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Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

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Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#271

Post by dspillett »

conartist6 wrote: post #127
dspillett wrote: post #123

> Accepting AI-rewriting as relicensing could spell the end of Copyleft The more restrictive licences perhaps, though only if the rewriter convinces everyone that they can properly maintain the result. For ancient projects that aren't actively maintained anyway (because they are essentially done at this point) this might make little difference, but for active projects any new features and fixes might result in either…

Who cares if it can be maintained. The system now penalizes the original creator for creating it and gives thieves the ability to conduct legal theft at a gargantuan scale, the only limit being how creative the abuser is in making money. With the incentives set up like that, the era of open software cooperation would be ended rapidly.

> Who cares if it can be maintained.

People who understand and care about the implications of https://xkcd.com/2347/

Which admittedly is not nearly enough of us…

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#272

Post by angiolillo »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #261

The folks at https://malus.sh seem to think it's fine.

That's amazing! But are you sure that the page is not satire?

> Tired of putting "Portions of this software..." in your documentation? Those maintainers worked for free—why should they get credit? ... Some licenses require you to contribute improvements back. Your shareholders didn't invest in your company so you could help strangers.

And the testimonials from "Definitely Real Corp", "MegaSoft Industries" and "Profit First LLC" are a bit suspicious, as is the fact that most of the links in the footer are not real.

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#273

Post by gus_massa »

ndriscoll wrote: post #222
jacquesm wrote: post #180

Earlier 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…

For an infographic, perhaps you claim claim fair use. I think it makes a lot of sense, but IANAL.

For a fan fiction episode that is different from all official episodes, you may cross your fingers.

For a remake of one of the episodes with a different camera angle and similar dialog, I expect that you will get in problems.

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#274

Post by pavel_lishin »

angiolillo wrote: post #272
pavel_lishin wrote: post #261

The folks at https://malus.sh seem to think it's fine.

That's amazing! But are you sure that the page is not satire? > Tired of putting "Portions of this software..." in your documentation? Those maintainers worked for free—why should they get credit? ... Some licenses require you to contribute improvements back. Your shareholders didn't invest in your company so you could help strangers. And the testimonials from "Definitely Real Corp", "MegaSoft Industries" and "Profit…

Damnit. Poe's law strikes again.

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#275

Post by wareya »

jerf wrote: post #265
wareya wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the "but their case would still fail if the second author could show that their work was independent, no matter how improbable" part of the post you're responding to.

One out of ten to the power of "forget about it" is not improbable, it's impossible. I know it's a popular misconception that "impossible" = a strict, statistical, mathematical 0, but if you try to use that in real life it turns out to be pretty useless. It also tends to bother people that there isn't a bright shining line between "possible" and "impossible" like there is between "0 and strictly not 0", but all you c…

It sounds to me like you're responding to a different argument than they're actually making and reading intent into it that isn't written into it.

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#276

Post by ndriscoll »

gus_massa wrote: post #273
ndriscoll wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

For an infographic, perhaps you claim claim fair use. I think it makes a lot of sense, but IANAL. For a fan fiction episode that is different from all official episodes, you may cross your fingers. For a remake of one of the episodes with a different camera angle and similar dialog, I expect that you will get in problems.

Is the claim that these models can 1 shot a Simpsons episode remake with different camera angle and similar dialog from a prompt like "produce Simpsons episode S01E04"? Or are we falling into the "the user doesn't notice that they told the model the answer, and the model in fact did not memorize the thing" trap?

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#277

Post by alexpotato »

Wasn't this already a thing in the past?

e.g.

Team A:

- reads the code

- writes specifications and tests based on the code

- gives those specifications to Team B

Team B:

- reads the specs and the tests

- writes new code based on the above

The thinking being that Team B never sees the code then it's "innovative" and you are not "laundering" the code.

On a side note:

what happens in a copyright lawsuit concerning code and how hired experts investigate what happened is described in this AMAZING talk by Dave Beazley: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZ4Sn-Y7AP8

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#278

Post by xyzzy_plugh »

ndriscoll wrote: post #257
xyzzy_plugh wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm no longer certain what point you're trying to make. Getting close less than half the time given three paragraphs as input still sounds like red-handed copyright infringement to me. If I sample a copyrighted song in my new track, clip it, slow it down, and decimate the bit rate, a court would not let me off the hook. It doesn't matter how much context you push into these things. If I feed them 50% of Moby Dick and…

That's... not how this works. > If I feed them 50% of Moby Dick and they produce the next word and I can repeatedly do that to produce the entire book... then we can prove the statistical model encodes the book. It can't because it doesn't. That's what it means to say it diverges. The "number of attempts" is you cheating. You're giving it the book when you let it try again word by word until it gets the correct answe…

But it does encode it! Each subsequent token's probability space encodes the next word(s) of the book with a non-zero probability that is significantly higher than random noise.

If you had access to a model's top p selection then I'd bet the book is in there consistently for every token. Is it statistically significant? Might be!

I'm not cheating because the number of attempts is so low it's irrelevant.

If I were to take a copyrighted work and chunk it up into 1000 pieces and encrypt each piece with a unique key, and give you all the pieces and keys, would it still be the copyrighted work? What if I shave off the last bit of each key before I give them to you, so you have a 50% chance of guessing the correct key for each piece? What if I shave two bits? What if it's a million pieces? When does it become transformative or no longer infringing for me to distribute?

The answer might surprise you.

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#279

Post by christina97 »

A reminder on this topic that copyright does not protect ideas, inventions, or algorithms. Copyright protects an expression of a creative work. It makes more sense eg. with books, where of course anyone can read the book and the ideas are “free” but copying paragraphs must be scrutinized for copyright reasons. It’s always been a bit weird that copyright is the intellectual property concept that protects code.

When you write code, it is the exact sequence of characters, the expression of the code, that is protected. If you copy it and change some lines, of course it’s still protected. Maybe some way of writing an algorithm is protected. But nothing else (under copyright).

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#280

Post by umvi »

foooorsyth wrote: post #213
danlitt wrote: post #134

I am pretty sure this article is predicated on a misunderstanding of what a "clean room" implementation means. It does not mean "as long as you never read the original code, whatever you write is yours". If you had a hermetically sealed code base that just happened to coincide line for line with the codebase for GCC, it would still be a copy. Traditionally, a human-driven clean room implementation would have a vanish…

>The actual meaning of a "clean room implementation" is that it is derived from an API and not from an implementation This is incorrect and thinking this can get you sued https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structure,_sequence_and_organi...

You can be sued for any reason if a company feels threatened (see: Oracle v Google)
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