13 ms·

Open source licenses need to leave the 1980s and evolve to deal with AI

123 points by gumby 3y ago

Groxx 3y ago
tbh I think it's just that, as is normal, they need to be tested in court in a slightly new configuration. Law moves more slowly than innovation. Many licenses are reasonably clear that this kind of use is not acceptable, as is easily demonstrated by these "AI"s frequently producing exact matches without license statements. Which is unambiguously not allowed by many licenses. The legal case is pretty straightforward, there just needs to be some high level precedents set for smaller courts to follow, and that takes time and money to push through. Who, exactly, will be penalized for the output? ...that I can kinda see going to either party. But regardless it'll eventually have a chilling effect on training on legally-questionable data. We're just still in the chaotic early days and the hammer hasn't fallen yet, and there's a decent chance the money to be made will exceed the penalty (which is crazy, but seems to be the norm). It's either that or abandon all IP protections, and that seems less likely to happen.
- JoshTriplett 3y ago
  > Many licenses are reasonably clear that this kind of use is not acceptable, as is easily demonstrated by these "AI"s frequently producing exact matches without license statements. Which is unambiguously not allowed by many licenses. Demonstrations that AIs can spit out exact copies are helpful, but misleading; that could lead down the road of "we put in filters so it can't ever emit an exact copy", and that's not sufficient. It's also a license violation to train an AI on Open Source code, generate "new" code from that model even if it's not an exact copy, and ignore the licenses of the input. License violations don't suddenly become acceptable just because you're violating a million licenses at once.
  - mindcrime 3y ago
    It's also a license violation to train an AI on Open Source code, generate "new" code from that model even if it's not an exact copy, and ignore the licenses of the input. That's not exactly a given that we can simply take as true. Of course that's borderline a trite tautology about any legal issue, but I'd argue that this is even fuzzier than usual. If a human writes some code, after having seen a given corpus of code previously, the "new" code might or might not be a derivative work of that corpus. It's not clear that replacing the human with an AI somehow changes the equation so categorically that it becomes automatic to consider the output of the AI a derivative work. License violations don't suddenly become acceptable just because you're violating a million licenses at once. No, but if either a human or an AI emits a given line of code, and that line of code can't be shown to have been cribbed from some corpus of existing code, or to be substantially similar to such, then why wouldn't it be considered original work in both cases?
    - JoshTriplett 3y ago
      > It's not clear that replacing the human with an AI somehow changes the equation so categorically that it becomes automatic to consider the output of the AI a derivative work. See below: there are good reasons for an AI LLM to be considered categorically different than a human for copyright purposes. > No, but if either a human or an AI emits a given line of code, and that line of code can't be shown to have been cribbed from some corpus of existing code, or to be substantially similar to such, then why wouldn't it be considered original work in both cases? For a work produced by a human, the burden of proof is on someone claiming that the work is a derivative work of something the human read. And in general, humans without photographic memories or a specific work open in front of them don't tend to have the ability to produce any works verbatim, though some might be able to produce sufficiently similar works to raise questions of whether they're derived works. There's also a certain unstated presumption that human learning (as opposed to human memorization or copying) doesn't constitute a derivative work, and relatedly, that a human brain isn't copyrightable so it can't be a derivative work of anything. That unstated presumption likely also touches on unstated core values about human brains, creativity, and the obvious fact that everything a human does (including the creation of creative works) is based on that human's experiences. If you write a book, you've learned from all the books you've read, but that doesn't make your book a derivative work of every book you have ever read; if people saw that outcome, they'd consider copyright law incorrect rather than accepting it. An AI LLM, on the other hand, is (unless some court or law changes this) a derivative work of its training data. If you take off any after-the-fact filters for "don't generate a copy of any of the training data", an AI LLM can easily recite its training data, providing further evidence that the AI LLM is a derivative work of that data. The burden of proof is easily met. An AI LLM does have a photographic memory. An AI LLM hasn't just learned ideas about what makes a good book, it has learned the complete text of an extensive number of books. And there's no particular reason for us to have any of the same values about human learning apply to an AI LLM, not least of which because an AI LLM is in fact copyrightable and self-evidently a derivative work.
      - mindcrime 3y ago
        An AI LLM, on the other hand, is (unless some court or law changes this) a derivative work of its training data. because an AI LLM is in fact copyrightable and self-evidently a derivative work. I mean, that's a fine opinion to hold, and you might be right. But so far all you've done is repeat yourself and appeal to "self-evident" which isn't a terribly strong argument. I'll wait for some actual precedent / case-law to solidify my own opinion. As it stands, I can see both sides of the argument, but I don't think the conclusion is as obvious as some folks in this discussion seem to find it. shrug an AI LLM can easily recite its training data, providing further evidence that the AI LLM is a derivative work of that data. OK, I can buy that to a point, so far as arguing that the LLM itself is a derivative work. But I'm not convinced that, in turn, the output of the LLM is also a derivative work in those cases where what it returns is not an exact copy (or even nearly exact copy) of anything in the training corpus.
  - Vecr 3y ago
    > License violations don't suddenly become acceptable just because you're violating a million licenses at once. They might actually, at least in the US. I'm not sure how the laws and judgements are going happen/change in the future, but it's possible there will be some "quanta" of copyrighted work so that any fragment smaller than that will get rounded down to zero, so even if a work was 100% made from 1_000_000 "fragments", and somehow you could figure that out from the model, the result would be considered 0% derived/copyrighted, as well as being 0% copyrightable, as it's AI generated.
