The whole "human nature" argument always irritates me. We deny human nature all the time, and if we didn't our world would be far worse. Human nature has many aspects that are bad. Like, really bad! Not all of it is bad, and our uniquely human privilege is the ability to use the good parts of our nature to control the bad parts. Saying that we should accept something "because it's here to stay" and that to do otherwise is "against nature" is like saying there's no point in standing up straight because gravity will always be pulling us down.
GCC steering committee announces AI policy
341–350 of 454 posts
Re: GCC steering committee announces AI policy
#342Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's true no project wants that type of "contributions." But this policy also bans long-time contributors from thoughtful use of LLM-generated code.
LLM-generated code is not subject to copyright.
That is not an established precedent. (It's not what that case decided.)
Re: GCC steering committee announces AI policy
#343Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can't speak for others but I'm just tired of hearing far-fetched copyright concerns that mask the real motivation (ideological opposition to LLMs).
There is nothing far fetched about this. GNU is an ideological organization and their ideology is "free software." Free software exists because of the copyright system. Now imagine if someone can just fork your GPL licensed software and distribute it under an incompatible license, and when you go to court, the judge tells you to punch sand because your codebase is all AI generated and therefore not copyrighted. I am…
> the judge tells you to punch sand because your codebase is all AI generated and therefore not copyrighted.
1. There is no indication that is at all likely except for purely vibe-coded projects. It seems highly unlikely and in some countries (e.g. the UK) the law clearly says otherwise.
2. There have been quite a few rulings in countries where it is unclear, and they all set some level of human input that will make AI generated code covered by copyright. Look at the cases that have been in HN stories about cases in the US, Germany and Japan, for example.
2. It would have to be all AI generated, and you would need to replace all the human written parts. Not a practical problem for a large, old project.
If this is their real reasoning they are jumping at shadows. However, this might be like where, the copyright (which is the explanation given in the ToS) is not the real reason (which was explained in the subsequent blog post).
It is interesting that proprietary software businesses, who have an even stronger interest in ensuring their software is covered by copyright in all countries seem to be quite happy to use LLM generated code. Microsoft and many others boast about how much of their code is now LLM generated.
Re: GCC steering committee announces AI policy
#344Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, it's far-fetched to believe GCC would get sued for incorporating LLM-generated code.
The risk might be small -- but is it a risk they need to take at all? We're talking about a very mature project here that more or less needs to move at the speed of standards bodies, which is basically glacial. Being the first to implement C++ 29 probably isn't that big of a deal. People do not upgrade their compilers daily, shit, most projects stay on the same version for years, so optimizing for velocity seems like…
For that very reason they would also add very little LLM code over the next few years (until we get more court rulings) even if they allowed it. A little LLM code would not be usable without the rest of their code which remains covered by copyright.
Its much the same as someone creating a fork of GPL code in which they make additions that they put in the public domain. All the original code and the fork as a whole would remain GPL.
its not a small risk, its a negligible risk.
Re: GCC steering committee announces AI policy
#345Why do the AI bros even care? Surely you can just make a better gcc with a prompt right, why care about one project disallowing your Thoughtful Contributions?
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Re: GCC steering committee announces AI policy
#346Earlier quoted context omitted.
To my knowledge there is not a single known case where this happened. News back then were about intentionally prompting to output known copyrighted material. The parent comment still stands in my opinion: When, despite millions of developers using agentic AI already, are these lawsuits supposed to manifest?
I have personally seen this happen: Someone tried to contribute “vibe-coded” device support to a project I’m involved with, they said they did it all based on the device documentation, the code their agents spit out was copied verbatim out of a (GPL’d) project with which I’m familiar which supports that device. LLMs are not learning things and then using that learning to construct new things. They are essentially a f…
As it happens, all evaluations I have seen in the news were in fact explicit about trying to reproduce a portion of the training set.
I am not aware of any study attempting to measure unintentional reproduction.
With your example, I question whether you have seen this happen first hand. For all I know, the contributor could have explicitly prompted the model to reference the GPL project and had the agent clone the code from the web.
Re: GCC steering committee announces AI policy
#347Whether you agree with the policy or not, the way it's written is good. It just states the rules neutrally. See https://gcc.gnu.org/ai-policy.html . In various projects I see AI policies that state not only the rules, but also their (moral) justification. I think that's worse, because I can agree to the rules, but that does not mean I subscribe to your point of view.
On other hand, what about people who don't understand the purpose of the rule and thus don't agree with it and might not entirely follow it, until they read the justification, upon which they change their mind. Or, even if they don't agree after reading the justification, they see that it is not unreasonable and follow it out of respect for the project and community. If they have no idea of the purpose, that seems less likely. Lots of software devs are totally disconnected to things like ethics, there are people who contribute to GNU but have no idea what free software is or what the basic purpose of the GPL is. That is fine, but it also means that it is probably a good idea to have text explaining the spirit/justification of a rule like this along with the letter of it. Also, I'd say a good half of the justifications against accepting LLM contributions are not moral.
Re: GCC steering committee announces AI policy
#348To 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…
What is the point of doing this? Why do people do this sort of thing? I'm genuinely puzzled.
Re: GCC steering committee announces AI policy
#349To 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…
Would it be ethical to give these bots a non-stop code review runaround to burn those tokens up?
In most ethical systems existing today: „no, but“
Only if you view it as appropriate measured self-defense against future attacks, which is a viewpoint some people subscribe too.
Re: GCC steering committee announces AI policy
#350Time to get the forks out! I mean, there is no stopping anyone from forking everything and just iterating off of that. But I dunno, look at zig. They tried to pull the whole "humans don't write slop, AI does, so ... humans only" thing, and it was so wrong that Bun got rewrote into rust. People who believe that bad code didn't exist before AI are not remembering the world before AI properly.
Isn’t it exactly the opposite: Bun overused LLMs -> codebase became a mess hard for humans to reason about. Luckily, bigger smarter model still could handle the mess and AI lab can afford spending $1M in token to rewrite it from scratch and the rest of the work to maintain it.
Can we expect that LLMs will be smarter and smarter without us running out of electricity?