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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

#351

Post by martin-t »

MarsIronPI wrote: post #288
martin-t wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, an LLM, being a machine obviously shouldn't hold copyright. But that doesn't stop people claiming that running vast amounts of code through an LLM can strip copyright from it. Ultimately LLMs (the first L stands for large and for a good reason) are only possible to create by taking unimaginable amounts of work performed by humans who have not consented to their work being used that way, most of whom require at…

If consent to use of your code in AI training can be revoked at any time, that makes training impossible, since if anyone ever withdraws consent, it's not like you can just take out their work from your finished model.

Yup. Not my problem.

You could even say it strongly would very strongly incentivize the LLM companies to be on their best behavior, otherwise people would start revoking consent en-masse and they'd have to keep training new models all the time.

If you want something more realistic, there would probably be time limits how long they have to comply and how much they have to compensate the authors for the time it took them to comply.

There absolutely are ways to make it work in mutually beneficial ways, there's just no political will because of the current hype and because companies have learned they can get away with anything (including murder BTW).

Re: AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel

#352

Post by theshrike79 »

sarchertech wrote: post #48
SirHumphrey wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quite a lot of companies use and release AI written code, are they all liable?

1. Almost definitely if discovered 2. Infringement in closed source code isn’t as likely to be discovered 3. OpenAI and Anthropic enterprise agreements agree to indemnify (pay for damages essentially) companies for copyright issues.

What would be "discovered" exactly? You can't patent a basic CRUD application.

There has to be an analogy to music or something here - except that code is even less copyrightable than melodies.

Yes, there might be some specific algorithms that are patented, but the average programmer won't be implementing any of those from scratch, they'll use libraries anyway.

Re: AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel

#353

Post by jlarocco »

pibaker wrote: post #136
qsort wrote: post #5

Basically the rules are that you can use AI, but you take full responsibility for your commits and code must satisfy the license. That's... refreshingly normal? Surely something most people acting in good faith can get behind.

I agree this is very sane and boring. What is insane is that they have to state this in the first place. I am not against AI coding in general. But there are too many people "contributing" AI generated code to open source projects even when they can't understand what's going on in their code just so they can say in their resumes that they contributed to a big open source project once. And when the maintainer call the…

> I agree this is very sane and boring. What is insane is that they have to state this in the first place.

I don't think it's insane. It seems reasonable that people could disagree about how much attribution and disclosure there should be about AI assistance, or if it's even allowed, etc.

Every document in that `process` directory explains stuff that could be obvious to some people but not others.

Re: AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel

#354

Post by sarchertech »

johnisgood wrote: post #124
sarchertech wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don’t produce enough similar code to infringe frequently. And if they did independent creation is an affirmative defense to copyright infringement that likely doesn’t apply to LLMs since they have the demonstrated capability to produce code directly from their training set.

You have shifted from "very easy not to infringe" to "don't infringe frequently", which concedes the original point that humans can and do produce infringing code without intent. On independent creation: you are conflating the tool with the user. The defense applies to whether the developer had access to the copyrighted work, not whether their tools did. A developer using an LLM did not access the training set direct…

> You have shifted from "very easy not to infringe" to "don't infringe frequently", which concedes the original point that humans can and do produce infringing code without intent.

Practically speaking humans do not produce code that would be found in court to be infringing without intent.

It is theoretically possible, but it is not something that a reasonable person would foresee as a potential consequence.

That’s the difference.

> LLM memorization/regurgitation is a documented failure mode, not normal operation (nor typical case).

Exactly. It is a documented failure mode that you as a user have no capacity to mitigate or to even be aware is happening.

Double standards are perfectly fine. LLMs are not conscious beings that deserve protection under the law.

>not settled.

What appears to likely be settled is that human authorship is required, so there’s no way that an LLM could qualify for independent creation.

Re: AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel

#355

Post by martin-t »

adrian_b wrote: post #319
martin-t wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, an LLM, being a machine obviously shouldn't hold copyright. But that doesn't stop people claiming that running vast amounts of code through an LLM can strip copyright from it. Ultimately LLMs (the first L stands for large and for a good reason) are only possible to create by taking unimaginable amounts of work performed by humans who have not consented to their work being used that way, most of whom require at…

Almost all the productivity enhancement provided by an AI coding assistant is provided by circumventing the copyright laws, with the remaining enhancement being provided by the fact that it automates the search-copy-paste loop that you would do if you had direct access to the programs used during training. (Much of the apparent gain of the automatic search-copy-paste is wasted by skipping the review phase that would…

> The reason is that it is absolutely impossible to write any kind of program that is not a derivative of earlier programs.

And that's why copyright has exceptions for humans.

You're right copyright was the wrong tool for code but for the wrong reasons.

It shouldn't be binary. And the law should protect all work, not just creative. Either workers would come to a mutual agreement how much each contributed or the courts would decide based on estimates. Then there'd be rules about how much derivation is OK, how much requires progressively more compensation and how much the original author can plainly tell you what to do and not do with the derivative.

It's impossible to satisfy everyone but every person has a concept of fairness (it has been demonstrated even in toddlers). Many people probably even have an internally consistent theory of fairness. We should base laws on those.

> abusing the copyright laws and the patent laws have been the most significant blockers of technical progress during the last few decades

Can you give examples?

> copyrights on non-open-source programs are almost never owned by creators, but by their employers

Yes and that's another thing that's wrong with the system, employment is a form of abusive relationship because the parties are not equal. We should fix that instead of throwing out the whole system. Copyright which belongs to creators absolutely does give creators more leverage and negotiating power.

Re: AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel

#356

Post by theshrike79 »

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #297

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 o…

Then we get to the Code of Theseus argument, if you take a piece of code and replace every piece of with code that looks the same, is it still the original code?

Is an AI reimplementation a "clean room" implementation? What if the AI only generates pseudocode and a human implements the final code based on that? Etc etc ad infinitum.

Lawyers will be having fun with this philosophical question for a good decade.

Re: AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel

#357

Post by martin-t »

akerl_ wrote: post #294
martin-t wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's a fallacy. Someone being utterly wrong and dismissing them for it so does not logically make me claim easily dismissible.

Re: AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel

#358

Post by bonzini »

bsimpson wrote: post #307
rwmj wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

You can write in AGENTS.md to ask the user for explicit sign off and to explain the document to the user.

Re: AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel

#359

Post by bonzini »

zahlman wrote: post #266
rwmj wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. I don't see how the "signed-off-by" attestation constitutes correct credit here. It's claiming that GP saw the final result and approved of it, which is apparently false.

Signed-off-by is a chain. The second person asserts that they delegate to the first person for the parts contributed by the first, and signs off on the ones that were contributed personally.

Hypothetically in court you'd go to the last, ask "did you write this" and only if not go up.

Re: AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel

#360

Post by bonzini »

rao-v wrote: post #347

A phenomenon I can not explain is the fact that this simple clean statement of a fairly obvious approach to AI assistance somehow took this long and Linus to state so cleanly. Are there other popular repos with effectively this policy stated as neatly that I’ve missed?

The wording might be more or less lawyerly but the idea is fairly common, e.g. https://openinfra.org/legal/ai-policy (OpenStack).
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