5 ms·

The FSF considers large language models

• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• isodev 1y ago
  > There is also, of course, the question of copyright infringements in code produced by LLMs, usually in the form of training data leaking into the model's output Well yes, LLMs like Claude Code are merely a "copyright violation as a service". Everyone is so focused on the next new "AI" feature but we haven't actually resolved the issue of all model providers using stolen code to train their models and their lack of transparency on sourced training data.
  • 1gn15 1y ago
    Copyright violation is not stealing, and training is not copyright violation (it's already been ruled as fair use, multiple times).
    • inglor_cz 1y ago
      I think the concerning problem is when the LLM reproduces some copyrighted code verbatim, and the user doesn't even stand a chance to know it.
      • 1gn15 1y ago
        Yes, but that's not what the grandparent comment was talking about.
        • isodev 1y ago
          If I’m the grandparent comment, it was a big part of what I mean. Stolen/Unknown content goes in for training, verbatim or very close “inspired by” code comes out and there is no way to verify the source - “violation as a service”.
          • fluidcruft 1y ago
            Verbatim dumping is one thing but otherwise this seems closer to the issue of plagiarism than copyright. If someone studies the Linux kernel and then builds a new kernel that follows some of the design decisions and idioms that's not really copyright infringement. The bigger issue (spiritually anyway) seems to be the need to develop free software LLM tools the same way FSF needed to develop free compilers. That's what's going to keep users from being able to adapt and control their machines. The issue is more ecological that programmers equipped with LLM are likely much more productive at creating and modifying code. Some of the rest seems more like saying that anyone who studies GCC internals is forever tainted and must write copyleft code for life which seems laughable to me. Again this is more a topic of plagiarism than copyright which are fairly similar but actually different and not as clear cut.
            • isodev 1y ago
              > more a topic of plagiarism than copyright You’re right, in the context of a technical legal interpretation they’re different. In the context of right or wrong, they amount to the same. > anyone who studies GCC internals LLMs are not a someone, they’re more like … the indigo printout of some text or design, you then use to make a scrapbook to be mass produced for profit. Very different situation. When the AI bubble pops, I hope we will have some equalisation back to something more ethical.
              • tjr 1y ago
                LLMs are not a someone This is in line with my disagreement over the fair use rulings. Most people who published works that have been used to train AI systems, created those works and published them for other people to consume and benefit from, not for proprietary software systems to consume and benefit from. The existing licenses and laws did not account for this; nobody was anticipating it.
              • fluidcruft 1y ago
                I don't know... there's a pretty clear difference between copyright and a say a utility patent or trade secret. The right and wrong in FSF isn't about labor, it's about control over machines and ability to modify. Free software has never tried to control the community using patents and trade secrets and in general are rather hostile to them. In fact its fairly contemptuous of copyright and uses it from a purely utilitarian perspective. And frankly FSF is not opposed to commercial software. They're opposed to users being unable to modify machines and software that they are using. That's the core of the ethics. See the origins in that damn printer firmware RMS did battle with. But I also disagree in general about LLMs. LLMs are statistical text models but the general concept of what if there were an "AI" that wasn't a LLM and was trained on open source software is the same at the end of the day. I think whether or not LLM are intelligent or equivalent to humans is a red herring. There's no reason to not consider the implications of machines that are indistinguishable or even superior to human programmers. Particularly if we're discussing ethics getting lost in implementation details seems like a distraction and then all the derived ethics gets thrown out after the next innovation.
      • CamperBob2 1y ago
        When that happens, it's because the code was trivial enough to be compressed to a minuscule handful of bits... either because it literally is trivial, or because it's common enough to have become part of our shared lexicon. As a society, we don't benefit from copyright maximalism, despite how trendy it is around here all of a sudden. See also Oracle v. Google.
        • thesz 1y ago
          Quake's sqrt approximation is not trivial and is not common. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/oc9qj1/copilot_regurgitating_quake_code_including_sweary/ https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/oc9qj1/copilot...
          • CamperBob2 1y ago
            (Shrug) It's a math trick, documented by Abrash among others and very heavily discussed on forums such as this one. And it didn't originate in the Quake codebase. Like much IEEE754 hackery, it goes back to the father of IEEE754 himself, William Kahan. Nobody benefits from a law that says that LLMs can't regurgitate the Quake sqrt() approximation. If that's what the law actually says, which it isn't.