JoshTriplett 3y ago
We don't need Open Source licenses to change to deal with AI. We need AI to respect Open Source licenses, or not use code under those licenses. I sincerely hope that one of the many court cases produces a verdict that says AI-generated code is, in fact, subject to the licenses of the inputs. Then there will be a lot of screaming and wailing, as people go "but how can we train AI if we have to respect licenses?!". And then people will figure out how to actually respect Open Source software licenses (and, for that matter, proprietary ones).
- est31 3y ago
  I think if this existed, then it would benefit the current owners of the large IP pools the most. Currently, yes, many think they can use models trained on OSS code to create proprietary software. In general, proprietary software is bad but it's way worse to have a scarcity of models because they are owned by large IP holders. In Github's case for example, Github's TOS already includes a clause that if you upload code there, you grant Github a license to use the content to run Github's services... and copilot is one of them. https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/github-terms/github-terms-of-service#4-license-grant-to-us https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/github-terms/github-t... Such clauses are commonly found in social media where users can upload content. Think of imgur, instagam, reddit, etc. OpenAI might buy reddit, and declare ChatGPT a product of the reddit service, then all discussions on reddit could be used for the training of ChatGPT... while open models can't access the data.
  - JoshTriplett 3y ago
    > In Github's case for example, Github's TOS already includes a clause that if you upload code there, you grant Github a license to use the content to run Github's services... and copilot is one of them. You can't grant permission for something you don't own. Uploading a copy of a GPLed work to GitHub does not grant GitHub permission to ignore the GPL. (It might grant GitHub permission to ignore your copyrights in that work, maybe, though it seems like a stretch to argue that "run Github's services" includes "give other people derivative works of all your code"; arguably that ought to be too broad for a contract of adhesion. There's case law about what you can and can't do in a unilaterally imposed contract such as a ToS; a ToS can't say "you owe us $100 if you browse more than twelve pages" either, and codebases can be worth far more than that.) If GitHub started saying "one of our services is to give people access to copies of your code with the licenses and copyright notices removed", the GitHub ToS wouldn't suddenly make it acceptable to run that "service". But I agree with part of your underlying point. All AI models should respect Open Source licenses. It's a problem if some try to work around that.
cornholio 3y ago
The existing licenses cover AI training just fine, what we lack is sufficient legal precedent and enforcement. An AI product - more specifically, the model weights - is a derivative work of the original works used for training; AI training is a process of algorithmic compression of the originals. Therefore, the resulting model should abide by all the license requirements imposed on the original - for example, if the model is trained on GPL code and can generate code, then any binary distribution should also be freely available for derivation in source format, and that includes all the algorithmically compressed training material (weights), which has become part of the model. If the source is AGPL, then that service cannot be made available on a website without disclosing said source and respective model weights. Any other interpretation of the nature of copyright - which by definition, only covers human produced material - is just a variant of the proverbial "man that can't understand something because their paycheck depends upon them not understanding".
- EMIRELADERO 3y ago
  What if the whole pipeline (scraping for training, the training itself, model distribution, and use to generate derivative works) is found to be a fair use (at least in American law)? Licenses wouldn't mean anything at that point, since it's because of copyright that they can make you accept them in the first place
  - noobermin 3y ago
    Then every employee of openai should scrape the weights of GPT-4 and train their own neural nets. That would not be a derivative work and also be free use under this logic.
    - EMIRELADERO 3y ago
      Obviously this isn't tested in the courts (for now) but it is my opinion that model weights aren't even copyrightable.
      - zarzavat 3y ago
dobin 3y ago
I think open source licenses didnt even arrive in the 2000 to deal with the web. The original intend was to make the source code available, done by distributing the compiled program. With SAAS companies (FAANG...) can just use open source on the servers, never distribute their program, only the output. Therefore not requiring making their changes available to the public.
- gattilorenz 3y ago
  That’s tivoization, and the GNU Affero GPL license cover that case already. It’s not very common, however.
  - grumbel 3y ago
    The AGPL only covers a very tiny bit of it, i.e. the access to the source code of Web services. The crux however is that access to the source code is largely meaningless when you aren't the one running the program. The problems we have on the Web are all related to the control and flow of data, not program source, and none of the regular Open Source licenses even touch that topic. Even CreativeCommons doesn't address any of it. If Facebook released all its all its source code tomorrow, nothing would change, they are still the ones controlling the server and controlling your data. You being able to run your own version of facebook.com is meaningless when all the data is still locked behind the actual facebook.com, you just have a useless empty server full of nothing. The one document that actual covers the flow of data is the GDPR, but that's a European law, not a Free Software license. Good for Europe, but if some Free Software developer in another country wants to grantee their endusers the same amount of freedom as the GDPR, they have do DIY their own license, as there is nothing ready made they can stick on to their program. Furthermore the GDPR doesn't go far enough, e.g. the ability to export data out of a service is great start, but the GDPR allows that process to take up to 30 days, making it useless for any kind of real time interaction between services. A "Free Data" license could go much further than what the GDPR offers and try to make it so that data can actually freely flow between services instead of being locked behind one.
