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Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

tuananh.net

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Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#71

Post by abrookewood »

_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?

Why does it matter if it is 'ripped off' if you released it as open source anyway? I get that you might want to impose a particular licence, but is that the only reason?

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#72

Post by abrookewood »

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.

It's not just open source, it is literally anything source-available, whether intentional or not.

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#73

Post by user34283 »

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.

I find the wording "protect from unwanted use" interesting.

It is my understanding that what a GPL license requires is releasing the source code of modifications.

So if we assume that a rewrite using AI retains the GPL license, it only means the rewrite needs to be open source under the GPL too.

It doesn't prevent any unwanted use, or at least that is my understanding. I guess unwanted use in this case could mean not releasing the modifications.

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#75

Post by vetrom »

gspr wrote: post #64
spwa4 wrote: post #55

Can we do the same with universal music? Because that's easy and already possible. Or Microsoft Windows? Because we all know the answer: if it works, essentially any government will immediately call it illegal. Because if this isn't allowed, that makes all of the AI models themselves illegal. They are very much the product of using others' copyrighted stuff and rewriting it. But of course this will be allowed because…

The dark future possibility here is that the big guy is allowed to launder the intellectual property of the little guy, but not vice versa.

That dark future is now, look at case law as applied to the AI operators vs the 'little guys'.

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#76

Post by msdz »

foota wrote: post #57
kouteiheika wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 don't know how far it would get, but I imagine that a FAANG will be able to get the farthest here by virtue of having mountains of corporate data that they have complete ownership over.

They’d probably get the farthest, but they won’t pursue that because they don’t want to end up leaking the original data from training. It is possible in regular language/text subsets of models to reconstruct massive consecutive parts of the training data [1], so it ought to be possible for their internal code, too.

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.02671

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#79

Post by spwa4 »

vetrom wrote: post #75
gspr wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The dark future possibility here is that the big guy is allowed to launder the intellectual property of the little guy, but not vice versa.

That dark future is now, look at case law as applied to the AI operators vs the 'little guys'.

Even big copyright firms. Disney especially is known for rehashing existing material and then not allowing anyone else to do the same with their stuff. Disney does not have a lot of original stories.
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