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AI and the Ship of Theseus

lucumr.pocoo.org

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Re: AI and the Ship of Theseus

#81

Post by Decabytes »

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…

The existence of permissive licenses like BSD or MIT does not show that copyleft was unimportant.Those licenses allowed code to remain open, but they also allowed it to be absorbed into proprietary products.

The GPL’s significance was that it changed the default outcome. At a time when software was overwhelmingly proprietary, it created a mechanism that required improvements to remain available to users and developers downstream.

Gcc was a massive deal for the reasons why compilers are free now today for example

Re: AI and the Ship of Theseus

#82

Post by pabs3 »

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.

The latter will become MIT sooner or later with Ghidra plus LLM-assisted reverse engineering.

https://reorchestrate.com/posts/your-binary-is-no-longer-saf... https://reorchestrate.com/posts/your-binary-is-no-longer-saf...

Even SaaSS isn't safe from that type of process:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47259485

Re: AI and the Ship of Theseus

#83

Post by raincole »

vintagedave wrote: post #26
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 GPL. Which I’m increasingly thinking is the only license. It requires sharing. And if anything can be reimplemented and there’s no value in the source any more, just the spec or tests, there’s no public-interest reason for any restriction other than completely free, in the GPL sense.

I highly recommend read the post in question first before commenting.

Re: AI and the Ship of Theseus

#84

Post by simonw »

duskdozer wrote: post #74
luma wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

It was instructed NOT to look at the source, with the one exception that it was told to look at this single file full of charset definitions: https://github.com/chardet/chardet/blob/f0676c0d6a4263827924...

Re: AI and the Ship of Theseus

#85

Post by visarga »

pabs3 wrote: post #82
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.

The latter will become MIT sooner or later with Ghidra plus LLM-assisted reverse engineering. https://reorchestrate.com/posts/your-binary-is-no-longer-saf... https://reorchestrate.com/posts/your-binary-is-no-longer-saf... Even SaaSS isn't safe from that type of process: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47259485

If you got access to a working prototype of a software, you can use it for differential testing. So you got unlimited tests for free.

Re: AI and the Ship of Theseus

#86

Post by catoc »

GaggiX wrote: post #32
measurablefunc wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wrote what I meant & meant what I wrote. You can take up your argument w/ the people who think they're working on AI by adding more data centers & more matrix multiplications to function graphs if you want to argue about marketing terms.

I was just thinking that calling artificial superintelligence "Real AI" was funny.

They’re looking for AI that’s só good it’s unreal

Re: AI and the Ship of Theseus

#87

Post by TZubiri »

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…

the issue with this Stallmanian view on IP is that IP predates software and solves an actual issue.

I don't think Stallman has a real proposal to how innovation can be incentivized and compensated.

Take the example of medical innovations, sure big pharma is bad, but if they don't get to monetize their inventions, how will R&D get funded?

If you destroy IP and allow everyone to clone whatever, you will have a great result in the short term, then no one will continue R&D

Re: AI and the Ship of Theseus

#89

Post by beloch »

Perhaps code licensing is going to become more similar to music.

e.g. Somebody wrote a library, and then you had an LLM implement it in a new language.

You didn't come up with the idea for whatever the library does, and you didn't "perform" the new implementation. You're neither writer nor performer, just the person who requested a new performance. You're basically a club owner who hired a band to cover some tunes. There's a lot involved in running a club, just like there's a fair bit involved in operating a LLM, but none of that gives you rights over the "composition". If you want to make money off of that performance, you need to pay the writer and/or satisfy whatever terms and conditions they've made the library available under.

IANAL, so I don't even know what species of worms are inside this can I've opened up. It seems sensible, to me, that running somebody else's work through a LLM shouldn't give you something that you can then claim complete control over.

---------

Edit: For the sake of this argument, let's pretend we're somewhere with sensible music copyright laws, and not the weird piano-roll derived lunacy that currently exists in the U.S..

Re: AI and the Ship of Theseus

#90

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

US courts have ruled that machine generated code cannot be copyright. Ergo, it cannot be licensed (under any license; nobody owns the copyright, thus nobody can "license" it to anyone else).

You cannot (*) use LLMs to generate code that you then license, whether that license is GPL, MIT or some proprietary mumbo-jumbo.

(*) unless you just lie about this part.

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