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GCC steering committee announces AI policy

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Re: GCC steering committee announces AI policy

#311

Post by felipeerias »

kristopolous wrote: post #278
a1o wrote: post #99

To people not interacting with open source projects that are stablished and popular, there are a lot of PRs and contributions where someone set an agent with a prompt like “contribute using my user to popular projects to improve my profile” or something similar and the entire PR and answers to maintainers questions and literally everything is entirely machine generated, without any human, and at the same time it is d…

I get these. I reject them basically like "look, you made Claude edit 2000 lines of code and now you want it to be my responsibility... No." I'm not saying no AI, but just a large volume of crap for something that could have taken like 10 lines has always been an instant no. The problem is I accept it then 18 months later you're off somewhere else and there's a bug so now it's my bug. The PR has to be small or else i…

Ultimately, it is a governance problem.

Communities need to set strong rules and expectations to reject and prevent those large useless drive-by contributions, which aim to extract more value from the project than they provide to it.

Banning all (or nearly all) AI uses creates this strange "don't ask don't tell" situation where valuable contributors are not allowed to discuss the tools that they are using.

Re: GCC steering committee announces AI policy

#312

Post by rswail »

There are two different but related copyright problems with LLM generated code:

1. Making a derivative work of already existing copyrighted code that breaks that code's license (eg injecting GPL code in output).

2. Fully LLM generated code is not able to be subject to copyright, because there is not a human author, which means that it is not able to be subject to a license.

#1 is a problem that the AI vendors are indemnifying customers for.

#2 is not something that AI vendors can change, as it is part of the enforceability of IPRs under law.

Companies are going to have to rely on trade secrets for protection of their closed source code, FOSS/GPL projects don't have that option.

Re: GCC steering committee announces AI policy

#313

Post by rswail »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #309
rswail wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that AI generated code is not subject to copyright means that your contribution is essentially public domain. This means that any license (GPL, BSD, Apache etc) are no longer enforceable on your contribution.

> The fact that AI generated code is not subject to copyright Only if there was "no human creativity or direction". I always ensure that both are present. I don't just randomly prompt and ship AI output. And that's just some kind of preliminary ruling by the US copyright office. It'll probably change at some point. AI work should be considered as work for hire, no different than a corporation hiring someone and ownin…

Just prompts are not considered to be "direction". The example in the US Copyright Office report was of a client providing "direction" to an architect, which did not provide the client with any claim of ownership over the actual architectural drawings.

On the other hand, the architect using CAD tools to create those drawings did include the necessary human creativity/direction even if the tools did things like apply building code rules etc.

Source code being subject to copyright and also considered to be "speech" has provided much more protection to the public from government overreach, eg restrictions on cryptography source code.

Re: GCC steering committee announces AI policy

#314

Post by olalonde »

rswail wrote: post #306
olalonde wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's just not an issue in practice. All major AI labs match generated code against their training data to prevent outputting verbatim copies. They're so confident they won't output copyrighted code that they offer copyright indemnification to paid users.

Do they offer the same indemnification that the code they generate IS subject to copyright and that you own that? Because the US Copyright begs to differ.

My understanding is that "one shotting" a C compiler from a single prompt would not be covered by copyright, but a large project like GCC containing thousands of individual contributions which each require human input most likely would (even if some of the code is LLM generated).

Also, it's worth noting that the USCO does not actually have the final say here. It's possible to register works that don't hold up in court or to fail to register works that do hold up. It's the courts that ultimately decide what the law is.

Re: GCC steering committee announces AI policy

#315

Post by matheusmoreira »

rswail wrote: post #302

Given that the GPL is entirely dependent on copyright to be enforceable, the fact that AI contributions are not copyrightable is something that is going to bite someone big very soon. The US copyright office has released a public report about the fact that copyright requires a human author. They compare the different cases of the equivalent of "prompt engineering", of a client that provides an architect guidance on w…

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

> Modifying or Arranging AI-Generated Content

> Generating content with AI is often an initial or intermediate step, and human authorship may be added in the final product.

> As explained in the AI Registration Guidance, “a human may select or arrange AI-generated material in a sufficiently creative way that ‘the resulting work as a whole constitutes an original work of authorship.’”

> A human may also “modify material originally generated by AI technology to such a degree that the modifications meet the standard for copyright protection.”

> As several commenters noted, human authors should be able to claim copyright if they select, coordinate, and arrange AI-generated material in a creative way.

> This would provide protection for the output as a whole (although not the AI-generated material alone).

