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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

#381

Post by cwnyth »

tomjen3 wrote: post #277
cwnyth wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is correct, and it's not limited to code. I can take the story of Cinderella, create something new out of it, copyright my new work, but Cinderella remains public domain for someone else to do something with. If I use public domain code in a project under a license, the whole work remains under the license, but not the public domain code. I'm not sure what the hullabaloo is about.

Be careful here - you cannot copyright a story, only the specific tangible form of the story.

Which is why I used precise language: "copyright my new *work*."

Re: AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel

#382

Post by akerl_ »

martin-t wrote: post #357
akerl_ wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yea, that’s exactly what I’m talking about.

Re: AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel

#383

Post by sarchertech »

lukeify wrote: post #231
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.

An open-source project receiving open-source contributions from (often anonymous) volunteers is not even close to analogous to a storefront selling products with a consumer guarantee they are backing on the basis of their supply chain.

Do you think that Goodwill should be able to offload all liability for everything they sell at their thrift shops to their often anonymous donors?

Linus makes $1.5 million per year from the Linux foundation. And the foundation itself pulls in $300 million a year in revenue.

They are directly benefiting from contributors and if they cause harm through their actions there’s a good chance they’ll be held liable.

Re: AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel

#384

Post by agentultra »

theshrike79 wrote: post #380
agentultra wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also I, a programmer, can immediately see whether the "probabilistic device" generated code that looks like it should. I highly doubt that. Empirical studies show that humans have very little effect on error rates when reviewing code. That effect disappears quickly the more code you read. Most programmers are bad at detecting UB and memory ownership and lifetime errors. A piece of wood comes off the table it’s cut or…

> Most programmers are bad at detecting UB and memory ownership and lifetime errors. And this is why we have languages and tooling that takes care of it. There's only a handful of people who can one-shot perfect code in a language that doesn't guard against memory ownership or lifetime errors every time. But even the crappiest programmer has to actually work against the tooling in a language like Rust to ownership is…

A piece of wood is either cut to spec or not. You don’t have to try and convince the table saw with a prompt that it is a table saw.

These tools are nothing alike and the reductionism of this metaphor isn’t helpful.

Re: AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel

#385

Post by jacquesm »

lrvick wrote: post #222
Luker88 wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't the "corpo moat" bigger now? They can wash the copyright by AI training, but the AIs don't get trained on closed source. "corpo" also has a ton of patents, which still can't be AI-washed. What will become unenforceable are Open Source Licenses exclusively, how does that make it a "level field"?

Because AI is also proving to be very good at reverse engineering proprietary binaries or just straight up cloning software from test suites or user interfaces. Cuts both ways.

Oh sure, AI is a fantastic protection against copyright law. You do realize that if you're not going to be able that you wrote something you're wide open to claims of copyright infringement, especially if your argument is going to be 'it wasn't me that did the RE, it was the AI, the same AI that wrote the code'.

It's going to be very interesting to see 'cleanroom' kind of development in the AI age but I suspect it's not going to be such a walk in the park as some seem to think it will be. There are just too many vested interests. But: it would be nice to see someone do a release of say the Oracle source code as rewritten by AI through this progress, just to see how fast the IP hammer will come down on this kind of trick.

Re: AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel

#386

Post by jacquesm »

xxpor wrote: post #336
intended wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People have measurably lower levels of ownership and understanding of AI generated code. The people using GenAI reap a major time and cognitive effort savings, but the task of verification is shifted to the maintainer. In essence, we get the output without the matching mental structures being developed in humans. This is great if you have nothing left to learn, its not that great if you are a newbie, or have low conf…

While I agree with this intuitively, I also just can't get past the argument that people said the same thing when we switched from everyone using ASM to C/Fortran etc.

There is a massive difference in outright transformation of something you created yourself vs a collage of snippets + some sauce based on stuff you did not write yourself. If all you did to use your AI was to train it exclusively on your own work product create during your lifetime I would have absolutely no problem with it, in fact in that case I would love to see copyright extended to the author.

But in the present case the authorship is just removed by shredding the library and then piecing back together the sentences. The fact that under some circumstances AIs will happily reproduce code that was in the training data is proof positive they are to some degree lossy compressors. The more generic something is ("for (i=0;i<MAXVAL;i++) {") the lower the claim for copyright protection. But higher level constructs past a couple of lines that are unique in the training set that are reproduced in the output modulo some name changes and/or language changes should count as automatic transformation (and hence infringing or creating a derivative work).

Re: AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel

#387

Post by p_l »

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?

Ok, so a simplified summary of EU AI Act approach as of now:

Model outputs are not copyrightable at all, only human work. That means the prompt, and whatever modifications done to output by human, are copyrighted, but nothing else.

HOWEVER, that does not mean the output can not violate copyright. Output of the model falls under same "derivative work" rules as anything else, AI just can't add its own "authorship". So if you accidentally or not recover script for a movie with serial numbers filed off, then its derivative work, etc. Same with code.

Re: AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel

#388

Post by theshrike79 »

agentultra wrote: post #384
theshrike79 wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most programmers are bad at detecting UB and memory ownership and lifetime errors. And this is why we have languages and tooling that takes care of it. There's only a handful of people who can one-shot perfect code in a language that doesn't guard against memory ownership or lifetime errors every time. But even the crappiest programmer has to actually work against the tooling in a language like Rust to ownership is…

A piece of wood is either cut to spec or not. You don’t have to try and convince the table saw with a prompt that it is a table saw. These tools are nothing alike and the reductionism of this metaphor isn’t helpful.

But how do you know it's cut to spec if you don't measure it?

Maybe someone bumped the fence aw while you were on a break, or the vibration of it caused the jig to get a bit out of alignment.

The basic point is that whether a human or some kind of automated process, probabilistic or not, is producing something you still need to check the result. And for code specifically, we've had deterministic ways of doing that for 20 years or so.

Re: AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel

#389

Post by intended »

xxpor wrote: post #336
intended wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People have measurably lower levels of ownership and understanding of AI generated code. The people using GenAI reap a major time and cognitive effort savings, but the task of verification is shifted to the maintainer. In essence, we get the output without the matching mental structures being developed in humans. This is great if you have nothing left to learn, its not that great if you are a newbie, or have low conf…

While I agree with this intuitively, I also just can't get past the argument that people said the same thing when we switched from everyone using ASM to C/Fortran etc.

The study compares ChatGPT use, search engine use, and no tool use.

The issues with moving from ASM to C/Fortran are different from using LLMs.

LLMs are automation, and general purpose automation at that. The Ironies of Automation came out in the 1980s, and we’ve known there are issues. Like Vigilance decrement that comes when you switch from operating a system to monitoring a system for rare errors.

On top of that, previous systems were largely deterministic, you didn’t have to worry that the instrumentation was going to invent new numbers on the dial.

So now automation will go from flight decks and assembly lines, to mom and pop stores. Regular to non-deterministic.

Re: AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel

#390

Post by gorgoiler »

Having the competence to put together a good patch used to be a proxy that you were motivated to stick around and fix any regressions you caused and that you were worth investing in, as a community member.

Or, to put it another way, in the old days in order to be a 3k-LoC PR wielding psychopath intent on making your colleagues miserable with churny aggro diffs from hell you at least had to be good at coding.

Nowadays, you only need to do the psychopath art — Claude will happily fill in the PR for you.

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