    • isodev 1y ago
      Not really, only a handful of authorities have weighed on that and most of them in a country where model providers literally buy themselves policy and judges.
    • matheusmoreira 1y ago
      Yeah, copyright infringement isn't stealing, copyright shouldn't even exist to begin with. I just think it's especially asinine how corporations are perfectly willing to launder copyrighted works via LLMs when it's profitable to do so. We have to perpetually pay them for their works and if we break their little software locks it's felony contempt of business model, but they get to train their AIs on our works and reproduce them infinitely and with total impunity without paying us a cent. It's that "rules for thee but not for me" nonsense that makes me reach such extreme logical conclusions that I feel empathy for terrorists.
      • thesz 1y ago
        > copyright shouldn't even exist to begin with. You then get trade secretes and guilds. Hardly an improvement.
        • matheusmoreira 1y ago
          Secrets? Just leak them, it only has to happen once. Guilds? Revoke their privileges and protections, and there's nothing they can do about it. Absolutely an improvement. Information wants to be free. Stop criminalizing it and people will find a way to free it. And once it's out there it's over, there is no containing it.
          • wakawaka28 1y ago
            People want to be paid for their work. If you don't let them, they won't do the work. "Information" does not have a mind of its own. Even when the idea of a thing is "out there" there is a lot of grunt work and special stuff that needs to be implemented to get the best outcomes. Nobody owes you that work for free. Regardless of what GPL copers say, it is very hard to make money with software without enforcing some access restrictions and IP. Open source is great when it works, but it does not work for most things nor is it at the leading edge for most things.
            • matheusmoreira 1y ago
    • blibble 1y ago
      > it's already been ruled as fair use, multiple times most countries don't have a concept of fair use but they nearly all have copyright law
      • quantummagic 1y ago
        That fact in itself is a worse injustice than anything the LLM companies are doing. At the very least, it should be open to use in reporting, parody, and critique. Having no concept of such fair-use is oppressive and stifling.
        • Hamuko 1y ago
          Fair use is not the only way to allow critique and/or parody.
          • quantummagic 1y ago
            What are you talking about? You can call it whatever you want, but it amounts to fair-use if you're allowed to use something for the purposes of critique and/or parody.
            • Hamuko 1y ago
              That's not how it works. Specific carveouts in copyright are not the same thing as fair use.
              • quantummagic 1y ago
                You're playing word games. The point is that any system that has no concept of fair-use, no allowance for reasonable usage of copyrighted works, except where explicitly granted by the copyright holder, is inherently unjust and stifling to free expression. How such allowances are specified in law, is irrelevant pedantry. What matters is that the allowances are afforded.
    • thesz 1y ago
      One can train model with copyrighted code as it is fair use, fair enough. Are there any rulings about use of code generated by model trained on copyrighted code? I believe distinction is clear.
  • falcor84 1y ago
    Wasn't copyleft essentially intended to be "copyright violation as a service"? I.e. making it impossible for an individual working with copyleft code to use copyright to assert control over the code?
    • wvenable 1y ago
      Copyleft requires strong copyright protections. Without a license, you have no rights at all to use the code. If you want to use the code, because it's copyrighted, you have abide by the terms of the license.
      • falcor84 1y ago
        > Without a license, you have no rights at all to use the code. Exactly - that is what copyright was set up for (whereas before copyright, people could copy freely), and then copyleft comes and says that everyone can use and modify the code, and the only thing that the license prohibits is the ability of authors of derived works to apply their own copyright. In this way (known as being "viral"), copyleft uses the legal mechanism of copyright to essentially bring things to how they were before copyright.
• bgwalter 1y ago
  It looks like the FSF is going to sit this one out like the SaaS revolution, to which they reacted late with the AGPL but did not push it. They are not working on a new license and Siewicz is already low-key pushing in favor of LLMs: "Many years ago, he said, photographs were not generally seen as being copyrightable. That changed over time as people figured out what could be done with that technology and the creativity it enabled. Photography may be a good analogy for LLMs, he suggested." I have zero trust in the FSF since they backstabbed Stallman. EDIT: Criticizing anything from LWN, be it Debian, Linux or FSF related, results in instant downvotes. LWN is not a critical publication and just lionizes whoever has a title and bloviates on a mailing list or at a conference.
  • gjvc 1y ago
    Yes. 100% agree.
