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DeepWiki: Understand Any Codebase

aitidbits.ai

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Re: DeepWiki: Understand Any Codebase

#41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I sent them a politely worded threat and they responded right away opting me out: > Hello, I am writing you as an author of Open Source software seeking to protect my security and that of my users. > What I would like to know is: how may I prevent deepwiki from indexing my projects, specifically those in the ----- GitHub organization? If you consider yourselves to have implicit legal permission to train on my project…

Just because you "consider" incorrect information to be libelous does not mean that it is. While it's true that LLMs have no will to act, the use of an LLM to publish information that ends up being incorrect does not imply that the user of the LLM intended to post incorrect information.

In that universe, there is no accountability at all. There is no way the system of law would allow that.

I admit that in my message I was careful not to make an accusation. I only stated my disposition towards their actions.

Re: DeepWiki: Understand Any Codebase

#42

It's a pity that there is no clear way to send takedown requests. We didn't ask for deceptive garbage to be generated as documentation for LibreOffice, but here it is and newbies are discovering it: https://deepwiki.com/LibreOffice/core/2-build-system (spoiler: LibreOffice has never used Buck as a build system)

I sent them a politely worded threat and they responded right away opting me out: > Hello, I am writing you as an author of Open Source software seeking to protect my security and that of my users. > What I would like to know is: how may I prevent deepwiki from indexing my projects, specifically those in the ----- GitHub organization? If you consider yourselves to have implicit legal permission to train on my project…

Yuck, based on tone alone I would ignore an email worded this way.

Re: DeepWiki: Understand Any Codebase

#43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just because you "consider" incorrect information to be libelous does not mean that it is. While it's true that LLMs have no will to act, the use of an LLM to publish information that ends up being incorrect does not imply that the user of the LLM intended to post incorrect information.

In that universe, there is no accountability at all. There is no way the system of law would allow that. I admit that in my message I was careful not to make an accusation. I only stated my disposition towards their actions.

IANAL, but I don't believe that lack of intent to cause harm means that relief can't be granted. You could still take legal action if they refused to remove the information. To my knowledge, a question that still hasn't been thoroughly tested from a legal perspective is to what degree users of LLMs should be reasonably expected to be aware of the potentially for false information and to what degree continued use despite that knowledge constitutes willful negligence.

Humans can make mistakes too when compiling information and when mistakes are done unintentionally without the intent of causing harm, I believe liability is typically limited. I would expect the same would be true of LLM use. As long as the user of the LLM has taken reasonable precautions to ensure accuracy, I think liability probably should be limited in most cases. In the case of DeepWiki getting something wrong, I think the case for significant reputational damage is pretty weak.

Re: DeepWiki: Understand Any Codebase

#44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In that universe, there is no accountability at all. There is no way the system of law would allow that. I admit that in my message I was careful not to make an accusation. I only stated my disposition towards their actions.

IANAL, but I don't believe that lack of intent to cause harm means that relief can't be granted. You could still take legal action if they refused to remove the information. To my knowledge, a question that still hasn't been thoroughly tested from a legal perspective is to what degree users of LLMs should be reasonably expected to be aware of the potentially for false information and to what degree continued use desp…

It's reasonable precautions where it seems to me they are likely to be what I would consider partially to wholly negligent. The lack of an ability to opt out, for example.

Re: DeepWiki: Understand Any Codebase

#45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I sent them a politely worded threat and they responded right away opting me out: > Hello, I am writing you as an author of Open Source software seeking to protect my security and that of my users. > What I would like to know is: how may I prevent deepwiki from indexing my projects, specifically those in the ----- GitHub organization? If you consider yourselves to have implicit legal permission to train on my project…

Yuck, based on tone alone I would ignore an email worded this way.

Sometimes you have to get angry to set boundaries.

Anyone human who puts their name to their words is free to write about my work.

If their wiki was just a wiki with human and AI contributorship that would have been a much better product and I probably would have been fine with it.

Re: DeepWiki: Understand Any Codebase

#46
post #37

It's a pity that there is no clear way to send takedown requests. We didn't ask for deceptive garbage to be generated as documentation for LibreOffice, but here it is and newbies are discovering it: https://deepwiki.com/LibreOffice/core/2-build-system (spoiler: LibreOffice has never used Buck as a build system)

From my experience using deepwiki what it generates is not deceptive garbage

[deleted]

Re: DeepWiki: Understand Any Codebase

#47

I recently received an AI-slop bug report for a small open source project (PureLB) that I maintain, and the slop was generated by DeepWiki. It was very incorrect, but I didn't know what "DeepWiki" was so I wasted about an hour. If DeepWiki is causing garbage bug reports even on tiny projects like mine, I can't imagine how much maintainer time it's wasting over all.

for anyone curious: https://gitlab.com/purelb/purelb/-/issues/147

Re: DeepWiki: Understand Any Codebase

#48
post #9

So I decided to look at some open source repos I know decently well. The only one that seems to have a wiki is LLVM ( https://deepwiki.com/llvm/llvm-project ). Thoughts on the overview page: Okay, weird subset of the top-level directories. The high-level compilation pipeline diagram is... wrong? Like, Clang-AST is definitely part of clang frontend, and you get to the optimization pipeline, which clearly fucks up the…

Nonetheless I still think it's impressive considering that LLVM codebase is one of the most complex ones to be found in the wild.

Re: DeepWiki: Understand Any Codebase

#49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IANAL, but I don't believe that lack of intent to cause harm means that relief can't be granted. You could still take legal action if they refused to remove the information. To my knowledge, a question that still hasn't been thoroughly tested from a legal perspective is to what degree users of LLMs should be reasonably expected to be aware of the potentially for false information and to what degree continued use desp…

It's reasonable precautions where it seems to me they are likely to be what I would consider partially to wholly negligent. The lack of an ability to opt out, for example.

Agreed that there should be an ability to opt out.

Re: DeepWiki: Understand Any Codebase

#50

Deepwiki was instrumental in our refactor of a large codebase away from playwright to pure CDP @ browser-use. Huge props to the team that built it, I regularly refer to it as one of the few strictly net positive AI coding tools. The auto-overviews and diagrams are great, but where it truly shines is the "deep research" follow-up questions system at the bottom. It's much better than using OpenAI deep research of perpl…

I want to respond to our last interaction here.

This is Cordyceps [0]. My Chrome extension port of the typescript port of Browser Use needs some love but it is contained there.

I wanted to post the port of a MCP with pure CDP libraryI found to use Chrome.debugger therefore removing Playwright but the typescript and monorepo tooling is out of date. Hopefully I'll get it done tomorrow.

[0] https://github.com/adam-s/cordyceps

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