but „no license“. The question of copyright applies hasn’t been definitely answered yet, but just because it is likely that the person PROMPTING the AI doesn’t gain copyright, doesn’t mean that an output that is 1:1 derived from copyrighted material loses its copyrighted status. That would be truly ridiculous.

Re: AI and the Ship of Theseus

#170

Post by mannanj »

I think at the core this is a problem of abuse of the commons and parasitic and extractive behavior being tolerated as a norm.

How would I defend myself against hostile entities and societal norms that make it OK to steal from me and my effort without compensation? I will close my doors, put up walls, and distrust more often.

That's clearly the trend the world is going towards and I don't see that changing until we find some a way to make it cheaper to detect deception and parasitic behavior along with holding said entities accountable. Since our world leaders have had a history of unaccountable leadership and they are whom model this behavior, I have difficulty seeing the norms change without drastic worldwide leadership change.

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