7 ms·
Claude didn't write that code. Someone else did and Claude took that code without credit to the original author(s), adapted it to your use case and then present
by jacquesm 11mo ago
Claude didn't write that code. Someone else did and Claude took that code without credit to the original author(s), adapted it to your use case and then presented it as its own creation to you and you accepted this. If a human did this we probably would have a word for them.
- giancarlostoro 11mo agoYou mean like copying and pasting code from Stack Overflow?
- Mtinie 11mo ago> If a human did this we probably would have a word for them. I don’t think it’s fair to call someone who used Stack Overflow to find a similar answer with samples of code to copy to their project an asshole.
- jacquesm 11mo agoWho brought Stack Overflow up? Stack Overflow does not magically generate code, someone has to actually provide it first.
- Mtinie 11mo agoI generally agree with your underlying point concerning attribution and intellectual property ownership but your follow-up comment reframes your initial statement: LLMs generate recombinations of code from code created by humans, without giving credit. Stack Overflow offers access to other peoples’ work, and developers combined those snippets and patterns into their own projects. I suspect attribution is low.
- jacquesm 11mo agoStack Overflow deals with that issue by having a license agreement.
- mbesto 11mo agoTo be fair, their license agreement is pretty much impossible to enforce.
- Mtinie 11mo agoGitHub, Bitbucket, GCE, AWS…all have licensing agreements for user contributions which the user flagged as “public” so I’m not exactly clear of your point if you are holding SO up as a bastion of intellectual property rights different from the other places LLM training sets were scraped from.
- jacquesm 11mo agoI was not the person that introduced SO to the discussion.
- sublinear 11mo agoUsing stack overflow recklessly is definitely asshole behavior.
- Mtinie 11mo agoRecklessly is a strong word. I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume your comment in good faith. How do you describe the “reckless” use of information?
- bluedino 11mo agoIt has been for the last 15 years.
- idiotsecant 11mo agoYes, the word for that is software developer.
- bsaul 11mo agoThat's an interesting hypothesis : that LLM are fundamentally unable to produce original code. Do you have papers to back this up ? That was also my reaction when i saw some really crazy accurate comments on some vibe coded piece of code, but i couldn't prove it, and thinking about it now i think my intuition was wrong (ie : LLMs do produce original complex code).
- jacquesm 11mo agoWe can solve that question in an intuitive way: if human input is not what is driving the output then it would be sufficient to present it with a fraction of the current inputs, say everything up to 1970 and have it generate all of the input data from 1970 onwards as output. If that does not work then the moment you introduce AI you cap their capabilities unless humans continue to create original works to feed the AI. The conclusion - to me, at least - is that these pieces of software regurgitate their inputs, they are effectively whitewashing plagiarism, or, alternatively, their ability to generate new content is capped by some arbitrary limit relative to the inputs.
- andrepd 11mo agoExcellent observation.
- bfffbgfdcb 11mo ago[flagged]
- jacquesm 11mo agoI think my track record belies your very low value and frankly cowardly comment. If you have something to say at least do it under your real username instead of a throwaway.
- andsoitis 11mo agoI like your test. Should we also apply to specific humans? We all stand on the shoulders of giants and learn by looking at others’ solutions.
- FanaHOVA 11mo agoAre you saying that every piece of code you have ever written contains a full source list of every piece of code you previously read to learn specific languages, patterns, etc? Or are you saying that every piece of code you ever wrote was 100% original and not adapted from any previous codebase you ever worked in or any book / reference you ever read?
- jacquesm 11mo agoWhat's with the bad takes in this thread. That's two strawmen in one comment, it's getting a bit crowded.
- DangitBobby 11mo agoOr the original point doesn't actually hold up to basic scrutiny and is indistinguishable from straw itself.
- jacquesm 11mo agoHN has guidelines for a reason.
- incr_me 11mo agoYou're adhering to an excess of rules, methinks!
- tovej 11mo agoThe original point, that LLMs are plagiarising inputs, is a very common and common sense opinion. There are court cases where this is being addressed currently, and if you think about how LLMs operate, a reasonable person typically sees that it looks an awful lot like plagiarism. If you want to claim it is not plagiarism, that requires a good argument, because it is unclear that LLMs can produce novelty, since they're literally trying to recreate the input data as faithfully as possible.
- 11mo ago
- mlinsey 11mo agoCertainly if a human wrote code that solved this problem, and a second human copied and tweaked it slightly for their use case, we would have a word for them. Would we use the same word if two different humans wrote code that solved two different problems, but one part of each problem was somewhat analogous to a different aspect of a third human's problem, and the third human took inspiration from those parts of both solutions to create code that solved a third problem? What if it were ten different humans writing ten different-but-related pieces of code, and an eleventh human piecing them together? What if it were 1,000 different humans? I think "plagiarism", "inspiration", and just "learning from" fall on some continuous spectrum. There are clear differences when you zoom out, but they are in degree, and it's hard to set a hard boundary. The key is just to make sure we have laws and norms that provide sufficient incentive for new ideas to continue to be created.
