I really don't get those takes. AI is the best thing that ever happened to the Free Software world, it is basically turning any software into Free Software. You can just throw file formats, protocols or even plain binaries at the AI and it'll reverse engineer everything in a pinch. Users can finally modify software themselves, which was always the goal of the Free Software world, but very rarely happened in actuality, since it was just so damn complicated. AI lowered the barrier of entry tremendously, not just in terms of required knowledge, but especially time. Same with Creative Commons, sharing art and stuff, was a nice gesture, but rarely useful, since the level of work to modify a work to fit your project was pretty close to just doing it from scratch anyway. With AI everybody can toy around with image generators and get what they want.
Is a social contract being broken? Yeah, kind of, but the problems that that contract existed to solve are no longer a thing. Creation is now easy and commodified. We finally have computer we can interact with in natural language, something people tried to do for at least 70 years and never made any significant progress on until LLM arrived.
If you want to gatekeep or only create stuff to boost your own ego or portfolio, then AI might be an issue, if you actually want to build stuff, AI is godsend. We are essentially living in the StarTrek future with Holodecks and replicators and people still find reason to complain.
It's not a real problem. It's one of the most honest business models currently employed by tech companies - simple exchange of money for value. Training wasn't free and only few players on the planet had enough capital to perform it. Serving isn't free, it costs electricity (and maintenance). The companies that trained the models, and companies that serve inference, have all created real value at their own expense, and they're (for now) charging very little for it. The value users get from inference - that no one is even capturing right now, it's literally left on the table and goes 100% to the users.
Contrast that with most other businesses - tech or otherwise - where there's always strings and trickery attached to any transaction.
While I agree with you regarding shady business practices, you're very conveniently skipping over the fact that open source licenses _REQUIRE_ attribution.
> While I agree with you regarding shady business practices, you're very conveniently skipping over the fact that open source licenses _REQUIRE_ attribution.
When you use the code as is or create a derivative work. The knowledge embodied by the code and encapsulated in an LLM doesn't strike me as needing to give attribution because the code the LLM would product doesn't match any particular open source code base.
At least that's my thinking. I'd be curious to see an example where you think attribution is necessary and how you would actually do it given an output from an LLM.
I hear you, but I think you might miss my point, which is while LLMs are clearly trained on copyrighted material, what they produce (their output) is NOT a copy of a specific code snippet they were trained on in a way that you would say "that's a copy from this code base".
Thanks for that link to the definition and requirements for something to be considered a derivative work.
I think my interpretation, based on your link, holds: unless the LLM output (transformation) substantially bears the original source code author's creation and personality, there is nothing to give attribution to.
grumbel · · focus · HN ↗
Is a social contract being broken? Yeah, kind of, but the problems that that contract existed to solve are no longer a thing. Creation is now easy and commodified. We finally have computer we can interact with in natural language, something people tried to do for at least 70 years and never made any significant progress on until LLM arrived.
If you want to gatekeep or only create stuff to boost your own ego or portfolio, then AI might be an issue, if you actually want to build stuff, AI is godsend. We are essentially living in the StarTrek future with Holodecks and replicators and people still find reason to complain.
ssl232 · · focus · HN ↗
TeMPOraL · · focus · HN ↗
Contrast that with most other businesses - tech or otherwise - where there's always strings and trickery attached to any transaction.
za_creature · · focus · HN ↗
andsoitis · · focus · HN ↗
When you use the code as is or create a derivative work. The knowledge embodied by the code and encapsulated in an LLM doesn't strike me as needing to give attribution because the code the LLM would product doesn't match any particular open source code base.
At least that's my thinking. I'd be curious to see an example where you think attribution is necessary and how you would actually do it given an output from an LLM.
za_creature · · focus · HN ↗
I will continue to hold that position until such a time that we get a better answer than:
> we cannot rule out that de-identified data derived from their usage of our products helped improve our models
andsoitis · · focus · HN ↗
za_creature · · focus · HN ↗
[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Derivative_work&oldid=1372562008" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Derivative_work&o...
andsoitis · · focus · HN ↗
I think my interpretation, based on your link, holds: unless the LLM output (transformation) substantially bears the original source code author's creation and personality, there is nothing to give attribution to.