5 ms·

I feel similarly for a different reason. I put my code out there, licensed under the GPL. It is now, through a layer of indirection, being used to construct pro

I feel similarly for a different reason. I put my code out there, licensed under the GPL. It is now, through a layer of indirection, being used to construct products that are not under the GPL. That's not what I signed up for. I know the GPL didn't have a specific clause for AI, and the jury is still out on this specific case (how similar is it to a human doing the same thing?), but I like to imagine, had it been made today, there probably would be a clause covering this usage. Personally I think it's a violation of the spirit of the license.

luke5441 9mo ago
GPL works via copyright. Since AI companies claim fair use no copyright applies. There is no fixing this. The only option is not to publish. There are non-US jurisdictions where you have some options, but since most of them are trained in the US that won't help much.
- ThunderSizzle 9mo ago
  > Since AI companies claim fair use no copyright applies. There is no fixing this. They can claim whatever they want. You can still try to stop it via lawsuits and make them claim it in court. Granted, I believe there's already been some jurisdictions that have sided with fair use in those particular cases.
  - zarzavat 9mo ago
    Laws can be changed. This is right now a trillion dollar industry, perhaps later it could even become a billion dollar industry. Either way, it's very important. Strict copyright enforcement is a competitive disadvantage. Western countries lobbied for copyright enforcement in the 20th century because it was beneficial. Now the tables have turned, don't hold your breath for copyright enforcement against the wishes of the markets. We are all China now.
    - luke5441 9mo ago
      Yes, I think Japan added an AI friendly copyright law. If there were problems in the US, they'd just move training there.
      - martin-t 9mo ago
        Moving training won't help them if their paying customers are in jurisdictions which do respect copyright as written and intended.
        luke5441 9mo ago
        OPs idea is about having a new GPL like license with a "may not be used for LLM training" clause. That the LLM itself is not allowed to produce copyrighted work (e.g. just copies of works or too structurally similar) without using a license for that work is something that is probably currently law. They are working around this via content filters. They probably also have checks during/after training that it does not reproduce work that is too similar. There are law suits about this pending if I remember correctly e.g. with the New York Times.
        martin-t 9mo ago
        The issue is that everyone is focusing on verbatim (or "too similar") reproduction. LLMs themselves are compressed models of the training data. The trick is the compression is highly lossy by being able to detect higher-order patterns instead of fucusing on the first-order input tokens (or bytes). If you look at how, for example, any of the Lempel-Ziv algorithms work, they also contain patterns from the input and they also predict the next token (usually byte in their case), except they do it with 100% probability because they are lossless. So copyright should absolutely apply to the models themselves and if trained on AGPL code, the models have to follow the AGPL license and I have the right to see their "source" by just being their user. And if you decompress a file from a copyrighted archive, the file is obviously copyrighted. Even if you decompress only a part. What LLMs do is another trick - by being lossy, they decompress probabilistically based on all the training inputs - without seeing the internals, nobody can prove how much their particular work contributed to the particular output. But it is all mechanical transformation of input data, just like synonym replacement, just more sophisticated, and the same rules regarding plagiarism and copyright infringement should apply. --- Back to what you said - the LLM companies use fancy language like "artificial intelligence" to distract from this so they can they use more fancy language to claim copyright does not apply. And in that case, no license would help because any such license fundamentally depends on copyright law, which as they claim does not apply. That's the issue with LLMs - if they get their way, there's no way to opt out. If there was, AGPL would already be sufficient.
- martin-t 9mo ago
  I recall a basics of law class saying that in some countries (e.g. Czech Republic), open source contributors have the right to small compensation if their work is used to a large financial benefit. At some point, I'll have to look it up because if that's right, the billionaires and wannabe-trillionaires owe me a shitton of money.
wmwragg 9mo ago
Yep, this is my take as well. It's not that open source is being stolen as such, as if you abide by an open source license you aren't stealing anything, it's that the licenses are being completely ignored for the profit of a few massive corporations.
- dom96 9mo ago
  Yeah, that's what I meant by "stolen", I should have been clearer. But indeed, this is the crux of the problem, I have no faith that licenses are being abided by.
- leonidasv 9mo ago
  What profit? All labs are taking massive losses and there's no clear path to profit for most of them yet.
  - karmakurtisaani 9mo ago
    Expected profit.
  - rurp 9mo ago
    The wealthiest people in tech aren't spending 10s of billions on this without the expectation of future profits. There's risk, but they absolutely expect the bets to be +EV overall.
delusional 9mo ago
The argument of the AI megacorps is that generated work is not "derivative" and therefore doesn't fall interact with the original authors copyright. They have invented a machine that takes in copyrighted works, and from a legal standpoint produces "entirely original" code. No license, be that GPL or otherwise, can do anything about that, because they ultimately rely on the authors copyright to required the licensee to observe the license. They cannot violate the license, because in their view they have not licensed anything from you. I think that's horse shit, and a clear violation of the intellectual property rights that are supposed to protect creatives from the business boys, but apparently the stock market must grow.
