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AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel

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Re: AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel

#261

Post by Applejinx »

dwedge wrote: post #234
lrvick wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The music industry has an army of lawyers too, and it did not make a damn bit of difference once bittorrent was popularized. IP law means nothing once tens of millions of people are openly violating it. The software industry is about to learn this lesson too.

So is music free now? The record industry doesn't exist anymore, isn't ridiculously profitable? Artists are finally earning a fair share?

In the sense of artists cannot expect to get any money for their work, yeah music's free. Becoming a meme or a celebrity on the grounds of personality is still fair game, to the extent that AI is not impersonating people effectively at scale yet.

Yet.

A whole bunch of people I watch on youtube (politics, analysts, a weatherman) are already seeing AI impersonation videos, sometimes misrepresenting their positions and identities. This will grow.

So, you can't create art because that's extruded at scale in such a way that it's just turning on the tap to fill a specified need, and you can't be a person because that can also be extruded at scale pretty soon, either to co-opt whatever you do that's distinct, or to contradict whatever you're trying to say, as you.

As far as being a person able to exist and function through exchanging anything you are or anything you do for recompense, to survive, I'm not sure that's in the cards. Which seems weird for a technology in the guise of aiding people.

Re: AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel

#262

Post by bdangubic »

gnz11 wrote: post #239
cinntaile wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Social media has never been seen as a universal positive force? It's the same with AI. It has good and bad aspects as does any technology that has an impact on this scale, AI will arguably have a much bigger impact imo. People are generally against change that forces them to change the way they used to do things. I'm sure most will have their reasons why they are against this particular change, but I don't think it w…

Adapting implies you are still a part of the environment though. AI is on a trajectory to replace you and take you out of the environment.

AI is on a trajectory to replace people who do not effectively use AI with people that do

Re: AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel

#263

Post by wafflemaker »

LtWorf wrote: post #255
cinntaile wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Social media has never been seen as a universal positive force? It's the same with AI. It has good and bad aspects as does any technology that has an impact on this scale, AI will arguably have a much bigger impact imo. People are generally against change that forces them to change the way they used to do things. I'm sure most will have their reasons why they are against this particular change, but I don't think it w…

> Social media has never been seen as a universal positive force? You missed the whole arab spring thing?

Is it meant as sarcasm?

Re: AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel

#264

Post by cinntaile »

LtWorf wrote: post #255
cinntaile wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Social media has never been seen as a universal positive force? It's the same with AI. It has good and bad aspects as does any technology that has an impact on this scale, AI will arguably have a much bigger impact imo. People are generally against change that forces them to change the way they used to do things. I'm sure most will have their reasons why they are against this particular change, but I don't think it w…

> Social media has never been seen as a universal positive force? You missed the whole arab spring thing?

If you selectively read one sentence of my comment, you risk missing the forest for the trees. I don't have any particular knowledge on the arab spring so I won't comment on that but I quite clearly said that technology has good and bad aspects to it.

Re: AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel

#265

Post by Muromec »

martin-t wrote: post #223
Luker88 wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't the "corpo moat" bigger now? They can wash the copyright by AI training, but the AIs don't get trained on closed source. "corpo" also has a ton of patents, which still can't be AI-washed. What will become unenforceable are Open Source Licenses exclusively, how does that make it a "level field"?

Exactly. AI proponents completely ignore the disparity of resources available to an individual and a corporation. If I and a company of 1000 people create the same product and compete for customers, the company's version will win. Every single time. Or maybe at least 1000:1 if you're an optimist. They have access to more money for advertising, they have an already established network of existing customers, they have…

>If I and a company of 1000 people create the same product and compete for customers, the company's version will win. Every single time.

As a person who works for a company with 25k people, I would disagree. You, a single person will often get to the basic product that a lot of people will want much faster than a company with 1k, 5k and 25k people.

Bigger companies are constrained by internal processes, piles of existing stuff, and inability to hire at the scale they need and larger required context. Also regulation and all that. Bigger companies are also really slow to adapt, so they would rather let you build the product and then buy out your company with your product and people who build it. They are at at a temporary disadvantage every time the landscape shifts.

