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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

#291

Post by martin-t »

cxr wrote: post #86
rzmmm wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In certain law cases plagiarization can be influenced by the fact if person is exposed to the copyrighted work. AI models are exposed to very large corpus of works..

Copyright infringement and plagiarism are not the same or even very closely related. They're different concepts and not interchangeable. Relative to copyright infringement, cases of plagiarism are rarely a matter for courts to decide or care about at all. Plagiarism is primarily an ethical (and not civil or criminal) matter. Rather than be dealt with by the legal system, it is the subject of codes of ethics within e.…

You're right, legally speaking.

But you shouldn't be right. I mean, morally.

The law is a compromise between what the people in power want and what they can get away with without people revolting. It has nothing to do with morality, fairness or justice. And we should change that. The promise of democracy was (among other things) that everyone would be equal, everybody would get to vote and laws would be decided by the moral system of the majority. And yet, today, most people will tell you they are unhappy about the rising cost of living and rising inequality...

The law should be based on complete and consistent moral system. And then plagiarism (taking advantage of another person's intellectual work without credit or compensation) would absolutely be a legal matter.

Re: AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel

#292

Post by KronisLV »

This is actually a pretty nice idea:

  Assisted-by: AGENT_NAME:MODEL_VERSION [TOOL1] [TOOL2]
I feel like a lot of people will have an ideological opposition to AI, but that would lead to people sometimes submitting AI generated code with no attribution and just lying about it.

At the same time, I feel bad for all the people that have to deal with low quality AI slop submissions, in any project out there.

The rules for projects that allow AI submissions might as well state: "You need to spend at least ~10 iterations of model X review agents and 10 USD of tokens on reviewing AI changes before they are allowed to be considered for inclusion."

(I realize that sounds insane, but in my experience iterated review even by the same Opus model can help catch bugs in the code, I feel like the next token prediction in of itself is quite error prone alone; in other words, even Opus "writes" code that it has bugs that its own review iterations catch)

Re: AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel

#293

Post by martin-t »

williamcotton wrote: post #279
martin-t wrote: post #18

This feels like the OSS community is giving up. LLMs are lossily-compressed models of code and other text (often mass-scraped despite explicit non-consent) which has licenses almost always requiring attribution and very often other conditions. Just a few weeks ago a SOTA model was shown to reproduce non-trivial amounts of licensed code[0]. The idea of intelligence being emergent from compression is nothing new[1]. Th…

"Just a few weeks ago a SOTA model was shown to reproduce non-trivial amounts of licensed code[0]." That LLM response is describing a specific project with full attribution.

And it proves the code is stored (in a compressed form) in the model.

Re: AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel

#294

Post by akerl_ »

martin-t wrote: post #282
martin-t wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I cannot take seriously any politician or layer using the words "artificial intelligence", especially to models from 2023. These people have never used LLMs to write code. They'd know even current models need constant babysitting or they produce unmaintainable mess, calling anything from 2023 AI is a joke. As the AI proponents keep saying, you have to try the latest model, so anything 2 years old is irrelevant. There…

Nice, -4 points, somebody, many somebodies in fact, took that personally and yet were unable to express where they disagree in a comment. Look, if you think I am wrong, you can surely put it into words. OTOH, if you don't think I am wrong but feel that way, then it explains why I see no coherent criticism of my statements.

When your comment is about how you can’t take your counterparty seriously and they’re a joke, you’re incentivizing people who disagree to just downvote and move on.

The signal you’re sending is that you are not open to discussing the issue.

Re: AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel

#297

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

It's a sane policy - human is responsible for what they contribute, regardless of what tools they use in the development process.

However, the gotcha here seems to be that the developer has to say that the code is compatible with the GPL, which seems an impossible ask, since the AI models have presumably been trained on all the code they can find on the internet regardless of licensing, and we know they are capable of "regenerating" (regurgitating) stuff they were trained on with high fidelity.

Re: AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel

#298

Post by alfiedotwtf »

Applejinx wrote: post #274
theptip wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think them stating this very simple policy should also be read as them explicitly not making a more restrictive policy, as some kernel maintainers were proposing.

From everything I'm seeing in the industry (I'm basically a noncoder choosing to not use AI in the stuff that I make, and privy to the private work experience of coders and creators also in that field because of human social contacts), I feel like I can shed a bit of light. It looks to me like a more restrictive policy will be flat-out impossible. Even people I trust are going along with this stuff, akin to CAD repla…

You can refuse to use AI personally, but why would you not help yourself when you can?

… my dad is 86 and only after I signed him up to Claude could he write Arduino code without a phone call to me after 5 minutes of trying himself. So now, he’s spending 4+ hours at a time focused writing code and building circuits of things he only dreamt about creating for decades.

Unless you’re doing something for the personal love of the craft and sharpening your tools, use every advantage you can get in order to do the job.

But… as above, if you’re doing it for the love of it, sure - hand crafted code does taste better and you know all the ingredients are organic

Re: AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel

#299

Post by alfiedotwtf »

Luker88 wrote: post #205
lrvick wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It cannot be understated how religiously opposed many in the Linux community are to even a single AI assisted commit landing in the kernel no matter how well reviewed. Plenty see Torvalds as a traitor for this policy and will never contribute again if any clearly labeled AI generated code is actually allowed to merge.

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".

In what jurisdiction?!

It’s weird how people on HN state legal opinion as fact… e.g if someone in the Philippines vibecodes an app and a person in Equador vibecodes a 100% copy of the source, what now?

Re: AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel

#300

Post by bdangubic »

gnz11 wrote: post #281
bdangubic wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That is the bait and switch. The end goal is that you are out of the equation. Your perceived effectiveness at using AI as an exchange of labor diminishes over time to the point that you become irrelevant.

this is certainly a possibility but human beings and societies as a whole adapt
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