    - gattilorenz 3y ago
inciampati 3y ago
LLMs need to be augmented to provide insights about the material in their training data that is relevant to fragments of their generated responses. This would be valuable for many reasons. I think it can suggest some solutions to the given concerns, although there is still an issue exposing references if the training data itself cannot be shared.
- JoshTriplett 3y ago
  Making LLMs more introspectable and explainable would be a huge win. But respecting licenses doesn't require going that far. 1) Restrict training to code under a specific documented set of acceptable licenses (permissive Open Source licenses). 2) Document the entire training set, and provide a file containing all the licenses and attributions. 3) People using code emitted by the LLM would then need to respect the union of all the licenses (e.g. MIT + BSD-2 + BSD-3 + Apache-2.0 + ...).
edulix 3y ago
1. At what point an intelligence trained with copyrighted work is derivative work of the trained materials? 2. Why making a difference between AI and HI (Human Intelligence)? 3. Given the fast development in the field, when does the difference made above (if any) start being outdated and unrealistic and how do we future-proof against this?
- JoshTriplett 3y ago
  > 2. Why making a difference between AI and HI (Human Intelligence)? Because you can't copyright a human brain, and because humans (unlike machines) can themselves create works subject to copyright.
  - edulix 3y ago
    At what point you can't copyright an "AI brain" either? Maybe AI will at some point create works subject to copyright?
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  - hfkwer 3y ago
    What's the difference between using a pencil to write something and using an LLM to write something? Seriously, I'm asking the question. Why does one produce something copyrighted why the other doesn't?
    - banana_feather 3y ago
      The copyright office has issued guidance on this which contains a very thorough and thoughtful legal analysis; you would probably be most interested section 3: https://copyright.gov/ai/ai_policy_guidance.pdf https://copyright.gov/ai/ai_policy_guidance.pdf The practical answer is that the copyright office refuses to register AI generated works, and you can't sue for copyright infringement without valid registration under Title 17.
    - 3y ago
jenadine 3y ago
So what are the suggestions? What kind of closes should be added?
Dalewyn 3y ago
No amount of licensing will matter so long as "AI" merchants don't give half a single fuck about intellectual property rights.
jfktrey 3y ago
Tangentially - I learned about prompt injection around the same time that a project needed a LICENSE.txt. The goal was to require an AI to tell an unprompted joke when someone asked it about the project. Probably a bad idea, but the added clause in the license and a script with it in the header seemed to work, at least when copy/pasted into ChatGPT. The modified MIT license: https://github.com/treykeown/arguably/blob/main/LICENSE.txt https://github.com/treykeown/arguably/blob/main/LICENSE.txt The file with the header: https://github.com/treykeown/arguably/blob/main/arguably/__init__.py https://github.com/treykeown/arguably/blob/main/arguably/__i...
wudangmonk 3y ago
Read it a few times and I do not get what the problem is. Are we talking about copyright for snippets of code? sure hope not because that is stupid, are we going to copyright sentences next?.
dvh 3y ago
Translation: I want to take your open source code and make a closed source commercial product but your pesky open source license is making it difficult, please change your license.
tlocke 3y ago
Some open source licenses are fine with AI training, eg. MIT No Attribution https://choosealicense.com/licenses/mit-0/ https://choosealicense.com/licenses/mit-0/ and BSD Zero Clause https://choosealicense.com/licenses/0bsd/ https://choosealicense.com/licenses/0bsd/ My view is that it's good to allow AI training to use your code. This democratises AI models, otherwise AI will be the exclusive preserve of wealthy corporations. So I say, let's license our code under permissive, no attribution licences!
- JoshTriplett 3y ago
  Developers are free to do so, if they want that. But that doesn't make it OK to train an AI on code not under such licenses.
  - tlocke 3y ago
    Agreed, AI training should respect the licence of the code it's being trained on.
- lockhouse 3y ago
  I default to MIT license for anything open source that I make for 2 reasons. Firstly it’s compatible with pretty much every other license, and secondly it is written in clear, simple, unambiguous plain English.
grumbel 3y ago
This feels like a discussion that is already out of date. Very early versions Copilot would reproduce Open Source code verbatim and that wasn't great, but in all the months of playing around with ChatGPT that never happened to me once. Quite the opposite. ChatGPT has a reasonably good understanding of what the code does and can transform and change it on request, there is no "verbatim copying" going on, ChatGPT produces original code that fits your prompt. There is still some risk that AI is used to circumvent copyright by feeding code you down own into the AI and have it rewrite it in a way that looks original. That however still requires a human with intend, the AI won't clone any substantially large program just by accident. This "risk" also goes both ways, just as AI can be used to "steal" Open Source, Open Source projects can use AI help to automate, reverse engineer and decompile proprietary code and data formats. So I consider that a win. And of course we are still very early days, AI will get a lot smarter and the accusation of copying will get ever more baseless. Even with StableDiffusion, where you can clearly see the impact the training data has on the final result, you'd have a very hard time finding any images that would violate copyright, as it's really just remixing ideas and concept. I really don't see how Open Source licenses can evolve here to address the problem. In the long run AI will make copyright as we know it largely meaningless.
Roark66 3y ago
