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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

#361

Post by sarchertech »

zarzavat wrote: post #206
sarchertech wrote: post #29

This does nothing to shield Linux from responsibility for infringing code. This is essentially like a retail store saying the supplier is responsible for eliminating all traces of THC from their hemp when they know that isn’t a reasonable request to make. It’s a foreseeable consequence. You don’t get to grant yourself immunity from liability like this.

Shield from what exactly? The Linux kernel is not a legal entity. It's a collection of contributions from various contributors. There is the Linux Foundation but they do not own Linux. If Linux were to contain 3rd party copyrighted code the legal entity at risk of being sued would be... Linux users, which given how widely deployed Linux is is basically everyone on Earth, and all large companies. Linux development is…

The Linux DCO system was designed to shield Linus and the Linux foundation from copyright and patent infringement liability, so they were certainly worried that it was a possibility.

However, there is no legal precedent that says that because contributors sign a DCO and retain copyright, the Linux Foundation is not liable. The entire concept is unproven.

Large company legal departments aren’t a shield against this kind of thing. Patent trolls routinely go after huge companies and smaller companies routinely sue much larger ones over copyright infringement.

Re: AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel

#362

Post by martin-t »

afro88 wrote: post #161
martin-t wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As opposed to an irregular person? LLMs are not persons, not even legal ones (which itself is a massive hack causing massive issues such as using corporate finances for political gain). A human has moral value a text model does not. A human has limitations in both time and memory available, a model of text does not. I don't see why comparisons to humans have any relevance. Just because a human can do something does n…

Dude come on, I clearly wasn't saying LLMs are people. My point was it's a tool and it's the responsibility of the person wielding it to check outputs. If it's too hard to check outputs, don't use the tool. Your arguments about copyright being different for LLMs: at the moment that's still being defined legally. So for now it's an ethical concern rather than a legal one. For what it's worth I agree that LLMs being tr…

Alright, I did make that assumption because I've seen and heard people talk about LLM as people. It worries me that otherwise functional and reasonable people, some of them my friends, have been so easily been convinced by a machine which demonstrated its flaws to me daily.

As for checking outputs - I don't believe that's sufficient. Maybe the letter of the law is flawed but according to the spirit the model itself is derivative work.

A model takes several orders of magnitude more work as training data than it takes to code the training algorithm itself, to any reasonable and sane person, that makes it a derivative work of the training data by nearly 100% - we can only argue how many nines it should be.

> precedent

Yeah but the US system makes me very uneasy about it. The right way to do this is to sit down, talk about the options and their downstream implications, talking about fairness and justice and then deciding what the law should be. If we did that, copyright law would look very different in the first place and this whole thing would have an obvious solution.

Re: AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel

#363

Post by sarchertech »

theshrike79 wrote: post #352
sarchertech wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I’m not talking patents. Code is 100% copyrightable.

Code being copyrightable is the entire basis for open source licenses.

Re: AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel

#364

Post by sarchertech »

testing22321 wrote: post #147
sarchertech wrote: post #29

This does nothing to shield Linux from responsibility for infringing code. This is essentially like a retail store saying the supplier is responsible for eliminating all traces of THC from their hemp when they know that isn’t a reasonable request to make. It’s a foreseeable consequence. You don’t get to grant yourself immunity from liability like this.

> This does nothing to shield Linux from responsibility for infringing code. It’s no worse than non-AI assisted code. I could easily copy-paste proprietary code, sign my name that it’s not and that it complies with the GPL and submit it. At the end of the day, it just comes down to a lying human.

That’s the difference. In practice a human has to commit fraud to do this.

But a human just using an LLM to generate code will do it accidentally. The difference is that regurgitation of training text is a documented failure mode of LLMs.

And there’s no way for the human using it to be aware it’s happening.

Re: AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel

#365

Post by sarchertech »

testing22321 wrote: post #149
sarchertech wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s just it though it’s not just your head. The liability could very likely also fall on the Linux foundation. You can’t say “you can do this thing that we know will cause problems that you have no way to mitigate, but if it does we’re not liable”. The infringement was a foreseeable consequence of the policy.

> liability could very likely also fall on the Linux foundation. It’s just the same as if I copy-paste proprietary code into the kernel and lie about it being GPL. Is the Linux foundation liable there?

Maybe. DCOs haven’t been tested. But you can at least say that the person who did this committed fraud and that you had no reasonable way to know they would do that.

LLMs can and do regurgitate code without the user’s knowledge. That’s the problem, the user has no way to mitigate against it. You’re telling contributors “use this thing that has a random chance of creating infringing code”. You should have foreseen that would result in infringing code making its way into the kernel.

Re: AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel

#366

Post by sarchertech »

bpt3 wrote: post #128
sarchertech wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice rebuttal.

Why would I put much effort into responding to a post like yours, which makes no sense and just shows that you don't understand what you're talking about?

Why would you put any effort into it at all?

Re: AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel

#367

Post by corbet »

sourcegrift wrote: post #229
senko wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Expected no less from Torvalds This was written by Sasha Levin referencing a Linux maintainers’ discussion.

Of all the documents, this one needed a proper attribution with link to meeting minutes

Meeting minutes: https://lwn.net/Articles/1049830/

Re: AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel

#368

Post by sarchertech »

Marha01 wrote: post #248
sarchertech wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone distributing infringing material can be liable, and it’s unlikely that this technicality will actually would shield anyone. Anyone who thinks they have a strong infringement case isn’t going to stop at the guy who authored the code, they’re going to go after anyone with deep pockets with a good chance of winning.

> Anyone distributing infringing material can be liable There is still the "mens rea" principle. If you distribute infringing material unknowingly, it would very likely not result in any penalties.

Copyright is strict liability. There’s no mens rea required.

Re: AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel

#369

Post by beAbU »

agentultra wrote: post #343
beAbU wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It cannot be understated how religiously opposed many in the woodworking community are to even a single table saw assisted cut making it's way to a piece of furniture, no matter how well designed. Plenty see {{some_woodworker}} as a traitor for this policy and will never contribute again if any clearly labeled table saw cuts is actually allowed to be used in furniture making.

There's a stark difference between a table saw and an LLM that weakens this argument. A table saw isn't a probabilistic device.

Anyone who has used a table saw before knows it's anything but probabilistic. Jus a little carelessness and you cut your thumb off.

As with LLMs, where careless use results in you dropping prod db or exposing user data.

Re: AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel

#370

Post by drzaiusx11 »

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?

For me it's always the fear of AI regurgitating something legally problematic directly from its training set: unintentionally adding copyright and licensing issues from those even with no intentions of doing so.

Obviously these issues existed before AI, but they required active deception before. Regurgitating others people's code just becomes the norm now.

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