> A number of commenters also made the point that if a user edits, adapts, enhances, or modifies AI-generated output in a way that contributes new authorship, the output would be entitled to protection.

> Although such works would not technically qualify as “derivative works,” derivative authorship provides a helpful analogy in identifying originality.

> Again, the copyright would extend to the material the human author contributed but would not extend to the underlying AI-generated content itself.

Re: GCC steering committee announces AI policy

#316

Post by matheusmoreira »

rswail wrote: post #313
matheusmoreira wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The fact that AI generated code is not subject to copyright Only if there was "no human creativity or direction". I always ensure that both are present. I don't just randomly prompt and ship AI output. And that's just some kind of preliminary ruling by the US copyright office. It'll probably change at some point. AI work should be considered as work for hire, no different than a corporation hiring someone and ownin…

Just prompts are not considered to be "direction". The example in the US Copyright Office report was of a client providing "direction" to an architect, which did not provide the client with any claim of ownership over the actual architectural drawings. On the other hand, the architect using CAD tools to create those drawings did include the necessary human creativity/direction even if the tools did things like apply…

> Just prompts are not considered to be "direction".

Which is why you don't just prompt and ship AI output. You review it, edit it, make it your own.

Re: GCC steering committee announces AI policy

#317

Post by PalmPilotProMax »

rswail wrote: post #304
PalmPilotProMax wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nominative determinism and cosmic irony in action. Who'd thought the Fall of Clang would be caused by Clangers Slop.

I thought they were "clankers" not "clangers"?

In a sense, Clankers are a clanger.

Re: GCC steering committee announces AI policy

#318

Post by MichaelMoser123 »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #315
rswail wrote: post #302

Given that the GPL is entirely dependent on copyright to be enforceable, the fact that AI contributions are not copyrightable is something that is going to bite someone big very soon. The US copyright office has released a public report about the fact that copyright requires a human author. They compare the different cases of the equivalent of "prompt engineering", of a client that provides an architect guidance on w…

https://www.copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-Intell... > Modifying or Arranging AI-Generated Content > Generating content with AI is often an initial or intermediate step, and human authorship may be added in the final product. > As explained in the AI Registration Guidance, “a human may select or arrange AI-generated material in a sufficiently creative way that ‘the resulting work as a whole constitutes an…

Interesting link, thanks. What about the contradiction between the next two sentences?

“a human may select or arrange AI-generated material in a sufficiently creative way that ‘the resulting work as a whole constitutes an original work of authorship.’”

"copyright would extend to the material the human author contributed but would not extend to the underlying AI-generated content itself."

The linked document is mentioning the act of selecting AI generated images for a comic book as an example, where the result is adding material that is copyrightable on its own merit. I am not sure if the same line of reasoning would apply to programming.

"in one early case, for instance, the Office found that the selection and arrangement of AI-generated images with human-authored text in a comic book were protectable as a compilation."

I think that AI is adding an extra layer of politics to just about everything. It is as if we are entering a phase of super-extra politics, as everyone is trying to figure out what should come next.

Instead of a war with machines we get an eternal war among lawyers and managers. Don't know which prospect is worse.

Re: GCC steering committee announces AI policy

#319

Post by jimmaswell »

Artoooooor wrote: post #254
wbolt wrote: post #148

I guess AI companies are actually super happy with major open source projects having such policies. It guarantees that their source code repositories will remain amazing assets for the training dataset construction. Open source projects don't buy massive licenses anyway - the paying customer is in the enterprise not in open source. So it's fine for open source to go without AI and by doing this contributing to AI mod…

Of course the trained models, being derived from GPL code, become derivative work, and by extension - also GPL? Right?

No, you can't copyright an idea, only an expression of an idea, and LLMs operate at the level of ideas. They don't literally stitch together code from training.

Re: GCC steering committee announces AI policy

#320

Post by germandiago »

datakan wrote: post #20
unprovable wrote: post #2

The comments are worth it... the full spectrum of personalities and the hottest of takes. 10/10, would recommend to a bored friend.

AI psychosis seems to be on all sides of the debate. We've truly lost our moderate speech and the ability to discuss.

It is reasonable to stop some people from flooding projects wirh low quality PRs that take time on the other side, that might not work at all or be patches that are several times the size of what is needed and get a lot in the way of the maintenance.

I agree with a policy of "no AI contributions by default" just to be able to ban them quickly and lower the incentive.

Ido not have anything against AI itself though, as long as it is lanaged by humans and snippets are properly reviewed. But that is not what many ppl do.

They will just drop something there and say: you silly, review for me amd I take a lot of credit.

I would not spend a minute in that kind of contributions.

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