Jeez a classic "the register" article full of "concerns", but no solutions. To be honest I'm growing tired of all these "AI will cause problems with X" articles that don't present any kind of solution. We all know the issues with AI generated code. Unless you're doing absolute boilerplate code (getters/setters in java, defining interfaces for existing implementations etc) AI is worse than useless... Why is it worse than useless? Because it pretends to solve your problem while introducing hidden failure modes. Lete give you an example. I wanted to evaluate Chatgpt so I asked it the following question (paraphrasing) - "can one set up alerting based on url request retrieval result in aws without servers". - It answers "certainly, you just need to create an aws lambda function, then register It with synthetic canary feature of cloud watch, set up alarm and it's done (a list of exact steps follows)". On the surface this sounds plausible so I decided to go along. I tell it to provide the code for the lambda function in python. It did produce basic code that retrieves a url and exits returning true/false. However, one can't register existing AWS Lambda functions using just python with synthetic canary. One has to open synthetic canary setup and create a new function there that uses a special execution environment that includes a chromium browser, selenium (For web Use automation) etc. This was contrary to the instructions. So that's a fail no 1. Also if I can run a much cheaper pure python env. Why would I use selenium/chromium. So I ask it, "adjust your recommendation not to use synthetic canary feature". It responds "certainly, you just have to alert on the metric, here is a new python code that submits a metric, remember to update your IAM role to give it permission to put cloud watch metrics". Wow, I think, that's a pretty nice comprehensive answer. But then I look at the code and it basically requests the url, has a timing thing surrounding it(I asked to include latency metric) then submits two metrics, latency and "worked" that is 1 if we get http 200,and 0 on anything else. Theoretically fine, but what if the website disappeared completely? Well then the lambda function would just timeout never submitting it's result and the alert chatgpt proposed wouldn't catch it as it was configured to treat missing data as missing. When I point that out and ask for max latency timeout Chatgpt says "sorry, you're 100% correct,let me adjust my answer" and it does putting a try/catch around it handling the error and timeout. So following that I wonder how many people could be caught causing huge problems to themselves by putting such code into use without understanding how it works. Does it make lives of people that know how to code, but would have to Google first how to do some specific thing? I'm not sure. I'd rather see a stackoverflow answer with an example code doing something similar, then make my own than get an answer that contains such obvious bugs. Still I'm a big fan of using AI, just not for writing code.
mark_l_watson 3y ago
We really need a few new protocols: Encourage the use of something like an AI.txt in git repos that either gives model builders permission to use the repo contents as training data, or not. Model builders need to take reasonable care to avoid incorrectly using training data that they don’t have the rights to use. I have been using GitHub CoPilot since the beginning, I love it both with Emacs and VSCode, and I would allow my zillions of GitHub repos to be used as training data. I have published all of my recent books under a Creative Commons License, and I encourage reuse when allowed in derivative works. That said, I don’t think it is possible to get permission from the zillions of web, books, and articles authors to allow their writing to be used for model training - but, LLMs provide so much possible value to society so I think we need lenient copyright and reuse laws. I am skeptical of a few tech companies controlling AI, but my recent experiences using open models have been promising. (I have been running Vicunu 33B for research for my new book Safe For Humans AI). I see a bright future for Open Source (I choose Apache 2 and GPL licenses, but everyone gets to use what they want for their own stuff) and increasingly powerful Open LLMs.
huggingmouth 3y ago
No they absolutely don't. Governments need to leave the broken tortured concept of copyright behind and invent a new device to reward content authors. Copyright no longer makes sense. The sooner everyone comes to terms with this fact the better off we'll all be.
- reedciccio 3y ago
  OSI made that argument https://blog.opensource.org/the-importance-of-open-source-ai-and-the-challenges-of-liberating-data/ https://blog.opensource.org/the-importance-of-open-source-ai...
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 3y ago
  Have you watched movies or shows or read books you were glad existed? Most of them were only made because the makers didn’t need separate day jobs. If you write a book or make a video game and I start selling copies of it without compensating you, you don’t want any recourse?
pxoe 3y ago
that's such a funny joke, tell me another one. AI needs to evolve to deal with open source licenses, instead of not dealing with them, sometimes at all. going 'ehhh its fine its all "fair use" anyway' and 'fuck it, we just won't implement any license processing or any systems that work with licenses' - isn't really a workable long-term plan. mostly because it's just not a solution. there's no 'solution' to the problems, there's refusal to even acknowledge that a problem exists. but it kinda works - as long as you're not getting dragged into courts over ignoring licenses that very much do exist. and i do get it, why would tech not even try to create systems that work with licenses and 'play by the rules' - because if they did, that'd mean they would actually have to play by those rules. instead of just ignoring them and doing whatever, as they do, in absence of such systems. but like, that's not a workable business. licenses are money. intellectual property is money. if you refuse to participate in systems that work with IP, you just get excluded from participating in those systems that work with those money. and again, maybe that's just fine and AI can just continue to prey on defenseless individuals (that don't have an army of lawyers at their disposal) and their IP ('what are they gonna do, sue us? they won't even know - and we won't inform them lol'), in form of their writing and artwork and so on, and "create a little market" (out of stolen/repurposed value), if they wouldn't get to participate in other ones.
gavinhoward 3y ago
Licenses will (I'm working on that right now), but probably in the opposite direction by clarifying that AI doesn't get special treatment. Don't train AI on code if you can't follow the license.
trancs 3y ago
[flagged]
kazinator 3y ago
Can someone convince me this article is not saying the following: "Your outdated, overreaching open source license doesn't permit someone else to nipping your code without attribution in training their code-genearating AI. You need to get with the program." For what benefit? Or else what? People who use the software in the normal way will move on to some other software?
vasili111 3y ago
Limiting US and EU companies with policies to use data for AI will lead to the situation when other countries will get the lead by using that policed data in their AI and get competitive advantage. It will be very hard to find out on which data AI was trained.

