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Yes, the prompt is copyrighted, just like your post here is copyrighted. But I don't think there's any point in versioning the prompts. The responses are just t

Yes, the prompt is copyrighted, just like your post here is copyrighted. But I don't think there's any point in versioning the prompts. The responses are just too nondeterministic. If you feed it the exact same prompt again, you can get something quite different back. On the other hand, if giving the same prompt got you the same response (like a reproducible build), then absolutely yes, version those prompts.

walterbell 2y ago
Imagine a court which ruled that LLMs must have a reproducible mode, based on a session ID provided by the user, to establish a legally binding and deterministic connection between copyrighted LLM prompt and generated code. Are LLM vendors allowed to permanently archive user-copyrighted prompts? Presumably the vendor's EULA can force the user to grant a non-exclusive license for any purpose. > If you feed it the exact same prompt again, you can get something quite different back If one trusted an LLM to generate code from the first prompt, it might be worthwhile to periodically evaluate new code generated from the same prompt. E.g. can the LLM generate a better implementation, or does testing of new output identify an ambiguity in the first prompt? Would a newbie developer have written better code after N months/years of experience?
- diggernet 2y ago
  Those are fun thoughts. I've imagined a world where you can create a long, complex prompt that results in a reproducible response of code that does exactly what you want, and does it correctly. In that world, the prompt could be your versioned source and the build process could start from that. Implementing changes could be done by tweaking the prompt. Of course you'd still want to archive the "intermediate" source code, if only to protect yourself from an LLM outage. In that world, you actually would be getting new code from the source prompt regularly, and yes, it hopefully would improve over time. In our world however (at least for me), usage tends to be more conversational, so there really isn't even "a prompt" to save. Not to mention that I never use the output as-is.

walterbell 2y ago

Imagine a court which ruled that LLMs must have a reproducible mode, based on a session ID provided by the user, to establish a legally binding and deterministic connection between copyrighted LLM prompt and generated code. Are LLM vendors allowed to permanently archive user-copyrighted prompts? Presumably the vendor's EULA can force the user to grant a non-exclusive license for any purpose. > If you feed it the exact same prompt again, you can get something quite different back If one trusted an LLM to generate code from the first prompt, it might be worthwhile to periodically evaluate new code generated from the same prompt. E.g. can the LLM generate a better implementation, or does testing of new output identify an ambiguity in the first prompt? Would a newbie developer have written better code after N months/years of experience?

diggernet 2y ago
Those are fun thoughts. I've imagined a world where you can create a long, complex prompt that results in a reproducible response of code that does exactly what you want, and does it correctly. In that world, the prompt could be your versioned source and the build process could start from that. Implementing changes could be done by tweaking the prompt. Of course you'd still want to archive the "intermediate" source code, if only to protect yourself from an LLM outage. In that world, you actually would be getting new code from the source prompt regularly, and yes, it hopefully would improve over time. In our world however (at least for me), usage tends to be more conversational, so there really isn't even "a prompt" to save. Not to mention that I never use the output as-is.