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AI and the Ship of Theseus

lucumr.pocoo.org

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Re: AI and the Ship of Theseus

#51

Post by coldtea »

moralestapia wrote: post #40
coldtea wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Licenses exists for a reason Yes, and the choice of license for a project is made for a reason that not necessarily everybody agree with. And the people who don't agree, have every right to implement a similar, even file-format or API compatible, project and give it another license. Gnumeric vs Excel, for example, or forks like MariaDB and Valkey. But whether they do that alternative licensed project or not, it's p…

Hmm ... you don't have to ask for consent. You just slap the license you want to your code and that's it. It's not some sort of democracy, lol, it's a set of exclusive rights that are created the moment the work being copyrighted is produced. (For a quick intro I recommend: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bxVs7FCgOig ) In the case of the license in question (L/GPL), it's one of the most strict ones out there, it expl…

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Re: AI and the Ship of Theseus

#53

Post by rzerowan »

the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #45
rzerowan wrote: post #42

Strange this with this whole incident apart from the rewrite/LLM part is the general misundrstanding of the licences. LGPL being a pretty permissive one going as far as allowing one to incorporate it in propriety code without the linking reciprocity clause [1] and MIT is even more permissive. Importantly these were meant to protect the USER of the code.Not the Dev , or the Company or the CLA holder - the USER is prim…

> Strange this with this whole incident apart from the rewrite/LLM part is the general misundrstanding of the licences. LGPL being a pretty permissive one going as far as allowing one to incorporate it in propriety code without the linking reciprocity clause The short version is that chardet is a dependency of requests which is very popular, and you cannot distribute PyInstaller/PyOxidizer builds with chardet due to…

Ok thanks for the background on that - again though this would be a painpoint on the packagers - but fully in line with the intentions of the GPL and with the LGPL to enpower the end user to be able to swap/update/tinker as they see fit.

As i recall there were some similar situations in regards to licences for distro builders regarding graphicsdrivers and even mp3 decoders wherer there was a song and dance the end user had to go through to legally install them during/after setup.

Or better yet to make a truly api compatible re-implementation to use with the license that they want to use, since what they have done i surmise would fall under a derivative work.So they havent really accomplised what they wanted - and instead introduced an unacceptable amount of risk to whoever uses the library going forward.

Kinda reminds me of what the Inderner Archive did during the pandemic with the digital lending library.Pushing the boundaries to test them and establish precedence. in any case let see how it plays out.

Re: AI and the Ship of Theseus

#54

Post by coldtea »

4star3star wrote: post #47
the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe, but the LLM did not recite the chardet source code so that argument does not appear to apply here.

I agree. If we look to music, how can a musician unhear what they've heard? We celebrate musicians when they cite their influences. In the case of a software library, it is a tool, not a work of art. Its beauty is in accomplishing a specific, useful task. If we can accept musicians drawing inspiration from all the music they've ever listened to, we should be able to do the same for software, especially when its inter…

>I agree. If we look to music, how can a musician unhear what they've heard?

Unlike with music, in software traditionally a (human) programmer could be chosen who haven't "heard" (i.e. read the original code). That has traditionally called a "clean room" implementation (not to be confused with the software development process called "clean room").

Re: AI and the Ship of Theseus

#55

Post by formerly_proven »

vintagedave wrote: post #26
nomdep wrote: post #7

In this emerging reality, the whole spectrum of open-source licenses effectively collapses toward just two practical choices: release under something permissive like MIT (no real restrictions), or keep your software fully proprietary and closed. These are fascinating, if somewhat scary, times.

Or GPL. Which I’m increasingly thinking is the only license. It requires sharing. And if anything can be reimplemented and there’s no value in the source any more, just the spec or tests, there’s no public-interest reason for any restriction other than completely free, in the GPL sense.

> Or GPL. Which I’m increasingly thinking is the only license. It requires sharing.

LLM companies and increasingly courts view LLM training as fair use, so copyright licensing does not enter the picture.

Re: AI and the Ship of Theseus

#56

Post by jason_oster »

cheesecompiler wrote: post #22

> I personally think all of this is exciting. I’m a strong supporter of putting things in the open with as little license enforcement as possible. I think society is better off when we share, and I consider the GPL to run against that spirit by restricting what can be done with it. I like sharing too but could permissive only licenses not backfire? GPL emerged in an era where proprietary software ruled and companies…

You're putting a lot of responsibility on a license that has several permissive contemporaries. The original BSD license "Net/1" and GPL 1.0 were both published in 1989, while the MIT license has its roots set in "probably 1987" [1] with the release of X11.

No doubt, GPL had some influence. But I would hardly single it out as the force that ensured software stayed open. Software stayed open because "information wants to be free" [2], not because some authors wield copyright law like a weapon to be used against corporations.

[1]: https://opensource.com/article/19/4/history-mit-license

[2]: A popular phase based on a fundamental idea that predates software.

Re: AI and the Ship of Theseus

#57

Post by kccqzy »

trueismywork wrote: post #9
jimmaswell wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This entirely misses the point. Re-implementing code based on API surface and compatibility is established fair use if done properly (Compaq v. IBM, Google v. Oracle). There's nothing wrong with doing that if you don't like a license. What's in question is doing this with AI that may or may not have been trained on the source. In the instance in the article where the result is very different, it's probably in the cle…

The real test would be to see how much of generated code is similar to the old code. Because then it is still a copyright. Just becsuse you drew mickey mouse from memory doesnt above you if it looks close enough to original hickey mouse.

That’s I believe woefully inadequate. There are some levels of code similarity:

Level 0: the code is just copied

Level 1: the code only has white space altered so the AST is the same

Level 2: the code has minor refactoring such as changing variables names and function names (in a compiled language the object code would be highly similar; and this can easily be detected by tools like https://github.com/jplag/JPlag)

Level 3: the code has had significant refactoring such as moving functionality around, manually extracting code to new functions and manually inlining functions

Level 4: the code does the same conceptual steps as the old code but with different internal architecture

At least in the United States you have to reach Level 4 because only concepts are not copyrightable. And I believe chardet has indeed reached level 4 in this rewrite.

Re: AI and the Ship of Theseus

#58

Post by moralestapia »

coldtea wrote: post #51
moralestapia wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm ... you don't have to ask for consent. You just slap the license you want to your code and that's it. It's not some sort of democracy, lol, it's a set of exclusive rights that are created the moment the work being copyrighted is produced. (For a quick intro I recommend: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bxVs7FCgOig ) In the case of the license in question (L/GPL), it's one of the most strict ones out there, it expl…

[flagged]

Hey, you can definitely rewrite your argument without resorting to bad language.

Take a look at the guidelines that keep this place together: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: AI and the Ship of Theseus

#60

Post by scuff3d »

nkmnz wrote: post #12
scuff3d wrote: post #6

The solution to this whole situation seems pretty simple to me. LLMs were trained on a giant mix of code, and it's impossible to disentangle it, but a not insignificant portion of their capabilities comes from GPL licenced code. Therefore, any codebase that uses LLM code is now GPL. You have a proprietary product? Not anymore. Not saying there's a legal precedent for that right now, but it's the only thing that makes…

What about the code that wasn't even GPL, but "all rights reserved", i.e., without any license? That's even stronger than GPL and based on your reasoning, this would mean that any code created by an LLM is not licensed to be used for anything.

Okay. That's fine with me. I was trying to be generous and assume the GPL would be the strongest.
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