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Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

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Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#81

Post by d1sxeyes »

emsign wrote: post #69

By design you can't know if the LLM doing the rewrite was exposed to the original code base. Unless the AI company is disclosing their training material, which they won't because they don't want to admit breaking the law.

Is it against the law for an LLM to read LGPL-licensed code?

That’s a complex question that isn’t solved yet. Clearly, regurgitating verbatim LGPL code in large chunks would be unlawful. What’s much less clear is a) how large do those chunks need to be to trigger LGPL violations? A single line? Two? A function? What if it’s trivial? And b) are all outputs of a system which has received LGPL code as an input necessarily derivative?

If I learn how to code in Python exclusively from reading LGPL code, and then go away and write something new, it’s clear that I haven’t committed any violation of copyright under existing law, even if all I’m doing as a human is rearranging tokens I understand from reading LGPL code semantically to achieve new result.

It’s a trying time for software and the legal system. I don’t have the answers, but whether you like them or not, these systems are here to stay, and we need to learn how to live with them.

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#82

Post by d1sxeyes »

kshri24 wrote: post #17

> The ownership void: If the code is truly a “new” work created by a machine, it might technically be in the public domain the moment it’s generated, rendering the MIT license moot. How would that work? We still have no legal conclusion on whether AI model generated code, that is trained on all publicly available source (irrespective of type of license), is legal or not. IANAL but IMHO it is totally illegal as no per…

> We still have no legal conclusion on whether AI model generated code, that is trained on all publicly available source (irrespective of type of license), is legal or not.

That horse has bolted. No one knows where all the AI code any more, and it would no longer possible to be compliant with a ruling that no one can use AI generated code.

There may be some mental and legal gymnastics to make it possible, but it will be made legal because it’s too late to do anything else now.

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#83

Post by gostsamo »

emsign wrote: post #69

By design you can't know if the LLM doing the rewrite was exposed to the original code base. Unless the AI company is disclosing their training material, which they won't because they don't want to admit breaking the law.

it was exposed when it was shown the thing to rewrite.

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#84

Post by lelanthran »

NitpickLawyer wrote: post #59
samrus wrote: post #31

> The ownership void: If the code is truly a “new” work created by a machine, it might technically be in the public domain the moment it’s generated, rendering the MIT license moot. Im struggling to see where this conclusion came from. To me it sounds like the AI-written work can not be coppywritten, and so its kind of like a copy pasting the original code. Copy pasting the original code doesnt make it public domain.…

> To me it sounds like the AI-written work can not be coppywritten I think we didn't even began to consider all the implications of this, and while people ran with that one case where someone couldn't copyright a generated image, it's not that easy for code. I think there needs to be way more litigation before we can confidently say it's settled. If "generated" code is not copyrightable, where do draw the line on wha…

All of your questions have seemingly trivial answers. Maybe I am missing something, but...

> If "generated" code is not copyrightable, where do draw the line on what generated means? Do macros count?

Does the output of the macro depend on ingesting someone else's code?

> Does code that generates other code count?

Does the output of the code depend on ingesting someone else's code?

> Protobuf?

Does your protobuf implementation depend on ingesting someone else's code?

> If it's the tool that generates the code, again where do we draw the line?

Does the tool depend ingestion of of someone else's code?

> Is it just using 3rd party tools?

Does the 3rd party tool depend on ingestion of someone else's code?

> Would training your own count?

Does the training ingest someone else's code?

> Would a "random" code gen and pick the winners (by whatever means) count?

Does the random codegen depend on ingesting someone else's code?

> Bruteforce all the space (silly example but hey we're in silly space here) counts?

Does the bruteforce algo depend on ingesting someone else's code?

> Is it just "AI" adjacent that isn't copyrightable?

No, it's the "depends on ingesting someone else's code" that makes it not copyrightable.

> If so how do you define AI?

Doesn't matter whether it is AI or not, the question is are you ingesting someone else's code.

> Does autocomplete count?

Does the specific autocomplete in question depend on ingesting someone else's code?

> Intellisense?

Does the specific Intellisense in question depend on ingesting someone else's code?

> Smarter intellisense?

Does the specific Smarter Intellisense in question depend on ingesting someone else's code?

...

Look, I see where you're going with this - reductio ad absurdum and all - but it seems to me that you're trying to muddy the waters by claiming that either all code generation is allowed or no code generation is disallowed.

Let me clear the waters for all the readers - the complaint is not about code generation, it's about ingesting someone else's code, frequently for profit.

All these questions you are asking seem to me to be irrelevant and designed to shift the focus from the ingestion of other people's work to something that no one is arguing against.

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#86

Post by skeledrew »

emsign wrote: post #69

By design you can't know if the LLM doing the rewrite was exposed to the original code base. Unless the AI company is disclosing their training material, which they won't because they don't want to admit breaking the law.

It doesn't even matter if the LLM was exposed during training. A clean-room rewrite can be done by having one LLM create a highly detailed analysis of the target (reverse engineering if it's in binary form), and providing that analysis to another LLM to base an implementation.

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#87

Post by xyzsparetimexyz »

skeledrew wrote: post #86
emsign wrote: post #69

By design you can't know if the LLM doing the rewrite was exposed to the original code base. Unless the AI company is disclosing their training material, which they won't because they don't want to admit breaking the law.

It doesn't even matter if the LLM was exposed during training. A clean-room rewrite can be done by having one LLM create a highly detailed analysis of the target (reverse engineering if it's in binary form), and providing that analysis to another LLM to base an implementation.

Why does it need 2 LLMs? LLMs aren't people. I'm not even sure that it needs to be done in 2 seperate contexts

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#88

Post by k__ »

skeledrew wrote: post #86
emsign wrote: post #69

By design you can't know if the LLM doing the rewrite was exposed to the original code base. Unless the AI company is disclosing their training material, which they won't because they don't want to admit breaking the law.

It doesn't even matter if the LLM was exposed during training. A clean-room rewrite can be done by having one LLM create a highly detailed analysis of the target (reverse engineering if it's in binary form), and providing that analysis to another LLM to base an implementation.

It doesn't matter for the LLM writing the analysis.

It does matter for the one who implements it.

Finding an LLM that's good enough to do the rewrite while being able to prove it wasn't exposed to the original GPL code is probably impossible.

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#89

Post by p0w3n3d »

Cantinflas wrote: post #78

"If “AI-rewriting” is accepted as a valid way to change licenses, it represents the end of Copyleft. " Software in the AI era is not that important. Copyleft has already won, you can have new code in 40 seconds for $0.70 worth of tokens.

Just take the code and let it AI rewrite. But... AI was taught on all the OpenSource Code available. Lot of them were GPL I think... So...

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#90

Post by k__ »

zozbot234 wrote: post #38

If you ask a LLM to derive a spec that has no expressive element of the original code (a clean-room human team can carefully verify this), and then ask another instance of the LLM (with fresh context) to write out code from the spec, how is that different from a "clean room" rewrite? The agent that writes the new code only ever sees the spec, and by assumption (the assumption that's made in all clean room rewrites) t…

How do you prove the training data didn't contain the code?

I'd assume an LLM trained on the original would also be contaminated.

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