Without wanting to take a stance on either side of these arguments, it does occur to me that, for this and other major FOSS projects deciding on AI policies, others can always start forks with different policies. The success or failure of such forks might even offer some insight into how helpful or harmful different forms of AI use are, at least from a programming perspective.
GCC steering committee announces AI policy
71–80 of 454 posts
Re: GCC steering committee announces AI policy
#72Yeah, go away with your vibeslop.
Fork it into Rust or something.
Re: GCC steering committee announces AI policy
#73The comments are worth it... the full spectrum of personalities and the hottest of takes. 10/10, would recommend to a bored friend.
> Do anti-LLM types expect to be vindicated in an orgy of copyright lawsuits that resets the industry back to 2022? What do people pushing expect to accomplish? You weren’t kidding, huh.
I like the top reply:
> "The true purpose of AI is to allow wealth to access skill without allowing skill to access wealth."
Re: GCC steering committee announces AI policy
#74Even GCC admit... nobody likes writing tests.
It's just so boring! But it's essential. And I think LLMs can help manage the tedium, as well as find gaps in tests that humans would easily overlook, unless they're very thorough.
That said, I think the gains will mostly be in boring, enterprise software; they are often a lot more code that, if the application is designed well, is mostly configuration and boring wiring. Boring code is good for LLMs to write.
But the underlying tools like GCC are not boring. They will have boring aspects to it, but for the most part they are not boring.
Re: GCC steering committee announces AI policy
#75The comments are worth it... the full spectrum of personalities and the hottest of takes. 10/10, would recommend to a bored friend.
AI psychosis seems to be on all sides of the debate. We've truly lost our moderate speech and the ability to discuss.
We really haven’t. It’s always been this bad.
For me I’m a late adopter. I’ve seen more things go than stay. I’ll wait until the industry has stabilised or evaporated before making a decision. It’ll save me time and money.
Re: GCC steering committee announces AI policy
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn't there also a concern that an LLM may reproduce copyrighted code verbatim (or close enough), and the original author asserts their copyright?
To my knowledge there is not a single known case where this happened. News back then were about intentionally prompting to output known copyrighted material. The parent comment still stands in my opinion: When, despite millions of developers using agentic AI already, are these lawsuits supposed to manifest?
I mean ai has generated copyright headers verbatim in code I asked it to make. I had a tutorial open from the web and asked the AI to generate an example for me and it was the example from the tutorial verbatim as well...
Re: GCC steering committee announces AI policy
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Do anti-LLM types expect to be vindicated in an orgy of copyright lawsuits that resets the industry back to 2022? What do people pushing expect to accomplish? You weren’t kidding, huh.
He's correct though. You would need 3 extremely low probability events to all occur simultaneously for the concern to actually manifest. 1) Courts reverse their previous decisions and declare LLM generated code as belonging to LLM labs. 2) LLM labs decide to assert their copyright and sue open source projects. 3) They are able to prove that the code was generated by an LLM and not just any LLM but their LLM.
No?
1) Someone re-licenses GCC under a non-GPL license.
2) EFF sues them, to stop the behaviour
3) Court tells EFF that they have no standing to sue because LLM generated content has no copyright
Obviously this happening would be in the future after someone translated GCC to Rust with LLMs or something.
Re: GCC steering committee announces AI policy
#78I wonder how they plan to detect it something is LLM generated. I think what this leads to is people just working hard to make their outputs appear human generated.
And that's fine - if LLM generated code is indistinguishable from human-written code, AND there's a person behind it or in the maintainers that fully understands it, then there is no issue.
But I don't think generated code in itself was ever the issue. It's who takes responsibility for it. And I think in this case, can the submitter guarantee it's not code that is copyrighted elsewhere.
Re: GCC steering committee announces AI policy
#79how do enforce 'human only code' anyway ???? at some point, what's stopping people from lying or make the code like human writing one ????
Yeah, I'm also in this camp. Saying we are going to deny all AI-written code wholesale and then asking them to properly attribute AI-written code is just going to incentivize not quoting AI-written code. Another thing is that when they say "can answer questions about it," it's also non-barrier, because the person will just feed the questions into a LLM. Short of an in-person interview, I don't see how this is going to keep anyone but honest users of AI out of the code base. I guess it could also be used retrospectively as a basis to ban someone.
Re: GCC steering committee announces AI policy
#80> The true purpose of AI is to allow wealth to access skill without allowing skill to access wealth.
This is such a fire quote