In mind, if you feed code into an AI model then the output is clearly a derivative work, with all the licensing implications. This seems objectively reasonable?
But code was fed into the models to create them, so where do we draw the line?
Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite
221–230 of 408 posts
Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite
#222Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, training and inference are two separate processes. Training data is never redistributed, only obtained and analyzed. What matters is what data is put into context during inference. This is controlled by the user. AI/ML is complex, so as a simpler analogy: If I watch The Simpsons, and I create an amusing infographic of how often Homer says "D'oh!" over time, my infographic would be an original work. AI training fo…
> my infographic would be an original work. > AI training follows the same principle. If you really believe that then we can't have a meaningful conversation about this, that's not even ELIF territory, that's just disconnected. You should be asking questions, not telling people how it works.
How exactly is it different? All the model itself is is a probability distribution for next token given input, fitted to a giant corpus. i.e. a description of statistical properties. On its own it doesn't even "do" anything, but even if you wrap that in a text generator and feed it literal gcc source code fragments as input context, it will quickly diverge. Because it's not a copy of gcc. It doesn't contain a copy of gcc. It's a description of what language is common in code in general.
In fact we could make this concrete: use the model as the prediction stage in a compressor, and compress gcc with it. The residual is the extent to which it doesn't contain gcc.
Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite
#223Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is their work present in v7?
Yes. Commits clearly show in progress where both LGPL and MIT code was working together. This clearly show they are a derivative work and MUST follow the original license. Plus the argument put forth is that they can re-license the project. It's not a new one made from scratch.
So, if these commits were private and squashed together before 7.0 was published there would be no violation?
Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite
#224The worst problem is that a LLM could not only copy the exact code it was trained on but possibly even their comments! There is one thing arguing that the code is a one to one copy but when the comments are even the same isn’t it quite clear it’s a copy?
It literally did copy significant portions of docstring comments, verbatim.
The human driver of the project has a comment that is reporting that the project has no structural overlap as analyzed by a plagarism analysis tool. Were comments excluded from that analysis? Is your comment here based on the data in the repo?
Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite
#225This 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.
Yes, this is the reason I've completely stopped releasing any open-source projects. I'm discovering that newer models are somewhat capable of reverse-engineering even compiled WebAssembly, etc. too, so I can feel a sort of "dark forest theory" taking hold. Why publish anything - open or closed - to be ripped off at negligible marginal cost?
This is pretty much exactly why copyright laws came about in the first place. Why bother creating a book, painting, or other work of art if anyone can trivially copy it and sell it without handing you a dime?
I think refusing to publish open source code right now is the safe bet. I know I won't be publishing anything new until this gets definitively resolved, and will only limit myself to contributing to a handful of existing open source projects.
Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite
#226Generative AI changed the equation so much that our existing copyright laws are simply out of date. Even copyright laws with provisions for machine learning were written when that meant tangential things like ranking algorithms or training of task-specific models that couldn't directly compete with all of their source material. For code it also completely changes where the human-provided value is. Copyright protects…
> Generative AI changed the equation so much that our existing copyright laws are simply out of date.
Copyright laws are predicated on the idea that valuable content is expensive and time consuming to create.
Ideas are not protected by copyright, expression of ideas is.
You can't legally copy a creative work, but you can describe the idea of the work to an AI and get a new expression of it in a fraction of the time it took for the original creator to express their idea.
The whole premise of copyright is that ideas aren't the hard part, the work of bringing that idea to fruition is, but that may no longer be true!
Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite
#227Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do you do phase 2 with an LLM when the LLM is likely trained on the original source code? Isn't this equivalent of "rewriting" Harry Potter by describing the plot to an LLM trained on the original books[1]? [1] https://arstechnica.com/features/2025/06/study-metas-llama-3...
Well, check out the "clean rewrite" design document, directly: https://github.com/chardet/chardet/commit/f51f523506a73f89f0... referenced in https://github.com/chardet/chardet/issues/327#issuecomment-4...
Writing in a plan "no GPL/LGPL code" does not actually mean "forget all the GPL/LGPL code that you have ever seen, so that you start from a clean slate".
Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite
#228Earlier quoted context omitted.
> my infographic would be an original work. > AI training follows the same principle. If you really believe that then we can't have a meaningful conversation about this, that's not even ELIF territory, that's just disconnected. You should be asking questions, not telling people how it works.
How exactly is it different? All the model itself is is a probability distribution for next token given input, fitted to a giant corpus. i.e. a description of statistical properties. On its own it doesn't even "do" anything, but even if you wrap that in a text generator and feed it literal gcc source code fragments as input context, it will quickly diverge. Because it's not a copy of gcc. It doesn't contain a copy of…
There already have been multiple documented cases of LLMs spitting out fairly large chunks of the input corpus. There have been some experiments to get it to replicate the entirety of 'Moby Dick' with some success for one model but less success with others most likely due to output filtering to prevent the generation of such texts, but that doesn't mean they're not in there in some form. And how could they not be, it is just a lossy compression mechanism, the degree of loss is not really all that relevant to the discussion.
Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite
#229Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Is their work present in v7?
Yes. The AI operator posted this as the prompt: https://github.com/chardet/chardet/commit/f51f523506a73f89f0...
which, minimally instructs it to directly examine the test suite: `4. High encoding accuracy on the chardet test suite`
Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite
#230Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes. Commits clearly show in progress where both LGPL and MIT code was working together. This clearly show they are a derivative work and MUST follow the original license. Plus the argument put forth is that they can re-license the project. It's not a new one made from scratch.
So, if these commits were private and squashed together before 7.0 was published there would be no violation?
They would be concealing the violation.