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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

#391

Post by Applejinx »

alfiedotwtf wrote: post #298
Applejinx wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From everything I'm seeing in the industry (I'm basically a noncoder choosing to not use AI in the stuff that I make, and privy to the private work experience of coders and creators also in that field because of human social contacts), I feel like I can shed a bit of light. It looks to me like a more restrictive policy will be flat-out impossible. Even people I trust are going along with this stuff, akin to CAD repla…

You can refuse to use AI personally, but why would you not help yourself when you can? … my dad is 86 and only after I signed him up to Claude could he write Arduino code without a phone call to me after 5 minutes of trying himself. So now, he’s spending 4+ hours at a time focused writing code and building circuits of things he only dreamt about creating for decades. Unless you’re doing something for the personal lov…

Nah. I'm only interested in the bits it doesn't know. Why would someone else's regurgitated whatever be what I wanted, why would that be help in any way?

Re: AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel

#392

Post by LtWorf »

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.

Yes but if you do that manually you are in bad faith, if you ask an AI to do it you have no idea if you are going to be liable of something or not.

Re: AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel

#394

Post by martin-t »

williamcotton wrote: post #331
martin-t wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And it proves the code is stored (in a compressed form) in the model.

So what's the legal issue here? How does the chardet achieve this? Explain in detail, with shortened code excerpts from the library itself if helpful to the explanation. The prompt is explicitly requesting the source!

You're saying the same thing like it's relevant. What matters to me is that the source code is clearly stored encoded/compressed in the model. That to me means the license of the code should apply to the model. Now we just need somebody to ask it to decompress ("reproduce") AGPL code and its owners will have to release it under the AGPL as well.

Yes, this is sarcasm but that's how it should work. These models cannot be created without ingesting vast amounts of code created by human labor. The proponents of this kind of stealing argue that the models "generalize" and that somehow makes it right and legal. And here we have counterexample to their generalization argument.

Doesn't change the fact labor theft is still labor theft but it might make a difference to the letter of the law, hopefully.

I say hopefully because I believe all people who contribute to technical progress should be compensated according to their amount of work and skill level. But of course many "temporarily embarrassed trillionaires" disagree. I don't understand why but I am happy to know that if the tides turn they will be perfectly A-OK with me taking their work without credit or compensation.

Re: AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel

#395

Post by mcv »

simonw wrote: post #112
mcv wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Didn't a court in the US declare that AI generated content cannot be copyrighted? I think that could be a problem for AI generated code. Fine for projects with an MIT/BSD license I suppose, but GPL relies on copyright. However, if the code has been slightly changed by a human, it can be copyrighted again. I think.

Thaler v. Perlmutter said that an AI system cannot be listed as the sole author of a work - copyright requires a human author. US Copyright Office guidance in 2023 said work created with the help of AI can be registered as long as there is "sufficient human creative input". I don't believe that has ever been qualified with respect to code, but my instinct is that the way most people use coding agents (especially for…

Sounds like using AI as a tool is fine, but those autonomous clawbots are not. All the more reason to reject their submissions, I guess.

Re: AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel

#396

Post by Barrin92 »

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.

>can't get past the argument that people said the same thing when we switched from everyone using ASM to C/Fortran

that's a bad comparison for two reasons. One is that C is a transparent language that requires understanding of its underlying mechanics. Using C doesn't absolve you from understanding lower concepts and was never treated as such. The power of C comes squarely with a warning label that this is a double edged sword.

Secondly insofar as people have used higher level languages as a replacement for understanding and introduced a "everyone can code now" mentality the criticism has been validated. What we've gotten, long before AI tooling, were shoddy, slow, insecure tower-of-babel like crappy codebases that were awful for the exact same reason these newest practices are awful.

Introducing new technology must never be an excuse for ignorance, the more powerful the tool the greater the knowledge required of the user. You don't hand the most potent dangerous weapon to the least competent soldier.

Re: AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel

#397

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

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.

> "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 was no "switch"; the transition took literally decades. Assembler and high level languages co-existed in the mainstream all the way until the 1990s because it was well understood that there was a trade off getting the best performance using assembler (e.g. DOOM's renderer in 1993) and ease of development and portability (something that really mattered when there were a dozen different CPU architectures around) using high level languages.

There is no need to get past the argument because it doesn't exist. Nobody said that.

Re: AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel

#398

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

theshrike79 wrote: post #356
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.

> Is an AI re-implementation a "clean room" implementation

Certainly not if it had seen the code (incl. having been trained on it).

The idea of clean room (dating back to IBM PC BIOS clones) is that ideas can't be copyright, but the expression of an idea (code) can be, so you have one person (or AI) write a spec of the thing you want to copy (expression -> idea) and then have another (in the "clean room") who has never seen the original code, and only seen the spec/idea, re-implement it.

If the re-implementation was being done with AI, then for this to pass as "clean room" it would need to be proved that the AI had never seen the code, only the spec.

Re: AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel

#399

Post by gh2k »

gnarlouse wrote: post #179

I wonder if this is happening because Mythos

this was my initial reaction. It feels like we would rather merge the Mythos/Glasswing fixes before the model becomes widespread. The rumours/vibe are that there are security issues at are going to need responsibly patching before the 0-day exploits arrive. If this means implementing a broader AI contribution policy now, it seems practical.

Re: AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel

#400

Post by [deleted] »

vips7L wrote: post #306
alfiedotwtf wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can refuse to use AI personally, but why would you not help yourself when you can? … my dad is 86 and only after I signed him up to Claude could he write Arduino code without a phone call to me after 5 minutes of trying himself. So now, he’s spending 4+ hours at a time focused writing code and building circuits of things he only dreamt about creating for decades. Unless you’re doing something for the personal lov…

Or just let people do the job the way they want.

[deleted]
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