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From that page: > Will my code be used for training AI models? > GitLab does not train generative AI models based on private (non-public) data. The vendors we

by remram 3y ago

From that page: > Will my code be used for training AI models? > GitLab does not train generative AI models based on private (non-public) data. The vendors we work with also do not train models based on private data. So they will steal your code if it is public, ignoring license. Understood.

arwineap 3y ago
Given that it's public, yes, gitlab as well as every other model on earth will be trained from it. Is it right? I don't know. Can we stop it? Absolutely not. Honestly, I find it comforting that gitlab is at least being straightforward about it
- cbsmith 3y ago
  > Is it right? I don't know. Can we stop it? Absolutely not. Depends on what you mean by "stop it". Patents are public, but it's hard to employ them for commercial purpose without an agreement from the owner.
- bondarchuk 3y ago
  I would not call that straightforward. Being straightforward would mean including something like "we & our vendors might (or will) train generative AI models based on public data", instead of letting us infer that for ourselves.
- freedomben 3y ago
  Straightforward? I very much disagree. You could maybe convince me that it is straightforward when measured against only corporate speak, but if not looked at as corporate speak it is very much not straightforward. Straightforward would be an explicit "Yes, we train from public code regardless of the license"
  - danielmarkbruce 3y ago
    The only statement they can make which is accurate is that they will not train on private data. They might train on your data if it's public. If your code is public, and it doesn't get pulled into their dataset, they won't train on it.
calvinmorrison 3y ago
that's what github and software heritage do too. apparently just publishing your software code means it's open game even if it's all rights reserved.
- arghwhat 3y ago
  Just in case people didn't know, the phrase "all rights reserved" does not have any legal consequence (in the early days of copyright people felt it was necessary, but all rights are automatically granted), and uploading content to Github means that you must also license it to Github and other Github users as per the ToS. It is your responsibility to ensure that you can grant that license. 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... In addition, one has to consider whether the act of studying a project whose sources you have legally obtained to gain experiences applied in other contexts where the original license may not apply or be upheld is an issue. This applies to humans as much as to ML.
  - calvinmorrison 3y ago
    > You grant us and our legal successors the right to store, archive, parse, and display Your Content, and make incidental copies, as necessary to provide the Service, including improving the Service over time A couple things - you agree github can do it, ostensbly taking archives for backups sure, but in this case it's to distribute out to some 3rd party and explicitly to be locked in a vault with no business purpose. My personal uploading of say - a GPL licensed code, or hell, microsofts leaked code DOES NOT magically grant github to do whatever they want with it. There's already a license, no? from the github archive page: > Archiving software across multiple organizations and forms of storage helps to ensure its long-term preservation. "The Arctic Code Vault" > On 02/02/2020 GitHub captured a snapshot of every active public repository. Those millions of repos were then archived to hardened film designed to last for 1,000 years, and stored in the GitHub Arctic Code Vault in a decommissioned coal mine deep beneath an Arctic mountain in Svalbard, Norway. Our partners include the Long Now Foundation, Software Heritage, the Internet Archive, Microsoft Research’s Project Silica, the Arctic World Archive, GHTorrent, and GHArchive. Our advisors include both technological visionaries and world-renowned experts in the humanities. so, like, I am sure it was vetted by lawyers, but my plain english understanding of that is github may need to archive it, whats not clear is that github may send it to any number of non profits to do with it what it pleases. Then you've got software heritage who literally just scrapes the web for cgit repos and copies them without any agreement or license between you as the host and software heritage. Anyway, it's all very Uber-model. Fuck the legality, we're just gonna do it and fuck it because the worst that can happen is a slap on the wrist.
pryelluw 3y ago
I’ve been feeling more and more that we should reconsider open source licenses to protect our rights as authors from LLM vendors. I’m not against them basing their models on my work. I do have reservations on them generating their models on my work and creating derivative works without respecting the license. It’s why I’ve started to use the MIT license less and less and have adopted various from the GPL family. Models trained in OSS should be open sourced IMO.
- toastal 3y ago
  https://github.com/non-ai-licenses/non-ai-licenses https://github.com/non-ai-licenses/non-ai-licenses These aren’t official (& hosted on a different, proprietary data siphoner), but there are attempts to add anti-AI clauses.
  - roywiggins 3y ago
    Companies are busy training their LLMs on totally unlicensed material. I'd be curious to know how much weight, legally speaking, anti-AI clauses can have. Naively I would expect no license should be maximally restrictive on what you can do with something.
  - Zambyte 3y ago
    Assuming copyright licenses are actually meaningful for this "anti-AI" clause, the only license that this actually changes an AIs ability to comply with is the CC0 license. All the rest are already violated by an AI agent (they all require attribution that an AI does not comply with). And the CC0 license seems extremely contradictory with this added clause. I would definitely stay away from all of these licenses.
- yencabulator 3y ago
  If they're not respecting MIT's attribution requirement for derived works, why would they respect GPL?
  - pas 3y ago
    They argue their use is transformative and thus the works are not derivatives.
golergka 3y ago
If a person can read it and learn from it, AI should be able to do the same.
- freedomben 3y ago
  I agree. Given the effort that has been put in to ensure code isn't copied verbatim, I don't see much of a philosophic difference between a human doing it or AI doing it. That said I think it's weasely that they would just explicitly say it. It's obviously a question a lot of people have if it's in the FAQs, and a non-answer like, "we never train on private code" is ridiculous.
- oblio 3y ago
  There's a valid moral question here, in short: why? I care about helping other people. Helping some type of amoral entity that's usually controlled by another amoral for-profit entity: why would I help those?
  - EVyesnoyesnoyes 3y ago
    Because you get to use it too? Llama, mistral and co.
    - Zambyte 3y ago
      Not all models have Free weights and not all models that are Free can run on your hardware. Normally the "can't run on your hardware" is a little dubious, but given how insanely high the hardware requirements can get to run these I think it's meaningful here.
      - EVyesnoyesnoyes 3y ago
        I'm still here to create a product/tool/script/solve something and not just to write code. If anything i do helps to make the ecosystem around me better i'm for it. And if you look at anything LLM right now, all the research happening, its not opensource doing the research. Its high paid google, ms, etc. people and academy replicates it fast for opensource. We already have a give and take on both sides. Without them, we would not have that at all.
jacooper 3y ago
This is for the supreme Court to decide, till then, its assumed to be fair use by these companies.
rickydroll 3y ago
I don't think licensing issues are important in this context. I have never gotten code from an LLM system that wasn't something I would create myself if I taken the time to write it manually. You should be thinking of LLM coding assistance as a junior programmer working for you with all of the pluses and minuses. If someone claims they found code from open source project in the output of an LLM, it is most likely the result of over constraining the specification i.e. I want you to make me painting that looks just like the Mona Lisa.
renewiltord 3y ago
[flagged]
- remram 3y ago
  You're obviously not posting in good faith, but their docs are CC-BY-SA, and I comply with the terms. Bro.
  - renewiltord 3y ago
    No link to license: non-compliant. Less theft, less lying about compliance, more compliance please.
    - wizzwizz4 3y ago
      In the US, there's a notion of "fair use": quoting small passages with attribution for the purposes of criticism does not require reproduction of the relevant Creative Commons license. Most of the other former British colonies have the concept of "fair dealing", which is similar. https://www.documentary.org/feature/negotiating-copyright-exceptions-across-borders https://www.documentary.org/feature/negotiating-copyright-ex... makes interesting reading.
    - remram 3y ago
      The link at the top of this page has the license. In what way can comments in this page, when they clearly state that content comes from the article, not be clearly linking to the article?