Re: AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel

#266

Post by zahlman »

rwmj wrote: post #190
bsimpson wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Signed-off-by is already a custom/formality that is surely cargo-culted by many first-time/infrequent contributors. It has an air of "the plans were on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard.'" There's no way to assert that every contributor has read a random document declaring what that line means in kernel parlance. I recent…

The way you describe it, the developers all did the right thing. You contributed something to the patch, and even if it wasn't in your preferred final form (and it's basically never going to be for a kernel contribution of any significance), you were correctly credited. If you didn't want to be credited you should have said. Signed-off-by probably has some legal weight. When you add that to code you are making a clea…

> You contributed something to the patch, and even if it wasn't in your preferred final form (and it's basically never going to be for a kernel contribution of any significance), you were correctly credited.

I don't see how the "signed-off-by" attestation constitutes correct credit here. It's claiming that GP saw the final result and approved of it, which is apparently false.

Re: AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel

#267

Post by Muromec »

lrvick wrote: post #257
martin-t wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think modified by a human is enough. If you take licensed text (code or otherwise) and manually replace every word with a synonym, it does not remove the license. If you manually change every loop into a map/filter, it does not remove the license. I don't think any amount of mechanical transformation, regardless if done by a human or machine erases it. There's a threshold where you modify it enough, it is no…

You only need to feed the docs and tests to an LLM to get a "clean room" re-implementation that can then be relicensed.

That wasn't tested legally.

Re: AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel

#268

Post by [deleted] »

martin-t wrote: post #223
Luker88 wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't the "corpo moat" bigger now? They can wash the copyright by AI training, but the AIs don't get trained on closed source. "corpo" also has a ton of patents, which still can't be AI-washed. What will become unenforceable are Open Source Licenses exclusively, how does that make it a "level field"?

Exactly. AI proponents completely ignore the disparity of resources available to an individual and a corporation. If I and a company of 1000 people create the same product and compete for customers, the company's version will win. Every single time. Or maybe at least 1000:1 if you're an optimist. They have access to more money for advertising, they have an already established network of existing customers, they have…

[deleted]

Re: AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel

#269

Post by jeremyjh »

Paracompact wrote: post #159
jeremyjh wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because they aren’t accountable - after it is merged only I am. And why would I want to go back and forth with an LLM through PR comments when I could just talk to the agent myself in real time? Anytime I want to work through a pile of slop I can ask for one, but I don’t work that way. I work with the agent to create plans first and refine them, and the author of a PR who couldn’t do that adds nothing.

> I work with the agent to create plans first and refine them, and the author of a PR who couldn’t do that adds nothing. As someone who has been using AI extensively lately, this is my preferred way of doing serious projects with them: Let them create the plan, help them refine it, let them rip; then scrutinize their diffs, fight back on the parts I don't like or don't trust; rinse and repeat until commit. Yet I assu…

I don’t have a problem working with contributors who use AI like you described. But this thread is about working with people who could not do the work on their own. So they cannot do what you described, and they cannot save me any time, they can only waste it.

Re: AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel

#270

Post by nonameiguess »

lrvick wrote: post #210
Luker88 wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just remember that "reviewed" is not enough to not be considered public domain. It needs to be modified by a human. No amount of prompting counts, and you can only copyright the modified parts. Any license on "100% vibecoded" projects can be safely ignored. I expect litigations in a few years where people argue about how much they can steal and relicense "since it was vibecoded anyway".

Meanwhile I expect that intellectual property protections for software are completely unenforceable and effectively useless now. If something does not exist as MIT, an LLM will create it. The playing field is level now, and corpo moats no longer exist. I happily take that trade.

Ironically, I actually suspect the exact opposite. Linux has no real choice in this matter because most of the code is written by Google, Red Hat, Cisco, and Amazon at this point, and these big cos are all going to mandate their developers have to use AI coding agents. Refuse to accept these contributions and we're just going to end up with 20 Linuxes instead of one, and the original still under the control of Linus will be relegated to desktop usage and wither and die.
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