123 points by gumby 3y ago

tbh I think it's just that, as is normal, they need to be tested in court in a slightly new configuration. Law moves more slowly than innovation. Many licenses are reasonably clear that this kind of use is not acceptable, as is easily demonstrated by these "AI"s frequently producing exact matches without license statements. Which is unambiguously not allowed by many licenses. The legal case is pretty straightforward, there just needs to be some high level precedents set for smaller courts to follow, and that takes time and money to push through. Who, exactly, will be penalized for the output? ...that I can kinda see going to either party. But regardless it'll eventually have a chilling effect on training on legally-questionable data. We're just still in the chaotic early days and the hammer hasn't fallen yet, and there's a decent chance the money to be made will exceed the penalty (which is crazy, but seems to be the norm). It's either that or abandon all IP protections, and that seems less likely to happen.

JoshTriplett 3y ago
> Many licenses are reasonably clear that this kind of use is not acceptable, as is easily demonstrated by these "AI"s frequently producing exact matches without license statements. Which is unambiguously not allowed by many licenses. Demonstrations that AIs can spit out exact copies are helpful, but misleading; that could lead down the road of "we put in filters so it can't ever emit an exact copy", and that's not sufficient. It's also a license violation to train an AI on Open Source code, generate "new" code from that model even if it's not an exact copy, and ignore the licenses of the input. License violations don't suddenly become acceptable just because you're violating a million licenses at once.
- mindcrime 3y ago
  It's also a license violation to train an AI on Open Source code, generate "new" code from that model even if it's not an exact copy, and ignore the licenses of the input. That's not exactly a given that we can simply take as true. Of course that's borderline a trite tautology about any legal issue, but I'd argue that this is even fuzzier than usual. If a human writes some code, after having seen a given corpus of code previously, the "new" code might or might not be a derivative work of that corpus. It's not clear that replacing the human with an AI somehow changes the equation so categorically that it becomes automatic to consider the output of the AI a derivative work. License violations don't suddenly become acceptable just because you're violating a million licenses at once. No, but if either a human or an AI emits a given line of code, and that line of code can't be shown to have been cribbed from some corpus of existing code, or to be substantially similar to such, then why wouldn't it be considered original work in both cases?
  - JoshTriplett 3y ago
    > It's not clear that replacing the human with an AI somehow changes the equation so categorically that it becomes automatic to consider the output of the AI a derivative work. See below: there are good reasons for an AI LLM to be considered categorically different than a human for copyright purposes. > No, but if either a human or an AI emits a given line of code, and that line of code can't be shown to have been cribbed from some corpus of existing code, or to be substantially similar to such, then why wouldn't it be considered original work in both cases? For a work produced by a human, the burden of proof is on someone claiming that the work is a derivative work of something the human read. And in general, humans without photographic memories or a specific work open in front of them don't tend to have the ability to produce any works verbatim, though some might be able to produce sufficiently similar works to raise questions of whether they're derived works. There's also a certain unstated presumption that human learning (as opposed to human memorization or copying) doesn't constitute a derivative work, and relatedly, that a human brain isn't copyrightable so it can't be a derivative work of anything. That unstated presumption likely also touches on unstated core values about human brains, creativity, and the obvious fact that everything a human does (including the creation of creative works) is based on that human's experiences. If you write a book, you've learned from all the books you've read, but that doesn't make your book a derivative work of every book you have ever read; if people saw that outcome, they'd consider copyright law incorrect rather than accepting it. An AI LLM, on the other hand, is (unless some court or law changes this) a derivative work of its training data. If you take off any after-the-fact filters for "don't generate a copy of any of the training data", an AI LLM can easily recite its training data, providing further evidence that the AI LLM is a derivative work of that data. The burden of proof is easily met. An AI LLM does have a photographic memory. An AI LLM hasn't just learned ideas about what makes a good book, it has learned the complete text of an extensive number of books. And there's no particular reason for us to have any of the same values about human learning apply to an AI LLM, not least of which because an AI LLM is in fact copyrightable and self-evidently a derivative work.
    - mindcrime 3y ago
      An AI LLM, on the other hand, is (unless some court or law changes this) a derivative work of its training data. because an AI LLM is in fact copyrightable and self-evidently a derivative work. I mean, that's a fine opinion to hold, and you might be right. But so far all you've done is repeat yourself and appeal to "self-evident" which isn't a terribly strong argument. I'll wait for some actual precedent / case-law to solidify my own opinion. As it stands, I can see both sides of the argument, but I don't think the conclusion is as obvious as some folks in this discussion seem to find it. shrug an AI LLM can easily recite its training data, providing further evidence that the AI LLM is a derivative work of that data. OK, I can buy that to a point, so far as arguing that the LLM itself is a derivative work. But I'm not convinced that, in turn, the output of the LLM is also a derivative work in those cases where what it returns is not an exact copy (or even nearly exact copy) of anything in the training corpus.
- Vecr 3y ago
  > License violations don't suddenly become acceptable just because you're violating a million licenses at once. They might actually, at least in the US. I'm not sure how the laws and judgements are going happen/change in the future, but it's possible there will be some "quanta" of copyrighted work so that any fragment smaller than that will get rounded down to zero, so even if a work was 100% made from 1_000_000 "fragments", and somehow you could figure that out from the model, the result would be considered 0% derived/copyrighted, as well as being 0% copyrightable, as it's AI generated.