- Ekaros 9mo ago
  What makes this whole thing even weirder for me is the similar fact that any output from AI might not enjoy copyright protections. So basically if you can steal software made with AI you can freely resell it.
  - martin-t 9mo ago
    During the gold rush, it is said, the only people who made money were the ones selling the pickaxes. A"I" companies are ~selling~ renting the pickaxes of today. (I didn't come up with this quote but I can't find the source now. If anything good comes out of LLMs, it's making me appreciate other people's more and trying to give credit where it's due.)
    - kapsi 9mo ago
      What about the people who sold gold? Didn't they make money?
      - martin-t 9mo ago
        To be honest, I haven't looked at any statistics but I imagine a tiny few of those looking for gold found any and got rich, the most either didn't find anything, died of illness or exposure or got robbed. I just like the quote as a comparison. Updated the original comment to reflect I haven't checked if it's correct.
martin-t 9mo ago
If you want, I made a coherent argument about how the mechanics of LLMs mean both their training and inference is plagiarism and should be copyright infringement.[0] TL;DR it's about reproducing higher order patterns instead of word for word. I haven't seen this argument made elsewhere, it would be interesting to get it into the courtrooms - I am told cases are being fought right now but I don't have the energy to follow them. Plus as somebody else put it eloquently, it's labor theft - we, working programmers, exchanged out limited lifetime for money (already exploitative) in a world with certain rules. Now the rules changed, our past work has much more value, and we don't get compensated. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46187330 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46187330
- martin-t 9mo ago
  And HN does its thing again - at least 3 downvotes, 0 replies. If you disagree, say why, otherwise I have to assume my argument is correct and nobody has any counterarguments but people who profit from this hate it being seen.
  - deleted 9mo ago
    [deleted]
  - dahart 9mo ago
    I agree that training on copyrighted material is violating the law, but not for the reasons you stated. That said, this comment is funny to me because I’ve done the same thing too, take some signal of disagreement, and assume the signal means I’m right and there’s a low-key conspiracy to hold me down, when it was far more likely that either I was at least a bit wrong, or said something in an off-putting way. In this case, I tend to agree with the general spirit of the sibling comment by @williamcotton in that it seems like you’re inventing some criteria that are not covered by copyright law. Copyrights cover the “fixation” of a work, meaning they protect only its exact presentation. Copyrights do not cover the Madlibs or Cliff Notes scenarios you proposed. (Do think about Cliff Notes in particular and what it implies about AI - Cliff Notes are explicitly legal.) Personally, I’ve had a lot of personal forward progress on HN when I assume that downvotes mean I said something wrong, and work through where my own assumptions are bad, and try to update them. This is an important step especially when I think I’m right. I’m often tempted to ask for downvote explanations too, but FWIW, it never helps, and aside from HN guidelines asking people to avoid complaining about downvotes, I find it also helps to think of downvotes as symmetric to upvotes. We don’t comment on or demand an explanation for an upvote, and an upvote can be given for many reasons - it’s not only used for agreement, it can be given for style, humor, weight, engagement, pity, and many other reasons. Realizing downvotes are similar and don’t only mean disagreement helps me not feel personally attacked, and that can help me stay more open to reflecting on what I did that is earning the downvotes. They don’t always make sense, but over time I can see more places I went wrong.
DrewADesign 9mo ago
Now imagine how much more that sucks for artists and designers that were putting artwork out there to advertise themselves only to have some douchebag ingest it in order to sell cheap simulacra.
ndsipa_pomu 9mo ago
One work-around would be to legislate that code produce by an LLM trained on GPL code would also be GPL.
- layer8 9mo ago
  There are licenses that are incompatible with each other, which implies that one wouldn’t be allowed to train LLMs on code based on multiple such licenses.
  - ndsipa_pomu 9mo ago
    Sounds reasonable to me - much the same way that building a project from multiple incompatible licenses wouldn't be allowed. The alternative is that using an LLM could just be an end-run around the choice of license that a developer used.
    - layer8 9mo ago
      Copyright normally only applies when you’re plagiarizing. LLM output typically isn’t that. It’s more like someone having studied multiple open source projects with incompatible licenses and coding up their own version of them, which is perfectly fine. So your “workaround” is overshooting things by far, IMO.
      - ndsipa_pomu 9mo ago
        My understanding is that LLMs are plagiarising openly available code - it's not like the code is used to inspire a person as that involves creative thinking. I'm thinking that taking a piece of code and applying a transformation to it to make it look different (e.g. changing variable/function names) would be still considered plagiarism. In the case of the GPL, I think it would be entirely appropriate for a GPL trained LLM to be required to license its code output as GPL. I suppose the question is when does a machine applied transformation become a new work?

luke5441 9mo ago

GPL works via copyright. Since AI companies claim fair use no copyright applies. There is no fixing this. The only option is not to publish. There are non-US jurisdictions where you have some options, but since most of them are trained in the US that won't help much.