by remram 3y ago

arwineap 3y ago

Given that it's public, yes, gitlab as well as every other model on earth will be trained from it. Is it right? I don't know. Can we stop it? Absolutely not. Honestly, I find it comforting that gitlab is at least being straightforward about it

cbsmith 3y ago
> Is it right? I don't know. Can we stop it? Absolutely not. Depends on what you mean by "stop it". Patents are public, but it's hard to employ them for commercial purpose without an agreement from the owner.
bondarchuk 3y ago
I would not call that straightforward. Being straightforward would mean including something like "we & our vendors might (or will) train generative AI models based on public data", instead of letting us infer that for ourselves.
freedomben 3y ago
Straightforward? I very much disagree. You could maybe convince me that it is straightforward when measured against only corporate speak, but if not looked at as corporate speak it is very much not straightforward. Straightforward would be an explicit "Yes, we train from public code regardless of the license"
- danielmarkbruce 3y ago
  The only statement they can make which is accurate is that they will not train on private data. They might train on your data if it's public. If your code is public, and it doesn't get pulled into their dataset, they won't train on it.

calvinmorrison 3y ago

arghwhat 3y ago
Just in case people didn't know, the phrase "all rights reserved" does not have any legal consequence (in the early days of copyright people felt it was necessary, but all rights are automatically granted), and uploading content to Github means that you must also license it to Github and other Github users as per the ToS. It is your responsibility to ensure that you can grant that license. 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... In addition, one has to consider whether the act of studying a project whose sources you have legally obtained to gain experiences applied in other contexts where the original license may not apply or be upheld is an issue. This applies to humans as much as to ML.
- calvinmorrison 3y ago
  > You grant us and our legal successors the right to store, archive, parse, and display Your Content, and make incidental copies, as necessary to provide the Service, including improving the Service over time A couple things - you agree github can do it, ostensbly taking archives for backups sure, but in this case it's to distribute out to some 3rd party and explicitly to be locked in a vault with no business purpose. My personal uploading of say - a GPL licensed code, or hell, microsofts leaked code DOES NOT magically grant github to do whatever they want with it. There's already a license, no? from the github archive page: > Archiving software across multiple organizations and forms of storage helps to ensure its long-term preservation. "The Arctic Code Vault" > On 02/02/2020 GitHub captured a snapshot of every active public repository. Those millions of repos were then archived to hardened film designed to last for 1,000 years, and stored in the GitHub Arctic Code Vault in a decommissioned coal mine deep beneath an Arctic mountain in Svalbard, Norway. Our partners include the Long Now Foundation, Software Heritage, the Internet Archive, Microsoft Research’s Project Silica, the Arctic World Archive, GHTorrent, and GHArchive. Our advisors include both technological visionaries and world-renowned experts in the humanities. so, like, I am sure it was vetted by lawyers, but my plain english understanding of that is github may need to archive it, whats not clear is that github may send it to any number of non profits to do with it what it pleases. Then you've got software heritage who literally just scrapes the web for cgit repos and copies them without any agreement or license between you as the host and software heritage. Anyway, it's all very Uber-model. Fuck the legality, we're just gonna do it and fuck it because the worst that can happen is a slap on the wrist.