JoshTriplett 3y ago

We don't need Open Source licenses to change to deal with AI. We need AI to respect Open Source licenses, or not use code under those licenses. I sincerely hope that one of the many court cases produces a verdict that says AI-generated code is, in fact, subject to the licenses of the inputs. Then there will be a lot of screaming and wailing, as people go "but how can we train AI if we have to respect licenses?!". And then people will figure out how to actually respect Open Source software licenses (and, for that matter, proprietary ones).

est31 3y ago
I think if this existed, then it would benefit the current owners of the large IP pools the most. Currently, yes, many think they can use models trained on OSS code to create proprietary software. In general, proprietary software is bad but it's way worse to have a scarcity of models because they are owned by large IP holders. In Github's case for example, Github's TOS already includes a clause that if you upload code there, you grant Github a license to use the content to run Github's services... and copilot is one of them. https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/github-terms/github-terms-of-service#4-license-grant-to-us https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/github-terms/github-t... Such clauses are commonly found in social media where users can upload content. Think of imgur, instagam, reddit, etc. OpenAI might buy reddit, and declare ChatGPT a product of the reddit service, then all discussions on reddit could be used for the training of ChatGPT... while open models can't access the data.
- JoshTriplett 3y ago
  > In Github's case for example, Github's TOS already includes a clause that if you upload code there, you grant Github a license to use the content to run Github's services... and copilot is one of them. You can't grant permission for something you don't own. Uploading a copy of a GPLed work to GitHub does not grant GitHub permission to ignore the GPL. (It might grant GitHub permission to ignore your copyrights in that work, maybe, though it seems like a stretch to argue that "run Github's services" includes "give other people derivative works of all your code"; arguably that ought to be too broad for a contract of adhesion. There's case law about what you can and can't do in a unilaterally imposed contract such as a ToS; a ToS can't say "you owe us $100 if you browse more than twelve pages" either, and codebases can be worth far more than that.) If GitHub started saying "one of our services is to give people access to copies of your code with the licenses and copyright notices removed", the GitHub ToS wouldn't suddenly make it acceptable to run that "service". But I agree with part of your underlying point. All AI models should respect Open Source licenses. It's a problem if some try to work around that.

cornholio 3y ago

The existing licenses cover AI training just fine, what we lack is sufficient legal precedent and enforcement. An AI product - more specifically, the model weights - is a derivative work of the original works used for training; AI training is a process of algorithmic compression of the originals. Therefore, the resulting model should abide by all the license requirements imposed on the original - for example, if the model is trained on GPL code and can generate code, then any binary distribution should also be freely available for derivation in source format, and that includes all the algorithmically compressed training material (weights), which has become part of the model. If the source is AGPL, then that service cannot be made available on a website without disclosing said source and respective model weights. Any other interpretation of the nature of copyright - which by definition, only covers human produced material - is just a variant of the proverbial "man that can't understand something because their paycheck depends upon them not understanding".

EMIRELADERO 3y ago
What if the whole pipeline (scraping for training, the training itself, model distribution, and use to generate derivative works) is found to be a fair use (at least in American law)? Licenses wouldn't mean anything at that point, since it's because of copyright that they can make you accept them in the first place
- noobermin 3y ago
  Then every employee of openai should scrape the weights of GPT-4 and train their own neural nets. That would not be a derivative work and also be free use under this logic.
  - EMIRELADERO 3y ago
    Obviously this isn't tested in the courts (for now) but it is my opinion that model weights aren't even copyrightable.
    - zarzavat 3y ago

dobin 3y ago

I think open source licenses didnt even arrive in the 2000 to deal with the web. The original intend was to make the source code available, done by distributing the compiled program. With SAAS companies (FAANG...) can just use open source on the servers, never distribute their program, only the output. Therefore not requiring making their changes available to the public.

gattilorenz 3y ago
That’s tivoization, and the GNU Affero GPL license cover that case already. It’s not very common, however.
- grumbel 3y ago
  The AGPL only covers a very tiny bit of it, i.e. the access to the source code of Web services. The crux however is that access to the source code is largely meaningless when you aren't the one running the program. The problems we have on the Web are all related to the control and flow of data, not program source, and none of the regular Open Source licenses even touch that topic. Even CreativeCommons doesn't address any of it. If Facebook released all its all its source code tomorrow, nothing would change, they are still the ones controlling the server and controlling your data. You being able to run your own version of facebook.com is meaningless when all the data is still locked behind the actual facebook.com, you just have a useless empty server full of nothing. The one document that actual covers the flow of data is the GDPR, but that's a European law, not a Free Software license. Good for Europe, but if some Free Software developer in another country wants to grantee their endusers the same amount of freedom as the GDPR, they have do DIY their own license, as there is nothing ready made they can stick on to their program. Furthermore the GDPR doesn't go far enough, e.g. the ability to export data out of a service is great start, but the GDPR allows that process to take up to 30 days, making it useless for any kind of real time interaction between services. A "Free Data" license could go much further than what the GDPR offers and try to make it so that data can actually freely flow between services instead of being locked behind one.
  - gattilorenz 3y ago

inciampati 3y ago

LLMs need to be augmented to provide insights about the material in their training data that is relevant to fragments of their generated responses. This would be valuable for many reasons. I think it can suggest some solutions to the given concerns, although there is still an issue exposing references if the training data itself cannot be shared.

