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AI Tribalism

nolanlawson.com

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Re: AI Tribalism

#71

Post by themafia »

wvenable wrote: post #62
themafia wrote: post #21

> I can already hear the cries of protest from other engineers who (like me) are clutching onto their hard-won knowledge. You mean the knowledge that Claude has stolen from all of us and regurgitated into your projects without any copyright attributions? > But I see a lot of my fellow developers burying their heads in the sand That feeling is mutual.

> You mean the knowledge that Claude has stolen from all of us and regurgitated into your projects without any copyright attributions? You can't, and shouldn't be able to, copyright and hoard "knowledge".

I did not suggest that; however, the law is clear. If I use my knowledge to produce code, under a specific license, then you take that code, and reproduce it without the license, you have broken the law.

You can twist this around as much as you like but there are several studies showing that LLMs and and will happily reproduce content from their training data.

Re: AI Tribalism

#72

Post by themafia »

yibers wrote: post #30
themafia wrote: post #21

> I can already hear the cries of protest from other engineers who (like me) are clutching onto their hard-won knowledge. You mean the knowledge that Claude has stolen from all of us and regurgitated into your projects without any copyright attributions? > But I see a lot of my fellow developers burying their heads in the sand That feeling is mutual.

We did the same as devopers before Claude. We would copy paste from stack overflow. Now this process is heavily automated.

> Now this process is heavily automated.

And comes with a price tag paid to people who neither own nor generated that content. You don't think that shifts the ethical boundaries _significantly_?

Re: AI Tribalism

#73

Post by wvenable »

themafia wrote: post #71
wvenable wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You mean the knowledge that Claude has stolen from all of us and regurgitated into your projects without any copyright attributions? You can't, and shouldn't be able to, copyright and hoard "knowledge".

I did not suggest that; however, the law is clear. If I use my knowledge to produce code, under a specific license, then you take that code, and reproduce it without the license, you have broken the law. You can twist this around as much as you like but there are several studies showing that LLMs and and will happily reproduce content from their training data.

> If I use my knowledge to produce code, under a specific license, then you take that code, and reproduce it without the license, you have broken the law.

Correct. But if read your code, produce a detailed specification of that code, and then give that code to another team (that has never seen your code) and they create a similar product then they haven't broken the law.

LLMs reproducing exact content from their training data is symptom of overfitting and is an error that needs correcting. Memorizing specific training data means that it is not generalizing enough.

Re: AI Tribalism

#74

Post by rpdillon »

sph wrote: post #11

> I see a lot of my fellow developers burying their heads in the sand, refusing to acknowledge the truth in front of their eyes, and it breaks my heart because a lot of us are scared, confused, or uncertain, and not enough of us are talking honestly about it. Imagine if we had to suffer these posts, day in and day out, when React or Kubernetes or any other piece of technology got released. This kind of proselyting th…

You of course don't have to use AI. Your core point is correct: the world around you is changing quickly, and in unpredictable ways. And that's why it's dangerous to ignore: if you've developed a way that worked in the world 10 years ago, there's a risk it won't play the same way in the world of 2030. So this is time-frame to prepare for whatever that change will be.

For some people, that's picking up the tool and trying to figure out what its good for (if anything) and how it works.

Re: AI Tribalism

#75

Post by jaredcwhite »

WA wrote: post #19
sph wrote: post #11

> I see a lot of my fellow developers burying their heads in the sand, refusing to acknowledge the truth in front of their eyes, and it breaks my heart because a lot of us are scared, confused, or uncertain, and not enough of us are talking honestly about it. Imagine if we had to suffer these posts, day in and day out, when React or Kubernetes or any other piece of technology got released. This kind of proselyting th…

The author of that post Nolan is a pretty interesting guy and deep in the web tech stack. He’s really one of the last people I’d call "tribal", especially since you mention React. This guy hand-writes his web components and files bug reports to browsers and writes his own memory leak detection lib and so on. If such a guy is slowly dipping his toes into AI and comes to the conclusion he just posted, you should take a…

Honestly that's what makes this all the more dangerous. He's trying to have his cake and eat it too: accept all of the hype and all of the propaganda, but then couch it in the rhetoric of "oh I'm so concerned I can remain in a sort of moderate & empathetic position and not fall prey to tribalism and flame wars."

There's no both-sides-ing of genAI. This is an issue akin to street narcotics, mass weapons of war, or forever chemicals. You're either on the side of heavy regulation or outright bans, or you're on the side of tech politics which are directly harmful to humanity. The OP is not a thoughtful moderate because that's not how any of this works.

