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AI and the Ship of Theseus

lucumr.pocoo.org

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Re: AI and the Ship of Theseus

#91

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

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…

US courts have already ruled that in the USA, no machine-generated code can be copyrighted. No copyright, no license, of any type.

Re: AI and the Ship of Theseus

#92

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

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.

Code created by an LLM cannot, in the USA, be copyrighted. No copyright, no license.

Re: AI and the Ship of Theseus

#94

Post by chii »

TZubiri wrote: post #87
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 re…

> then no one will continue R&D

i would like to see a system of publicly funded R&D.

Re: AI and the Ship of Theseus

#95

Post by nl »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #90

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.

This oversimplifies it.

You can't copyright a work that is only generated by a machine: "In February 2022, the Copyright Office’s Review Board issued a final decision affirming the refusal to register a work claimed to be generated with no human involvement"

But human direction of machine processes can be copyright:

"A year later, the Office issued a registration for a comic book incorporating AI-generated material."

and

"In most cases, however, humans will be involved in the creation process, and the work will be copyrightable to the extent that their contributions qualify as authorship. It is axiomatic that ideas or facts themselves are not protectible by copyright law and the Supreme Court has made clear that originality is required, not just time and effort. In Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Telephone Service Co., the Court rejected the theory that “sweat of the brow” alone could be sufficient for copyright protection. “To be sure,” the Court further explained, “the requisite level of creativity is extremely low; even a slight amount will suffice."

See https://www.copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-Intell...

Re: AI and the Ship of Theseus

#96

Post by the_mitsuhiko »

josephg wrote: post #80
embedding-shape wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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.

I have successfully created a partial implementation of p4 by pointing it at the captured network stream and some strace output. It's amazing how good those things are.

Re: AI and the Ship of Theseus

#98

Post by galaxyLogic »

nl wrote: post #95
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #90

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.

This oversimplifies it. You can't copyright a work that is only generated by a machine: "In February 2022, the Copyright Office’s Review Board issued a final decision affirming the refusal to register a work claimed to be generated with no human involvement" But human direction of machine processes can be copyright: "A year later, the Office issued a registration for a comic book incorporating AI-generated material."…

Would writing a prompt, or few, for an LLM qualify as "the requisite level of creativity is extremely low; even a slight amount will suffice"

Re: AI and the Ship of Theseus

#99

Post by galaxyLogic »

beloch wrote: post #89

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. T…

If a recordoing is made in a club, doesn't the party doing the recording have the copyright to that (live) recording, or is it the performers?

Re: AI and the Ship of Theseus

#100

Post by galaxyLogic »

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

We will need ... software patents!
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