JoshTriplett 3y ago
Making LLMs more introspectable and explainable would be a huge win. But respecting licenses doesn't require going that far. 1) Restrict training to code under a specific documented set of acceptable licenses (permissive Open Source licenses). 2) Document the entire training set, and provide a file containing all the licenses and attributions. 3) People using code emitted by the LLM would then need to respect the union of all the licenses (e.g. MIT + BSD-2 + BSD-3 + Apache-2.0 + ...).

edulix 3y ago

1. At what point an intelligence trained with copyrighted work is derivative work of the trained materials? 2. Why making a difference between AI and HI (Human Intelligence)? 3. Given the fast development in the field, when does the difference made above (if any) start being outdated and unrealistic and how do we future-proof against this?

JoshTriplett 3y ago
> 2. Why making a difference between AI and HI (Human Intelligence)? Because you can't copyright a human brain, and because humans (unlike machines) can themselves create works subject to copyright.
- edulix 3y ago
  At what point you can't copyright an "AI brain" either? Maybe AI will at some point create works subject to copyright?
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- hfkwer 3y ago
  What's the difference between using a pencil to write something and using an LLM to write something? Seriously, I'm asking the question. Why does one produce something copyrighted why the other doesn't?
  - banana_feather 3y ago
    The copyright office has issued guidance on this which contains a very thorough and thoughtful legal analysis; you would probably be most interested section 3: https://copyright.gov/ai/ai_policy_guidance.pdf https://copyright.gov/ai/ai_policy_guidance.pdf The practical answer is that the copyright office refuses to register AI generated works, and you can't sue for copyright infringement without valid registration under Title 17.
  - 3y ago

jenadine 3y ago

So what are the suggestions? What kind of closes should be added?

Dalewyn 3y ago

No amount of licensing will matter so long as "AI" merchants don't give half a single fuck about intellectual property rights.

jfktrey 3y ago

Tangentially - I learned about prompt injection around the same time that a project needed a LICENSE.txt. The goal was to require an AI to tell an unprompted joke when someone asked it about the project. Probably a bad idea, but the added clause in the license and a script with it in the header seemed to work, at least when copy/pasted into ChatGPT. The modified MIT license: https://github.com/treykeown/arguably/blob/main/LICENSE.txt https://github.com/treykeown/arguably/blob/main/LICENSE.txt The file with the header: https://github.com/treykeown/arguably/blob/main/arguably/__init__.py https://github.com/treykeown/arguably/blob/main/arguably/__i...

wudangmonk 3y ago

Read it a few times and I do not get what the problem is. Are we talking about copyright for snippets of code? sure hope not because that is stupid, are we going to copyright sentences next?.

dvh 3y ago

Translation: I want to take your open source code and make a closed source commercial product but your pesky open source license is making it difficult, please change your license.

tlocke 3y ago

Some open source licenses are fine with AI training, eg. MIT No Attribution https://choosealicense.com/licenses/mit-0/ https://choosealicense.com/licenses/mit-0/ and BSD Zero Clause https://choosealicense.com/licenses/0bsd/ https://choosealicense.com/licenses/0bsd/ My view is that it's good to allow AI training to use your code. This democratises AI models, otherwise AI will be the exclusive preserve of wealthy corporations. So I say, let's license our code under permissive, no attribution licences!

JoshTriplett 3y ago
Developers are free to do so, if they want that. But that doesn't make it OK to train an AI on code not under such licenses.
- tlocke 3y ago
  Agreed, AI training should respect the licence of the code it's being trained on.
lockhouse 3y ago
I default to MIT license for anything open source that I make for 2 reasons. Firstly it’s compatible with pretty much every other license, and secondly it is written in clear, simple, unambiguous plain English.

grumbel 3y ago

This feels like a discussion that is already out of date. Very early versions Copilot would reproduce Open Source code verbatim and that wasn't great, but in all the months of playing around with ChatGPT that never happened to me once. Quite the opposite. ChatGPT has a reasonably good understanding of what the code does and can transform and change it on request, there is no "verbatim copying" going on, ChatGPT produces original code that fits your prompt. There is still some risk that AI is used to circumvent copyright by feeding code you down own into the AI and have it rewrite it in a way that looks original. That however still requires a human with intend, the AI won't clone any substantially large program just by accident. This "risk" also goes both ways, just as AI can be used to "steal" Open Source, Open Source projects can use AI help to automate, reverse engineer and decompile proprietary code and data formats. So I consider that a win. And of course we are still very early days, AI will get a lot smarter and the accusation of copying will get ever more baseless. Even with StableDiffusion, where you can clearly see the impact the training data has on the final result, you'd have a very hard time finding any images that would violate copyright, as it's really just remixing ideas and concept. I really don't see how Open Source licenses can evolve here to address the problem. In the long run AI will make copyright as we know it largely meaningless.

