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AI and the Ship of Theseus

lucumr.pocoo.org

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Re: AI and the Ship of Theseus

#71

Post by NewsaHackO »

erelong wrote: post #19

hopefully this continues to show how awkward the idea of "intellectual property" (IP) is until people abandon it IP sounds good in theory but enables things like "patent trolling" by large corps and creating all kinds of goofy barriers and arbitrary questions like we're asking about if re-implementations of ideas are "really ours" (maybe they were never anyone's in the first place, outside of legally created mentalit…

Unfortunately, there are going to be people who push back on the virtue of this being a startup founder website.

Re: AI and the Ship of Theseus

#72

Post by luma »

measurablefunc wrote: post #15
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.

If you listen to the people who believe real AI is right around the corner then any software can be recreated from a detailed enough specification b/c whatever special sauce is hidden in the black box can be inferred from its outward behavior. Real AI is more brilliant than whatever algorithm you could ever think of so if the real AI can interact w/ your software then it can recreate a much better version of it w/o l…

What you describe is essentially what happened, the AI result working from specs and tests was more performant than the original. The real AI you describe just rewrote chardet without looking at the source, only better.

Re: AI and the Ship of Theseus

#73

Post by duskdozer »

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…

Absolutist permissive licenses are how you get the xkcd jenga tower

Re: AI and the Ship of Theseus

#74

Post by duskdozer »

luma wrote: post #72
measurablefunc wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you listen to the people who believe real AI is right around the corner then any software can be recreated from a detailed enough specification b/c whatever special sauce is hidden in the black box can be inferred from its outward behavior. Real AI is more brilliant than whatever algorithm you could ever think of so if the real AI can interact w/ your software then it can recreate a much better version of it w/o l…

What you describe is essentially what happened, the AI result working from specs and tests was more performant than the original. The real AI you describe just rewrote chardet without looking at the source, only better.

It was instructed to look at the source...

Re: AI and the Ship of Theseus

#75

Post by duskdozer »

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.

That would make sense, yes.

Re: AI and the Ship of Theseus

#76

Post by JambalayaJimbo »

luma wrote: post #72
measurablefunc wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you listen to the people who believe real AI is right around the corner then any software can be recreated from a detailed enough specification b/c whatever special sauce is hidden in the black box can be inferred from its outward behavior. Real AI is more brilliant than whatever algorithm you could ever think of so if the real AI can interact w/ your software then it can recreate a much better version of it w/o l…

What you describe is essentially what happened, the AI result working from specs and tests was more performant than the original. The real AI you describe just rewrote chardet without looking at the source, only better.

How do you know it didn’t look at the source?

Re: AI and the Ship of Theseus

#77

Post by mzi »

jason_oster wrote: post #56
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…

GPL was a response to Symbolics incorporating public domain into their software without giving back to the community (and Lisp Machines).

Re: AI and the Ship of Theseus

#78

Post by moregrist »

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.

I suspect there’s a middle ground that involves either keeping tests more proprietary or a copyright license that bars using the work for AI reimplementation, or both.

I think it’s entirely reasonable to release a test suite under a license that bars using it for AI reimplementation purposes. If someone wants to reimplement your work with a more permissive license, they can certainly do so, but maybe they should put the legwork in to write their own test suite.

Re: AI and the Ship of Theseus

#79

Post by randallsquared »

cheesecompiler wrote: post #67
jason_oster wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I’m not saying it’s the only force. But if it wasn’t instrumental what’s your take on the cause of proprietary software dominating until relatively recently?

The vast majority of running instances of operating systems are Linux or BSD. I don't think proprietary software has dominated for 15-20 years.

The two places it has won out thus far is in retail and SaaS. The environment of 1980 when most important software was locked behind proprietary licenses is quite far behind us.

Re: AI and the Ship of Theseus

#80

Post by josephg »

embedding-shape wrote: post #39
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 keep your software fully proprietary and closed. I guess it depends on your intention, but eventually I'm not sure it'll even be possible to keep it "fully proprietary and closed" in the hopes of no one being able to replicate it, which seems to be the main motivation for many to go that road. If you're shipping something, making something available, others will be able to use it (duh) and therefore replicate it…

I completely agree.

Right now you can point claude at any program and ask it to analyse it, write an architecture document describing all the functionality. Then clear memory and get it to code against that architecture document.

You can't do that as easily with closed source software. Except, if you can read assembly, every program is open source. I suspect we're not far away from LLMs being able to just disassemble any program and do the same thing.

Is there a driver in windows that isn't in linux? No problem. Just ask claude to reverse engineer it, write out a document describing exactly how the driver issues commands to the device and what constraints and invariants it needs to hold. Then make a linux driver that works the same way.

Have an old video game you wanna play on your modern computer? No problem. Just get claude to disassemble the whole thing. Then function by function, rewrite it in C. Then port that C code to modern APIs.

It'll be chaos. But I'm quite excited about the possibilities.

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