ThunderSizzle 9mo ago
> Since AI companies claim fair use no copyright applies. There is no fixing this. They can claim whatever they want. You can still try to stop it via lawsuits and make them claim it in court. Granted, I believe there's already been some jurisdictions that have sided with fair use in those particular cases.
- zarzavat 9mo ago
  Laws can be changed. This is right now a trillion dollar industry, perhaps later it could even become a billion dollar industry. Either way, it's very important. Strict copyright enforcement is a competitive disadvantage. Western countries lobbied for copyright enforcement in the 20th century because it was beneficial. Now the tables have turned, don't hold your breath for copyright enforcement against the wishes of the markets. We are all China now.
  - luke5441 9mo ago
    Yes, I think Japan added an AI friendly copyright law. If there were problems in the US, they'd just move training there.
    - martin-t 9mo ago
      Moving training won't help them if their paying customers are in jurisdictions which do respect copyright as written and intended.
      - luke5441 9mo ago
        OPs idea is about having a new GPL like license with a "may not be used for LLM training" clause. That the LLM itself is not allowed to produce copyrighted work (e.g. just copies of works or too structurally similar) without using a license for that work is something that is probably currently law. They are working around this via content filters. They probably also have checks during/after training that it does not reproduce work that is too similar. There are law suits about this pending if I remember correctly e.g. with the New York Times.
        martin-t 9mo ago
        The issue is that everyone is focusing on verbatim (or "too similar") reproduction. LLMs themselves are compressed models of the training data. The trick is the compression is highly lossy by being able to detect higher-order patterns instead of fucusing on the first-order input tokens (or bytes). If you look at how, for example, any of the Lempel-Ziv algorithms work, they also contain patterns from the input and they also predict the next token (usually byte in their case), except they do it with 100% probability because they are lossless. So copyright should absolutely apply to the models themselves and if trained on AGPL code, the models have to follow the AGPL license and I have the right to see their "source" by just being their user. And if you decompress a file from a copyrighted archive, the file is obviously copyrighted. Even if you decompress only a part. What LLMs do is another trick - by being lossy, they decompress probabilistically based on all the training inputs - without seeing the internals, nobody can prove how much their particular work contributed to the particular output. But it is all mechanical transformation of input data, just like synonym replacement, just more sophisticated, and the same rules regarding plagiarism and copyright infringement should apply. --- Back to what you said - the LLM companies use fancy language like "artificial intelligence" to distract from this so they can they use more fancy language to claim copyright does not apply. And in that case, no license would help because any such license fundamentally depends on copyright law, which as they claim does not apply. That's the issue with LLMs - if they get their way, there's no way to opt out. If there was, AGPL would already be sufficient.
martin-t 9mo ago
I recall a basics of law class saying that in some countries (e.g. Czech Republic), open source contributors have the right to small compensation if their work is used to a large financial benefit. At some point, I'll have to look it up because if that's right, the billionaires and wannabe-trillionaires owe me a shitton of money.

wmwragg 9mo ago

Yep, this is my take as well. It's not that open source is being stolen as such, as if you abide by an open source license you aren't stealing anything, it's that the licenses are being completely ignored for the profit of a few massive corporations.

dom96 9mo ago
Yeah, that's what I meant by "stolen", I should have been clearer. But indeed, this is the crux of the problem, I have no faith that licenses are being abided by.
leonidasv 9mo ago
What profit? All labs are taking massive losses and there's no clear path to profit for most of them yet.
- karmakurtisaani 9mo ago
  Expected profit.
- rurp 9mo ago
  The wealthiest people in tech aren't spending 10s of billions on this without the expectation of future profits. There's risk, but they absolutely expect the bets to be +EV overall.

delusional 9mo ago

The argument of the AI megacorps is that generated work is not "derivative" and therefore doesn't fall interact with the original authors copyright. They have invented a machine that takes in copyrighted works, and from a legal standpoint produces "entirely original" code. No license, be that GPL or otherwise, can do anything about that, because they ultimately rely on the authors copyright to required the licensee to observe the license. They cannot violate the license, because in their view they have not licensed anything from you. I think that's horse shit, and a clear violation of the intellectual property rights that are supposed to protect creatives from the business boys, but apparently the stock market must grow.