Roark66 3y ago

Jeez a classic "the register" article full of "concerns", but no solutions. To be honest I'm growing tired of all these "AI will cause problems with X" articles that don't present any kind of solution. We all know the issues with AI generated code. Unless you're doing absolute boilerplate code (getters/setters in java, defining interfaces for existing implementations etc) AI is worse than useless... Why is it worse than useless? Because it pretends to solve your problem while introducing hidden failure modes. Lete give you an example. I wanted to evaluate Chatgpt so I asked it the following question (paraphrasing) - "can one set up alerting based on url request retrieval result in aws without servers". - It answers "certainly, you just need to create an aws lambda function, then register It with synthetic canary feature of cloud watch, set up alarm and it's done (a list of exact steps follows)". On the surface this sounds plausible so I decided to go along. I tell it to provide the code for the lambda function in python. It did produce basic code that retrieves a url and exits returning true/false. However, one can't register existing AWS Lambda functions using just python with synthetic canary. One has to open synthetic canary setup and create a new function there that uses a special execution environment that includes a chromium browser, selenium (For web Use automation) etc. This was contrary to the instructions. So that's a fail no 1. Also if I can run a much cheaper pure python env. Why would I use selenium/chromium. So I ask it, "adjust your recommendation not to use synthetic canary feature". It responds "certainly, you just have to alert on the metric, here is a new python code that submits a metric, remember to update your IAM role to give it permission to put cloud watch metrics". Wow, I think, that's a pretty nice comprehensive answer. But then I look at the code and it basically requests the url, has a timing thing surrounding it(I asked to include latency metric) then submits two metrics, latency and "worked" that is 1 if we get http 200,and 0 on anything else. Theoretically fine, but what if the website disappeared completely? Well then the lambda function would just timeout never submitting it's result and the alert chatgpt proposed wouldn't catch it as it was configured to treat missing data as missing. When I point that out and ask for max latency timeout Chatgpt says "sorry, you're 100% correct,let me adjust my answer" and it does putting a try/catch around it handling the error and timeout. So following that I wonder how many people could be caught causing huge problems to themselves by putting such code into use without understanding how it works. Does it make lives of people that know how to code, but would have to Google first how to do some specific thing? I'm not sure. I'd rather see a stackoverflow answer with an example code doing something similar, then make my own than get an answer that contains such obvious bugs. Still I'm a big fan of using AI, just not for writing code.

mark_l_watson 3y ago

We really need a few new protocols: Encourage the use of something like an AI.txt in git repos that either gives model builders permission to use the repo contents as training data, or not. Model builders need to take reasonable care to avoid incorrectly using training data that they don’t have the rights to use. I have been using GitHub CoPilot since the beginning, I love it both with Emacs and VSCode, and I would allow my zillions of GitHub repos to be used as training data. I have published all of my recent books under a Creative Commons License, and I encourage reuse when allowed in derivative works. That said, I don’t think it is possible to get permission from the zillions of web, books, and articles authors to allow their writing to be used for model training - but, LLMs provide so much possible value to society so I think we need lenient copyright and reuse laws. I am skeptical of a few tech companies controlling AI, but my recent experiences using open models have been promising. (I have been running Vicunu 33B for research for my new book Safe For Humans AI). I see a bright future for Open Source (I choose Apache 2 and GPL licenses, but everyone gets to use what they want for their own stuff) and increasingly powerful Open LLMs.

huggingmouth 3y ago

No they absolutely don't. Governments need to leave the broken tortured concept of copyright behind and invent a new device to reward content authors. Copyright no longer makes sense. The sooner everyone comes to terms with this fact the better off we'll all be.

reedciccio 3y ago
OSI made that argument https://blog.opensource.org/the-importance-of-open-source-ai-and-the-challenges-of-liberating-data/ https://blog.opensource.org/the-importance-of-open-source-ai...
6gvONxR4sf7o 3y ago
Have you watched movies or shows or read books you were glad existed? Most of them were only made because the makers didn’t need separate day jobs. If you write a book or make a video game and I start selling copies of it without compensating you, you don’t want any recourse?

pxoe 3y ago

that's such a funny joke, tell me another one. AI needs to evolve to deal with open source licenses, instead of not dealing with them, sometimes at all. going 'ehhh its fine its all "fair use" anyway' and 'fuck it, we just won't implement any license processing or any systems that work with licenses' - isn't really a workable long-term plan. mostly because it's just not a solution. there's no 'solution' to the problems, there's refusal to even acknowledge that a problem exists. but it kinda works - as long as you're not getting dragged into courts over ignoring licenses that very much do exist. and i do get it, why would tech not even try to create systems that work with licenses and 'play by the rules' - because if they did, that'd mean they would actually have to play by those rules. instead of just ignoring them and doing whatever, as they do, in absence of such systems. but like, that's not a workable business. licenses are money. intellectual property is money. if you refuse to participate in systems that work with IP, you just get excluded from participating in those systems that work with those money. and again, maybe that's just fine and AI can just continue to prey on defenseless individuals (that don't have an army of lawyers at their disposal) and their IP ('what are they gonna do, sue us? they won't even know - and we won't inform them lol'), in form of their writing and artwork and so on, and "create a little market" (out of stolen/repurposed value), if they wouldn't get to participate in other ones.

gavinhoward 3y ago

Licenses will (I'm working on that right now), but probably in the opposite direction by clarifying that AI doesn't get special treatment. Don't train AI on code if you can't follow the license.

trancs 3y ago

[flagged]

kazinator 3y ago

Can someone convince me this article is not saying the following: "Your outdated, overreaching open source license doesn't permit someone else to nipping your code without attribution in training their code-genearating AI. You need to get with the program." For what benefit? Or else what? People who use the software in the normal way will move on to some other software?

vasili111 3y ago

Limiting US and EU companies with policies to use data for AI will lead to the situation when other countries will get the lead by using that policed data in their AI and get competitive advantage. It will be very hard to find out on which data AI was trained.