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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

#301

Post by brabel »

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.

Who has that end goal?? Who is going to direct the AI if only the CEO is left in the organization? The CEO will never actually do it , and will always need someone who can and will do it. I just can’t see a grand plan to take humans out of the equation entirely.

Re: AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel

#303

Post by cjfd »

cinntaile wrote: post #217
sdevonoes wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not every change is good, and sometimes we realise too late

What is it that worries you about the change that is happening?

All kinds of worries are possible. (1) It turns out that all this AI generated stuff is full of bugs and we go back to traditional software development, creating a giant disinvestment and economic downturn. (2) sofware quality going way down. we cannot produce reliable programs anymore. (3) massive energy use makes it impossible to use sustainable energy sources and we wreck the environment every more than we are currently doing. (4) AIs are in the hands of a few big companies that abuse their power. (5) AI becomes smarter than humans and decides that humans are outdated and kills all of us.

It obviously depends on how powerful AI is going to become. These scenarios are mutually exclusive because some assume that AI is actually not very powerful and some assume that it is very powerful. I think one of these things happening is not at all unlikely.

Re: AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel

#304

Post by johanyc »

tmalsburg2 wrote: post #241
XYen0n wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even human developers are unlikely to have only ever seen GPL-2.0-only code.

Humans will not regurgitate longer segments of code verbatim. Even if we wanted to, we couldn’t do it because our memory doesn’t work that way. LLM on the other hand can totally do that, and there’s nothing you can do to prevent it.

Llm can but do they? Is there any evidence that they spit out a piece of code verbatim without being explicitly prompted to do so? NYT v OpenAI for example, NYT intentionally prompted to circumvent OpenAi's guardrail to show NYT articles

Re: AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel

#305

Post by bdangubic »

brabel wrote: post #301
gnz11 wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Who has that end goal?? Who is going to direct the AI if only the CEO is left in the organization? The CEO will never actually do it , and will always need someone who can and will do it. I just can’t see a grand plan to take humans out of the equation entirely.

that most definitely is a plan, make no mistake about it. but as mike tyson famously said, “every has a plan until they get punched in a mouth” :)

Re: AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel

#306

Post by vips7L »

alfiedotwtf wrote: post #298
Applejinx wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 lov…

Or just let people do the job the way they want.

Re: AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel

#307

Post by bsimpson »

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…

The problem is they've got a doc that declares "when you say balacalaboozy, you're declaring that a specific set of legal conditions is met. You must say balacalaboozy to proceed."

Newcomers see everyone saying balacalaboozy, so they say it to. It doesn't mean that they have read or agree to the doc that declared its meaning.

LLMs are the world's most sophisticated copycats. Surely they too will parrot balacalaboozy, unless their training is updated to include, understand, and consistently follow these new guidelines.

Re: AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel

#308

Post by Luker88 »

VorpalWay wrote: post #226
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".

> Any license on "100% vibecoded" projects can be safely ignored. As far as I know that has only been decided in US so far, which is far from the whole world.

There was a study from the US copyright office that found a single jurisdiction where the output of an AI prompt is copyrightable: China.

Everything else is various shades of "No, unless a human modified it"

edit: https://www.copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-Intell...

Re: AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel

#309

Post by Luker88 »

alfiedotwtf wrote: post #299
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".

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?

There was a study from the US copyright office that found a single jurisdiction where the output of an AI prompt is copyrightable: China.

Everywhere else in the world is in various shades of "No, unless a human modified it"

https://www.copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-Intell...

Re: AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel

#310

Post by manquer »

Luker88 wrote: post #204
newsoftheday wrote: post #10

> All code must be compatible with GPL-2.0-only How can you guarantee that will happen when AI has been trained a world full of multiple licenses and even closed source material without permission of the copyright owners...I confirmed that with several AI's just now.

NIT: All AI code satisfies the GPL license. Anything generated by an AI is public domain. You can include public domain in your GPL code. I would urge some stronger requirement with the help of a lawyer. You only need a comment like "completely coded by AI, but 100% reviewed by me" to make that code's license worthless. The only AI-generated part copyrightable are the ones modified by a human. I am afraid that this "…

> Anything new generated by an AI is public domain[1]

Language models do generate character for character existing code on which they are trained on . The training corpus usually contain code which is only source available but is not FOSS licensed .

Generated does not automatically mean novel or new the bar needed for IP.

[1] Even this is not definitely ruled in courts or codified in IP law and treaties yet .

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