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Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

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Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#41

Post by anilgulecha »

microtonal wrote: post #32
mlaretallack wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its very important to understand the "how" it was done. The GPL hands the "compile" step, and the result is still GPL. The clean Room process uses 2 teams, separated by a specification. So you would have to 1. Generate specification on what the system does. 2. Pass to another "clean" system 3. Second clean system implements based just on the specification, without any information on the original. That 3rd step is the…

So what if a frontier model company trains two models, one including 50% of the world's open source project and the second model the other 50% (or ten models with 90-10)? Then the model that is familiar with the code can write specs. The model that does not have knowledge of the project can implement them. Would that be a proper clean room implementation? Seems like a pretty evil, profitable product "rewrite any code…

LLM training is unnecessary in what we're discussing. Merely LLM using: original code -> specs as facts -> specs to tests -> tests to new code.

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#42

Post by miroljub »

zozbot234 wrote: post #38

If you ask a LLM to derive a spec that has no expressive element of the original code (a clean-room human team can carefully verify this), and then ask another instance of the LLM (with fresh context) to write out code from the spec, how is that different from a "clean room" rewrite? The agent that writes the new code only ever sees the spec, and by assumption (the assumption that's made in all clean room rewrites) t…

The new agent who writes code has probably at least parts of the original code as training data.

We can't speak about clean room implementation from LLM since they are technically capable only of spitting their training data in different ways, not of any original creation.

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#43

Post by est »

Uh, patricide?

The key leap from gpt3 to gpt-3.5 (aka ChatGPT) was code-davinci-002, which is trained upon Github source code after OpenAI-Microsoft partnership.

Open source code contributed much to LLM's amazing CoT consistency. If there's no Open Source movement, LLM would be developed much later.

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#44

Post by gf000 »

zozbot234 wrote: post #38

If you ask a LLM to derive a spec that has no expressive element of the original code (a clean-room human team can carefully verify this), and then ask another instance of the LLM (with fresh context) to write out code from the spec, how is that different from a "clean room" rewrite? The agent that writes the new code only ever sees the spec, and by assumption (the assumption that's made in all clean room rewrites) t…

I guess it depends on if the source data set is part of the training data or not (if it's open source it is likely part of it).

A lawyer could easily argue that the model itself stores a representation of the original, and thus it can never do a "fresh context".

And to be perfectly honest, LLMs can quote a lot of text verbatim.

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#45

Post by gf000 »

thedevilslawyer wrote: post #15
kshri24 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think you can classify "public data in" as public domain. Public data could also include commercial licenses which forbid using it in any way other than what the license states. Just because the source is open for viewing does not necessarily mean it is OSL. That's the core issue here. All models are trained on ALL source code that is publicly available irrespective of how it was licensed. It is illegal but e…

Copyright is not a blacklist but an allowlist of things kept aside for the holder. Everything else is free game. LLM ingestion comes under fair use so no worries. If someone can get their hand on it, nothing in law stops it from training ingestion. We can debate if this law is moral. Like the GP I took agree public data in -> public domain out is what's right for society. Copyright as an artificial concept has gone o…

There are hardly any rulings/laws about the topic, and it quite obviously changes the picture of licenses.

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#46

Post by kouteiheika »

kshri24 wrote: post #17

> The ownership void: If the code is truly a “new” work created by a machine, it might technically be in the public domain the moment it’s generated, rendering the MIT license moot. How would that work? We still have no legal conclusion on whether AI model generated code, that is trained on all publicly available source (irrespective of type of license), is legal or not. IANAL but IMHO it is totally illegal as no per…

> I would go so far as to say the most restrictive license that the model is trained on should be applied to all model generated code.

That license is called "All Rights Reserved", in which case you wouldn't be able to legally use the output for anything.

There are research models out there which are trained on only permissively licensed data (i.e. no "All Rights Reserved" data), but they're, colloquially speaking, dumb as bricks when compared to state-of-art.

But I guess the funniest consequence of the "model outputs are a derivative work of their training data" would be that it'd essentially wipe out (or at very least force a revert to a pre-AI era commit) every open source project which may have included any AI-generated or AI-assisted code, which currently pretty much includes every major open source project out there. And it would also make it impossible to legally train any new models whose training data isn't strictly pre-AI, since otherwise you wouldn't know whether your training data is contaminated or not.

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#47

Post by seddonm1 »

_dwt wrote: post #40
mfabbri77 wrote: post #19

This has the potential to kill open source, or at least the most restrictive licenses (GPL, AGPL, ...): if a license no longer protects software from unwanted use, the only possible strategy is to make the development closed source.

Yes, this is the reason I've completely stopped releasing any open-source projects. I'm discovering that newer models are somewhat capable of reverse-engineering even compiled WebAssembly, etc. too, so I can feel a sort of "dark forest theory" taking hold. Why publish anything - open or closed - to be ripped off at negligible marginal cost?

It’s a real problem. I threw it at an old MUD game just to see how hard it is [0] then used differential testing and LLMs to rewrite it [1]. Just seems to be time and money.

[0] https://reorchestrate.com/posts/your-binary-is-no-longer-saf...

[1] https://reorchestrate.com/posts/your-binary-is-no-longer-saf...

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#49

Post by Tiberium »

_dwt wrote: post #40
mfabbri77 wrote: post #19

This has the potential to kill open source, or at least the most restrictive licenses (GPL, AGPL, ...): if a license no longer protects software from unwanted use, the only possible strategy is to make the development closed source.

Yes, this is the reason I've completely stopped releasing any open-source projects. I'm discovering that newer models are somewhat capable of reverse-engineering even compiled WebAssembly, etc. too, so I can feel a sort of "dark forest theory" taking hold. Why publish anything - open or closed - to be ripped off at negligible marginal cost?

People are just not realizing this now because it's mostly hobby projects and companies doing it in private, but eventually everyone will realize that LLMs allow almost any software to be reverse engineered for cheap.

See e.g. https://banteg.xyz/posts/crimsonland/ , a single human with the help of LLMs reverse engineered a non-trivial game and rewrote it in another language + graphics lib in 2 weeks.

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#50

Post by kshri24 »

kouteiheika wrote: post #46
kshri24 wrote: post #17

> The ownership void: If the code is truly a “new” work created by a machine, it might technically be in the public domain the moment it’s generated, rendering the MIT license moot. How would that work? We still have no legal conclusion on whether AI model generated code, that is trained on all publicly available source (irrespective of type of license), is legal or not. IANAL but IMHO it is totally illegal as no per…

> I would go so far as to say the most restrictive license that the model is trained on should be applied to all model generated code. That license is called "All Rights Reserved", in which case you wouldn't be able to legally use the output for anything. There are research models out there which are trained on only permissively licensed data (i.e. no "All Rights Reserved" data), but they're, colloquially speaking, d…

I agree with your assessment. Which is why I was proposing a middle-ground where an agreement is setup between the model training company and the collective of developers/artists et all and come up with a license agreement where they are rewarded for their original work for perpetuity. A tiny % of the profits can be shared, which would be a form of UBI. This is fair not only because companies are using AI generated output but developers themselves are also paying and using AI generated output that is trained on other developer's input. I would feel good (in my conscience) that I am not "stealing" someone else's effort and they are being paid for it.
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