pryelluw 3y ago

I’ve been feeling more and more that we should reconsider open source licenses to protect our rights as authors from LLM vendors. I’m not against them basing their models on my work. I do have reservations on them generating their models on my work and creating derivative works without respecting the license. It’s why I’ve started to use the MIT license less and less and have adopted various from the GPL family. Models trained in OSS should be open sourced IMO.

toastal 3y ago
https://github.com/non-ai-licenses/non-ai-licenses https://github.com/non-ai-licenses/non-ai-licenses These aren’t official (& hosted on a different, proprietary data siphoner), but there are attempts to add anti-AI clauses.
- roywiggins 3y ago
  Companies are busy training their LLMs on totally unlicensed material. I'd be curious to know how much weight, legally speaking, anti-AI clauses can have. Naively I would expect no license should be maximally restrictive on what you can do with something.
- Zambyte 3y ago
  Assuming copyright licenses are actually meaningful for this "anti-AI" clause, the only license that this actually changes an AIs ability to comply with is the CC0 license. All the rest are already violated by an AI agent (they all require attribution that an AI does not comply with). And the CC0 license seems extremely contradictory with this added clause. I would definitely stay away from all of these licenses.
yencabulator 3y ago
If they're not respecting MIT's attribution requirement for derived works, why would they respect GPL?
- pas 3y ago
  They argue their use is transformative and thus the works are not derivatives.

golergka 3y ago

If a person can read it and learn from it, AI should be able to do the same.

freedomben 3y ago
I agree. Given the effort that has been put in to ensure code isn't copied verbatim, I don't see much of a philosophic difference between a human doing it or AI doing it. That said I think it's weasely that they would just explicitly say it. It's obviously a question a lot of people have if it's in the FAQs, and a non-answer like, "we never train on private code" is ridiculous.
oblio 3y ago
There's a valid moral question here, in short: why? I care about helping other people. Helping some type of amoral entity that's usually controlled by another amoral for-profit entity: why would I help those?
- EVyesnoyesnoyes 3y ago
  Because you get to use it too? Llama, mistral and co.
  - Zambyte 3y ago
    Not all models have Free weights and not all models that are Free can run on your hardware. Normally the "can't run on your hardware" is a little dubious, but given how insanely high the hardware requirements can get to run these I think it's meaningful here.
    - EVyesnoyesnoyes 3y ago
      I'm still here to create a product/tool/script/solve something and not just to write code. If anything i do helps to make the ecosystem around me better i'm for it. And if you look at anything LLM right now, all the research happening, its not opensource doing the research. Its high paid google, ms, etc. people and academy replicates it fast for opensource. We already have a give and take on both sides. Without them, we would not have that at all.

jacooper 3y ago

This is for the supreme Court to decide, till then, its assumed to be fair use by these companies.

rickydroll 3y ago

I don't think licensing issues are important in this context. I have never gotten code from an LLM system that wasn't something I would create myself if I taken the time to write it manually. You should be thinking of LLM coding assistance as a junior programmer working for you with all of the pluses and minuses. If someone claims they found code from open source project in the output of an LLM, it is most likely the result of over constraining the specification i.e. I want you to make me painting that looks just like the Mona Lisa.

renewiltord 3y ago

[flagged]

remram 3y ago
You're obviously not posting in good faith, but their docs are CC-BY-SA, and I comply with the terms. Bro.
- renewiltord 3y ago
  No link to license: non-compliant. Less theft, less lying about compliance, more compliance please.
  - wizzwizz4 3y ago
    In the US, there's a notion of "fair use": quoting small passages with attribution for the purposes of criticism does not require reproduction of the relevant Creative Commons license. Most of the other former British colonies have the concept of "fair dealing", which is similar. https://www.documentary.org/feature/negotiating-copyright-exceptions-across-borders https://www.documentary.org/feature/negotiating-copyright-ex... makes interesting reading.
  - remram 3y ago
    The link at the top of this page has the license. In what way can comments in this page, when they clearly state that content comes from the article, not be clearly linking to the article?