Ekaros 9mo ago
What makes this whole thing even weirder for me is the similar fact that any output from AI might not enjoy copyright protections. So basically if you can steal software made with AI you can freely resell it.
- martin-t 9mo ago
  During the gold rush, it is said, the only people who made money were the ones selling the pickaxes. A"I" companies are ~selling~ renting the pickaxes of today. (I didn't come up with this quote but I can't find the source now. If anything good comes out of LLMs, it's making me appreciate other people's more and trying to give credit where it's due.)
  - kapsi 9mo ago
    What about the people who sold gold? Didn't they make money?
    - martin-t 9mo ago
      To be honest, I haven't looked at any statistics but I imagine a tiny few of those looking for gold found any and got rich, the most either didn't find anything, died of illness or exposure or got robbed. I just like the quote as a comparison. Updated the original comment to reflect I haven't checked if it's correct.

martin-t 9mo ago

If you want, I made a coherent argument about how the mechanics of LLMs mean both their training and inference is plagiarism and should be copyright infringement.[0] TL;DR it's about reproducing higher order patterns instead of word for word. I haven't seen this argument made elsewhere, it would be interesting to get it into the courtrooms - I am told cases are being fought right now but I don't have the energy to follow them. Plus as somebody else put it eloquently, it's labor theft - we, working programmers, exchanged out limited lifetime for money (already exploitative) in a world with certain rules. Now the rules changed, our past work has much more value, and we don't get compensated. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46187330 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46187330

martin-t 9mo ago
And HN does its thing again - at least 3 downvotes, 0 replies. If you disagree, say why, otherwise I have to assume my argument is correct and nobody has any counterarguments but people who profit from this hate it being seen.
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
- dahart 9mo ago
  I agree that training on copyrighted material is violating the law, but not for the reasons you stated. That said, this comment is funny to me because I’ve done the same thing too, take some signal of disagreement, and assume the signal means I’m right and there’s a low-key conspiracy to hold me down, when it was far more likely that either I was at least a bit wrong, or said something in an off-putting way. In this case, I tend to agree with the general spirit of the sibling comment by @williamcotton in that it seems like you’re inventing some criteria that are not covered by copyright law. Copyrights cover the “fixation” of a work, meaning they protect only its exact presentation. Copyrights do not cover the Madlibs or Cliff Notes scenarios you proposed. (Do think about Cliff Notes in particular and what it implies about AI - Cliff Notes are explicitly legal.) Personally, I’ve had a lot of personal forward progress on HN when I assume that downvotes mean I said something wrong, and work through where my own assumptions are bad, and try to update them. This is an important step especially when I think I’m right. I’m often tempted to ask for downvote explanations too, but FWIW, it never helps, and aside from HN guidelines asking people to avoid complaining about downvotes, I find it also helps to think of downvotes as symmetric to upvotes. We don’t comment on or demand an explanation for an upvote, and an upvote can be given for many reasons - it’s not only used for agreement, it can be given for style, humor, weight, engagement, pity, and many other reasons. Realizing downvotes are similar and don’t only mean disagreement helps me not feel personally attacked, and that can help me stay more open to reflecting on what I did that is earning the downvotes. They don’t always make sense, but over time I can see more places I went wrong.

DrewADesign 9mo ago

Now imagine how much more that sucks for artists and designers that were putting artwork out there to advertise themselves only to have some douchebag ingest it in order to sell cheap simulacra.

ndsipa_pomu 9mo ago

One work-around would be to legislate that code produce by an LLM trained on GPL code would also be GPL.

layer8 9mo ago
There are licenses that are incompatible with each other, which implies that one wouldn’t be allowed to train LLMs on code based on multiple such licenses.
- ndsipa_pomu 9mo ago
  Sounds reasonable to me - much the same way that building a project from multiple incompatible licenses wouldn't be allowed. The alternative is that using an LLM could just be an end-run around the choice of license that a developer used.
  - layer8 9mo ago
    Copyright normally only applies when you’re plagiarizing. LLM output typically isn’t that. It’s more like someone having studied multiple open source projects with incompatible licenses and coding up their own version of them, which is perfectly fine. So your “workaround” is overshooting things by far, IMO.
    - ndsipa_pomu 9mo ago
      My understanding is that LLMs are plagiarising openly available code - it's not like the code is used to inspire a person as that involves creative thinking. I'm thinking that taking a piece of code and applying a transformation to it to make it look different (e.g. changing variable/function names) would be still considered plagiarism. In the case of the GPL, I think it would be entirely appropriate for a GPL trained LLM to be required to license its code output as GPL. I suppose the question is when does a machine applied transformation become a new work?