Re: AI Tribalism

#76

Post by rpdillon »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #25
WA wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author of that post Nolan is a pretty interesting guy and deep in the web tech stack. He’s really one of the last people I’d call "tribal", especially since you mention React. This guy hand-writes his web components and files bug reports to browsers and writes his own memory leak detection lib and so on. If such a guy is slowly dipping his toes into AI and comes to the conclusion he just posted, you should take a…

I really don't care what authority he's arguing from. The "just try it" pitch here is fundamentally a tribalist argument: tribes don't want another tribe to exist that's viewed as threatening to them.

Trying a new technology seems like what engineers do (since they have to leverage technology to solve real problems, having more tools to choose from can be good). I'm surprised it rings as tribalist.

Re: AI Tribalism

#77

Post by rpdillon »

soulofmischief wrote: post #61
sph wrote: post #11

> I see a lot of my fellow developers burying their heads in the sand, refusing to acknowledge the truth in front of their eyes, and it breaks my heart because a lot of us are scared, confused, or uncertain, and not enough of us are talking honestly about it. Imagine if we had to suffer these posts, day in and day out, when React or Kubernetes or any other piece of technology got released. This kind of proselyting th…

I don't think you understand how much things are about to change in a relatively short time. A lot of people are rightfully confused and concerned. Many people are seeing this as an existential moment requiring careful navigation and planning, not just another language or browser or text editor war.

This is exactly my position. Landscape-changing technology is impossible to get away from, because it follows you. It's like a local business owner in 1998 telling me they didn't care about the stupid "internet" thing, and then the internet blew away their business within 10 years. Similar story with the PC: folks didn't get the option to just "opt out" of a digital office because they liked typewriters and paper. Cell phones were this way also, and while many people post about how they hate their phones and needs to quit using it so much, pretty much everyone admits you can't live in society without one because they have pervaded so many interactions.

So that's how I think AI will be seen in 20 years: like the PC, the internet, and mobile phones. Tech that shapes society, for better or worse.

Re: AI Tribalism

#78

Post by rpdillon »

themafia wrote: post #72
yibers wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We did the same as devopers before Claude. We would copy paste from stack overflow. Now this process is heavily automated.

> Now this process is heavily automated. And comes with a price tag paid to people who neither own nor generated that content. You don't think that shifts the ethical boundaries _significantly_?

I don't. The general trend is that, in US rulings, courts have found that if the material was obtained legally, then training can be fair use. My understanding is that getting LLMs to regurgitate anything significant requires very specific prompting, in general.

I would very much like someone to give me the magic reproduction triple: a model trained on your code, a prompt you gave it to produce a program, and its output showing copyright infringement on the training material used. Specific examples are useful; my hypothesis is that this won't be possible using a "normal" prompt that's in general use, but rather a prompt containing a lot of directly quoted content from the training material, that then asks for more of the same. This was a problem for the NYT when they claimed OpenAI reproduced the content of their articles...they achieved this by prompting with large, unmodified sections of the article and then the LLM would spit out a handful of sentences. In their briefing to the court, they neglected to include their prompts for this reason. I think this is significant because it relates to what is really happening, rather than what people imagine is happening.

But I guess we'll get to see from the NYT trial, since OpenAI is retaining all user prompts and outputs and providing them to the NYT to sift through. So the ground-truth exists, I'm sure they'll be excited to cite all the cases where people were circumventing their paywall with OpenAI.

Re: AI Tribalism

#79

Post by rpdillon »

sodapopcan wrote: post #38
yibers wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We did the same as devopers before Claude. We would copy paste from stack overflow. Now this process is heavily automated.

...from answers that were publicly shared without license. It's not the same thing, even though every LOVES to make this argument. Also: Over the past 20 years, I could count the number of times on one hand that I was been able to get away with out-right copy/paste from SO.

In a prior job, I had to scan a 2M+ line codebase for software license violations to support the sale of a unit to another corporation. One class of violation was using SO snippets, because they are licensed under CC and not compatible with the distribution model the new company was planning. Many weeks of work to track them all down.

Re: AI Tribalism

#80

Post by halJordan »

lins1909 wrote: post #20

What if I just enjoy how I work at the moment and don't really care about this stuff? Why do I _have_ to give it a go? Why don't LLM evangelists accept this as an option? Choosing not to use AI agents is maybe the only tool position I feel I've had to defend or justify in over a decade of doing this, and it's so bizarre to me. It almost reeks of insecurity from the Agent Evangelists and I wonder if all the "fear" and…

What? Was anyone forcing people off vim when vs code dropped? No, go use vim. Same here. Why are you acting persecuted when you can literally do nothing.
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