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AI and the Ship of Theseus

lucumr.pocoo.org

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Re: AI and the Ship of Theseus

#171

Post by simonw »

glkindlmann wrote: post #160
simonw wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There should exist a .jsonl file somewhere with exactly that information in it - might be worth Dan preserving that, it should be in a ~/.claude/projects folder.

Re: AI and the Ship of Theseus

#172

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

nkmnz wrote: post #169
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

As you note, this is a legal question that has not yet been answered. I think that speculating on the outcome in the current legal climate is fruitless.

Re: AI and the Ship of Theseus

#173

Post by greyface- »

beloch wrote: post #89

Perhaps code licensing is going to become more similar to music. e.g. Somebody wrote a library, and then you had an LLM implement it in a new language. You didn't come up with the idea for whatever the library does, and you didn't "perform" the new implementation. You're neither writer nor performer, just the person who requested a new performance. You're basically a club owner who hired a band to cover some tunes. T…

Compulsory licensing for software is going to be fun.

Re: AI and the Ship of Theseus

#174

Post by PunchyHamster »

littlestymaar wrote: post #133
jason_oster wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're putting a lot of responsibility on a license that has several permissive contemporaries. The original BSD license "Net/1" and GPL 1.0 were both published in 1989, while the MIT license has its roots set in "probably 1987" [1] with the release of X11. No doubt, GPL had some influence. But I would hardly single it out as the force that ensured software stayed open. Software stayed open because "information wants…

Linux won against the multiple proprietary Unixes because it forced corporations to contribute back instead of keeping their secret sauce for themselves.

And same corporations are now pushing BSD license at every avenue just to avoid having to do that.

Re: AI and the Ship of Theseus

#175

Post by duskdozer »

TZubiri wrote: post #87
erelong wrote: 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…

>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?

By taking the public money that goes to medical R&D already, increased if need be, and hire scientists to research medical tech in the interest of public wellbeing and not profit.

Re: AI and the Ship of Theseus

#176

Post by prmph »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #112

> For me personally, what is more interesting is that we might not even be able to copyright these creations at all. A court still might rule that all AI-generated code is in the public domain, because there was not enough human input in it. That’s quite possible, though probably not very likely. As I understand it, the US Supreme Court has just this week ruled exactly this. LLM output cannot be copyrighted, so the o…

Technically how will vibe code be identified? And how does one determine the level of human involvement that would make code copyrightable? What of the prompts? Are those copyrightable? What about the architectural and tactical design of the code if I do those myself?

I don't vibe code; I am firmly in charge of the architecture and code style of my projects, and i frequently give detailed instructions to AI tools I use. But, to me, this is leading to a weird place. Why would the result of using a tool to create something new not be copyrightable simply due to the specific tool used?

I think this whole hullabaloo is self inflicted. Code or an other creative work should stand on its merits. There is no issue with copyright and no issue with the ship of Theseus. The current copyright approach is still applicable: code (or any other creative work) that appears to be lifted verbatim from another work could be a copyright violation. Work that is sufficiently original (irrespective of how it was created) is likely not a copyright violation.

Re: AI and the Ship of Theseus

#177

Post by duskdozer »

radarsat1 wrote: post #120

This is interesting because I've been considering a similar project. I maintain a package for a scientific simulation codebase, it's all in Fortran and C++ with too much template code, which takes ages to build and is very error prone, and frankly a pain to maintain with its monstrous CMake spaghetti build system. Furthermore the whole thing would benefit with a rewrite around GPU-based execution, and generally a bet…

If you really want to do that, the sensible thing is to keep it separate from the original and respect the original license. There would have been no outcry if that happened with chardet. If the different package is genuinely better, it will be used.

Re: AI and the Ship of Theseus

#178

Post by jFriedensreich »

Non-permissive licenses, open core and proprietary software will just not survive. There is no reality in which I or anyone in my community would use something like eg. raycast or the saas email clients that someone locks down and does rent extraction and top down decisions on. The experience of being able to change anything about the software i use with a prompt while using it is impossible to come back from to all the glitches, limitations and stupidities. we have to come to terms with infinite software.

Re: AI and the Ship of Theseus

#179

Post by jason_oster »

Decabytes wrote: post #81
jason_oster wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're putting a lot of responsibility on a license that has several permissive contemporaries. The original BSD license "Net/1" and GPL 1.0 were both published in 1989, while the MIT license has its roots set in "probably 1987" [1] with the release of X11. No doubt, GPL had some influence. But I would hardly single it out as the force that ensured software stayed open. Software stayed open because "information wants…

The existence of permissive licenses like BSD or MIT does not show that copyleft was unimportant.Those licenses allowed code to remain open, but they also allowed it to be absorbed into proprietary products. The GPL’s significance was that it changed the default outcome. At a time when software was overwhelmingly proprietary, it created a mechanism that required improvements to remain available to users and developer…

I did not say it was unimportant. I said it was not the only important factor.

Re: AI and the Ship of Theseus

#180

Post by qsera »

pixl97 wrote: post #161
qsera wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 allo…

Because if it was in the right direction, then it would have been possible to amend its knowledge without going through the whole re-training procedure.
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