- whatshisface 11mo agoThey key difference between plagarism and building on someone's work is whether you say, "this based on code by linsey at github.com/socialnorms" or "here, let me write that for you."
- CognitiveLens 11mo agobut as mlinsey suggests, what if it's influenced in small, indirect ways by 1000 different people, kind of like the way every 'original' idea from trained professionals is? There's a spectrum, and it's inaccurate to claim that Claude's responses are comparable to adapting one individual's work for another use case - that's not how LLMs operate on open-ended tasks, although they can be instructed to do that and produce reasonable-looking output. Programmers are not expected to add an addendum to every file listing all the books, articles, and conversations they've had that have influenced the particular code solution. LLMs are trained on far more sources that influence their code suggestions, but it seems like we actually want a higher standard of attribution because they (arguably) are incapable of original thought.
- sarchertech 11mo ago
- ekropotin 11mo ago> If a human did this we probably would have a word for them. What do you mean? The programmers work is literally combining the existing patterns into solutions for problems.
- Aeolun 11mo agoSoftware engineer? You think I cite all the code I’ve ever seen before when I reproduce it? That I even remember where it comes from?
- tovej 11mo agoYou don't? If you reproduce something, usually you have to check the earlier implementation for it and copy it over. This would inevitably require you to look at the license and author of said code. Assuming of course, you're talking about nontrivial functionality, because obviously we're not talking about trivial one-liners etc.
- fooker 11mo ago> If a human did this we probably would have a word for them. Humans do this all the time.
- goneskiiiing 11mo ago[flagged]
- nvllsvm 11mo ago> Someone else did Who?
- kevinsync 11mo agoI've been struggling with this throughout the entire LLM-generated-code arc we're currently living -- I agree that it is wack in theory to take existing code and adapt it to your use-case without proper accreditation, but I've also been writing code since Pulp Fiction was in theaters and a lot of it is taking existing code and adapting it to my use-case, sometimes without a fully-documented paper trail. Not to mention the moral vagaries of "if you use a library, is the complete articulation of your thing actually 100% your code?" Is there a difference between loading and using a function from ImageMagick, and a standalone copycat function that mimics a function from ImageMagick? What if you need it transliterated from one language to another? Is it really that different than those 1200 page books from the 90's that walk you through implementing a 3D engine from scratch (or whatever the topic might be)? If you make a game on top of that book's engine, is your game truly yours? If you learn an algorithm in some university class and then just write it again later, is that code yours? What if your code is 1-for-1 a copy of the code you were taught? It gets very murky very quick! Obviously I would encourage proper citation, but I also recognize the reality of this stuff -- what if you're fully rewriting something you learned decades ago and don't know who to cite? What if you have some code snippet from a website long forgotten that you saved and used? What if you use a library that also uses a library that you're not aware of because you didn't bother to check, and you either cite the wrapper lib or cite nothing at all? I don't have some grand theory or wise thoughts about this shit, and I enjoy the anthropological studies trying to ascertain provenance / assign moral authority to remarkable edge cases, but end of the day I also find it exhausting to litigate the use of a tool that exploited the fact that your code got hoovered up by a giant robot because it was public, and might get regurgitated elsewhere. To me, this is the unfortunate and unfair story of Gregory Coleman [0] -- drummer for The Winstons, who recorded "Amen, Brother" in 1969 (which gave us the most-sampled drum break in the world, spawned multiple genres of music, and changed human history) -- the man never made a dime from it, never even knew, and died completely destitute, despite his monumental contribution to culture. It's hard to reconcile the unjustness of it all, yet not that hard to appreciate the countless positive things that came out of it. I don't know. I guess at the end of the day, does the end justify the means? Feels pretty subjective! [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amen_break https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amen_break
- 11mo ago
- martin-t 11mo agoProgrammers are willingly blind to this, at least until it's their code being stolen or they lose their job. _LLMs are lossily compressed archives of stolen code_. Trying to achieve AI through compression is nothing new.[0] The key innovation[1] is that the model[2] does not output only the first order input data but also the higher order patterns from the input data. That is certainly one component of intelligence but we need to recognize that the tech companies didn't build AI, they build a compression algorithm which, combined with the stolen input text, can reproduce the input data and its patterns in an intelligent-looking way. [0]: http://prize.hutter1.net/ http://prize.hutter1.net/ [1]: Oh, god, this phrase is already triggering my generated-by-LLM senses. [2]: Model of what? Of the stolen text. If 99.9999% of the work to achieve AI wasn't done by people whose work was stolen, they wouldn't be called models.
- ineedasername 11mo ago>we probably would have a word for them Student? Good learner? Pretty much what everyone does can be boiled down to reading lots of other code that’s been written and adapting it to a use case. Sure, to some extent models are regurgitating memorized information, but for many tasks they’re regurgitating a learned method of doing something and backfilling the specifics as needed— the memorization has been generalized.
- FeepingCreature 11mo agoThis is not how LLMs work.
- raincole 11mo agoThis is why ragebait is chosen as the word of 2025. > took that code without credit to the original author(s), adapted it to your use case Aka software engineering.