  • lukan 1y ago
    "I have zero trust in the FSF since they backstabbed Stallman." The controversial line might have also been that one.
    • bgwalter 1y ago
      Sure, but remember that the Stallman situation started with a highly clumsy Minsky/Epstein mail on an MIT mailing list. The Epstein coverup was bipartisan and now all tech companies are ostensibly on Trump's side and even finance his ballroom. Are there any protests or demands for the cancellation of Trump, Clinton, Wexner, Black, Barak? I have not seen any. The cancel tech people only go after those who they perceive as weak.
      • inglor_cz 1y ago
        Cancellation of Stallman was the low point of that period, at least within tech, but it also made quite a lot of people aware that this monster of a practice must be resisted, or it will devour everyone unchecked. (Or, at least, anyone.)
• badsectoracula 1y ago
  > The prompt used to create the code should also be provided. The LLM-generated code should be clearly marked. I have a feeling the people who write these haven't really used LLMs for programming because even just playing around with them will make it obvious that this makes no sense - especially if you try to use something local based that lets you rewrite the discussion at will, including any code the LLM generated. E.g. sometimes when trying to get Devstral make something for me, i let it generate whatever (sometimes buggy/not working) code it comes up with[0] and then i start editing its response to fix the bug so that further instructions are under the assumption it generated the correct code from the get go instead of trying to convince it[0] to fix the code it generated. In such a scenario there is no clear separation between LLM-generated code and manually written code nor any specific "prompt" (unless you count all snapshots of the entire discussion every time one hits the "submit" button as a series of prompts, which technically is what the LLM using as a prompt instead of what the user types, but i doubt this was what the author had in mind). And all that without taking into account what someone commented in the article about code not even done in a single session but with plans, restarting from scratch, summarizing, etc (and there are tools to automate these too and those can use a variety of prompts by themselves that the end user isn't even aware of). TBH i think if FSF wants to "consider LLMs" they should begin by gaining some real experience using them first - and bringing people with such experience on board to explain things for them. [0] i do not like anthropomorphizing LLMs, but i cannot think of another description for that :-P
  • cxr 1y ago
    What you're describing isn't any different from a branch of commits between two people practicing a form of continuous integration where they commit whatever they have (whether it breaks the build or not, or is buggy, etc.), capped off by a merge commit when it's finally in the finished state.
    • badsectoracula 1y ago
      Eh, i do not think these are comparable, unless you really stretch the idea of what is a "commit", who makes it and you consider all sorts of destructive modifications of branch history and commits normal.
• 1gn15 1y ago
  > A member of the audience pointed out that the line between LLMs and assistive (accessibility) technology can be blurry, and that any outright ban of the former can end up blocking developers needing assistive technology, which nobody wants to do. This is because LLMs are a type of assistive technology, usually for those with mental disabilities. It's a shame that mental disabilities are still seen as less important than physical disabilities. If one takes them seriously, one would realize that banning LLMs is inherently ableist. Just make sure that the developer takes accountability for the submitted code.
• 7e 1y ago
  [flagged]
• somewhereoutth 1y ago
  1. Understand that code that has been wholly or partly LLM generated is tainted - it has (in at least some part) been created neither by humans nor by a deterministic, verifiable, process. Any representations to its quality are therefore void. 2. Ban tainted code. Consider code that (in the old days) had been copy pasted from elsewhere. Is that any better than LLM generated code? Why yes - to make it work a human had to comb through it, tweaking as necessary, and if they did not then stylistic cues make the copy pasta quite evident. LLMs effectively originate and disguise copy pasta (including mimicking house styles), making it harder/impossible to validate the code without stepping through every single statement. The process can no longer be validated, so the output has to be. Which does not scale.
  • acoustics 1y ago
    It depends on the nature of the code and codebase. There have been many occasions when working in a very verbose enterprise-y codebase where I know exactly what needs to happen, and the LLM just types it out. I carefully review all 100 lines of code and verify that it is very nearly exactly what I would have typed myself.
• andybak 1y ago
  If AI code is non-copyrightable, does this not achieve the aims of copyleft by different means? I'm playing a bit fast and loose here but there's a solid idea at the heart of this statement - I'm just on the cusp of going to bed so wanted to post a placeholder until tomorrow. The gist is "what do copyleft licences aim to achieve as an end goal - and what would non-copyrightable code mean in that broader context?"
• stuaxo 1y ago
  A GPL model trained purely on GPL based code could work.