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AI and the Ship of Theseus

lucumr.pocoo.org

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181–190 of 203 posts

Re: AI and the Ship of Theseus

#181

Post by waffletower »

jason_oster wrote: post #56
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…

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 downvotes on the above post are telling -- the GPL Bolsheviks are girding their loins. Myself, I am nostalgic for "information wants to be free" and find the Bolsheviks to embody a horseshoe alternative form of fascism who, somehow without cognizance of the irony, attempt to redefine the meaning of freedom.

Re: AI and the Ship of Theseus

#182

Post by jason_oster »

cheesecompiler wrote: post #67
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…

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?

You certainly made the case that the GPL was the only force, or at least ignored the contribution of alternative licenses.

I also wouldn't agree that proprietary software is in decline. There are niches where the OS, mobile apps, and games are almost entirely proprietary (and that is not changing any time soon). But the most damning problem is that all computer hardware now has multiple layers of subsystems with proprietary software components, even if the boot loader and beyond are ostensibly FOSS.

My take on the cause of proprietary software is "the bottom line". Companies want to sell products and they believe that it's easier to sell things that are not open source. Meanwhile, there are several counterexamples of commercial products that are also open source (not necessarily copyleft), including computer games. The cause of whatever decline you're seeing in proprietary software dominance is unlikely to be the GPL.

Re: AI and the Ship of Theseus

#183

Post by jason_oster »

PunchyHamster wrote: post #174
littlestymaar wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This confuses the economics of open source. It's easier to contribute changes upstream than maintaining a fork. A smart business decision is using permissively licensed software that is maintained by other teams (low maintenance cost) while contributing patches upstream when the need arises (low feature cost).

Bringing a fork in-house and falling behind on maintenance is a very bad idea. The closest I've ever come to that in industry was deploying a patch before the PR was merged.

Re: AI and the Ship of Theseus

#184

Post by observationist »

jagged-chisel wrote: post #153
magicalist wrote: post #131

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. 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.

If it were a trained monkey, and the photographer held a button in his hand that triggered the photo taking mechanism, there'd be no question of copyrightability. Similarly, vibe-coding and eliciting output from a software tool which results in software or images or text created under the specification and direction and intent and deliberate action of the user of the tool is clearly able to be copyrighted.

The user is responsible for the output of the software. An image created in photoshop isn't the IP of Adobe, nor is text in Word somehow belonging to Microsoft. The idea that because the software tool is AI its output is magically immune from copyright is silly, and any regulation or legislation or agency that comes to that conclusion is silly and shouldn't be taken seriously.

Until they get over the silliness, just lie. You carefully manually crafted each and every character, each pixel, each raw byte by hand, slaving away with a tiny electrode, flipping each bit in memory, to elicit the result you see. Any resemblance to AI creations is purely coincidental, or deliberate as an ironic statement about current affairs.

Re: AI and the Ship of Theseus

#185

Post by greyface- »

observationist wrote: post #184
jagged-chisel wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If it were a trained monkey, and the photographer held a button in his hand that triggered the photo taking mechanism, there'd be no question of copyrightability. Similarly, vibe-coding and eliciting output from a software tool which results in software or images or text created under the specification and direction and intent and deliberate action of the user of the tool is clearly able to be copyrighted. The user i…

Copyright is positive law created by humans, not natural law that we happen to recognize. The idea that adopted legislation or established caselaw can be wrong about what copyright fundamentally is makes no sense.

Re: AI and the Ship of Theseus

#187

Post by littlestymaar »

jason_oster wrote: post #183
PunchyHamster wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

This confuses the economics of open source. It's easier to contribute changes upstream than maintaining a fork. A smart business decision is using permissively licensed software that is maintained by other teams (low maintenance cost) while contributing patches upstream when the need arises (low feature cost). Bringing a fork in-house and falling behind on maintenance is a very bad idea. The closest I've ever come to…

Proprietary Unixes were literally that at the scale of an entire OS.

Re: AI and the Ship of Theseus

#188

Post by observationist »

greyface- wrote: post #185
observationist wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it were a trained monkey, and the photographer held a button in his hand that triggered the photo taking mechanism, there'd be no question of copyrightability. Similarly, vibe-coding and eliciting output from a software tool which results in software or images or text created under the specification and direction and intent and deliberate action of the user of the tool is clearly able to be copyrighted. The user i…

Copyright is positive law created by humans, not natural law that we happen to recognize. The idea that adopted legislation or established caselaw can be wrong about what copyright fundamentally is makes no sense.

Not what I'm saying - if you meet the technical, intentional definition of a process, substantiated by precedent, then the law should support any variation of the process which has those same technical features meeting the definition.

Using AI as a tool to produce output, no matter how complex the underlying tool, should result in the authorship of the output being assigned to the user of the tool.

If autocorrect in Word doesn't nullify copyright, neither should the use of LLMs; manifesting an idea into code and text and images using prompts might have little human input, but the input is still there. And if it's a serious project, into which many hours of revision, back and forth, testing, changing, etc, there should be absolutely no bar to copyright.

I can entertain a dismissal based on specific low effort uses of a tool - something like "generate a 13 chapter novel 240 pages long" and seeing what you get, then attempting to publish the book. But almost anything that involves any additional effort, even specifying the type of novel, or doing multiple drafts, or generating one chapter at a time, would be sufficient human involvement to justify copyright, in my eyes.

There's no good reason to gatekeep copyright like that. It doesn't benefit society, or individuals, it can only benefit those with vast IP hoards and giant corporations, and it's probably fair to say we've all had about enough of that.

Re: AI and the Ship of Theseus

#189

Post by bloppe »

> 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.

This is a head-spinning argument. The whole point of GPL is to force more things out into the open. You'd think someone who espouses open source would cheer the GPL. The only practical difference between MIT and GPL is that the former allows more closed-source code.

This feels analogous to the paradox of freedom. Truly unlimited freedom would include the freedom to oppress others, so "freedom maximalism" is an unsound philosophy (unless applied solipsistically).

When I publish, I tend to do so under MIT. I also write plenty of closed-source code. And I do generally believe in open source. But I don't use that as a justification for preferring MIT. If anything, I like MIT despite believing in open source, not because. Mainly because I want people to actually use what I wrote.

Re: AI and the Ship of Theseus

#190

Post by casey2 »

Pretty simple, if the model was trained on GPL or any copyleft then the output is copyleft (in whole or in part!) you just have a really long preprocessing step before hitting compile.
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