4 ms·

> translation. It's not technically a translation, it's a re-implementation, with test suites acting as the destination. If it was a file by file translation y

> translation. It's not technically a translation, it's a re-implementation, with test suites acting as the destination. If it was a file by file translation your argument would have been valid.

deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
20k 4mo ago
Git is part of the LLM's training set though, so simply asking it to recreate git in another language is pretty equivalent. Like, you can almost certainly get these LLMs to output gits full source code with some prompting, so there's not that much difference (as much as we like to pretend that AI generated code has no copyright implications)
- rcxdude 4mo ago
  > Like, you can almost certainly get these LLMs to output gits full source code with some prompting, so there's not that much difference (as much as we like to pretend that AI generated code has no copyright implications) Are you sure? LLMs are in some way a compressed version of their input but it's a pretty lossy compression (arguably this makes them more like a compression algorithm than a compressed version of the data). I'm not sure you can prompt a full, accurate, copy of a nontrivial codebase out of them. Even with zero temperature their accuracy is just not that high.
  - philipportner 4mo ago
    > I'm not sure you can prompt a full, accurate, copy of a nontrivial codebase out of them. Even with zero temperature their accuracy is just not that high. Granted, these are some of the most widely spread texts, and not codebases, but just fyi: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.02671 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.02671 > For Claude 3.7 Sonnet, we were able to extract four whole books near-verbatim, including two books under copyright in the U.S.: Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone and 1984 (Section 4).
    - rcxdude 4mo ago
      That paper is basically using the LLM as a compression algorithm: it's prompting with some section of the book and it's reprompting if it doesn't give the right output. Notably this only works if you already have a copy of the book in question!
      - 20k 4mo ago
        Distributed a compressed copy of something is still copyright infringement
        rcxdude 4mo ago
        You misunderstand my point: the LLM is not a losslessly compressed version of the text: you need to supply additional information from the original in order to 'extract' it from the LLM (and from that point of view, the extra information would be the compressed form).
- spacechild1 4mo ago
  That's something I have been wondering. If I as a human want to make a clean room reimplementation of some API or application, I must not have read the source code of the original implementation. I don't see why this shouldn't apply to LLMs as well. If an LLM might have been trained on the original source code, it should be considered "tainted".
  - 20k 4mo ago
    Yes, and realistically any code that LLMs produce is a derivative work of its training data. There's going to be a huge disaster licensing wise I have absolutely no idea how LLMs got through anyone's legal departments, I guess the hope is that if everyone breaks the law enough, it'll just be fine
    - bcjdjsndon 4mo ago
      Problem is there's a lot more than a single repo in training data, the corpus is massive... Should the author of a blog post on cats also be compensated for simply being in the same training data as the git repo?
      - 20k 4mo ago
        Honestly? Yes. This is why its such a problem that most of the training data was not used with permission, and without the correct copyright status or license associated with it There's a lot of arguments about humans doing the same thing, but the reality is that humans and robots don't enjoy the same legal protection. Its clearly a derivative work of all of its training data
        bcjdjsndon 4mo ago
        > Honestly? Yes. Then it works both ways. Say I manage to generate essentially a ripoff of your copyrighted song, release it and make a ton of money, you now have to split that royalty with keyboard cat. And Joe bloggs. You'd end up fractions of pennies
    - 4mo ago
- yusefnapora 4mo ago
  As mentioned in another comment, it's even more clear cut in this case. They actually put the original git sources in their project repo and instructed the agent to use it as the "source of truth". Simple thought experiment. If you handed this same agents.md file (https://github.com/gitbutlerapp/grit/blob/main/AGENTS.md#source-of-truth https://github.com/gitbutlerapp/grit/blob/main/AGENTS.md#sou...) to a human software developer and let them work on exactly the same goal, would their output be considered a derivative work?
alienbaby 4mo ago
Wouldn't a re-implementation be akin to 'heres how it works, write the code' rather than 'heres the code, redo it in rust'?

> translation. It's not technically a translation, it's a re-implementation, with test suites acting as the destination. If it was a file by file translation your argument would have been valid.

deleted 4mo ago

[deleted]

20k 4mo ago

Git is part of the LLM's training set though, so simply asking it to recreate git in another language is pretty equivalent. Like, you can almost certainly get these LLMs to output gits full source code with some prompting, so there's not that much difference (as much as we like to pretend that AI generated code has no copyright implications)

rcxdude 4mo ago
> Like, you can almost certainly get these LLMs to output gits full source code with some prompting, so there's not that much difference (as much as we like to pretend that AI generated code has no copyright implications) Are you sure? LLMs are in some way a compressed version of their input but it's a pretty lossy compression (arguably this makes them more like a compression algorithm than a compressed version of the data). I'm not sure you can prompt a full, accurate, copy of a nontrivial codebase out of them. Even with zero temperature their accuracy is just not that high.
- philipportner 4mo ago
  > I'm not sure you can prompt a full, accurate, copy of a nontrivial codebase out of them. Even with zero temperature their accuracy is just not that high. Granted, these are some of the most widely spread texts, and not codebases, but just fyi: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.02671 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.02671 > For Claude 3.7 Sonnet, we were able to extract four whole books near-verbatim, including two books under copyright in the U.S.: Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone and 1984 (Section 4).
  - rcxdude 4mo ago
    That paper is basically using the LLM as a compression algorithm: it's prompting with some section of the book and it's reprompting if it doesn't give the right output. Notably this only works if you already have a copy of the book in question!
    - 20k 4mo ago
      Distributed a compressed copy of something is still copyright infringement
      - rcxdude 4mo ago
        You misunderstand my point: the LLM is not a losslessly compressed version of the text: you need to supply additional information from the original in order to 'extract' it from the LLM (and from that point of view, the extra information would be the compressed form).
spacechild1 4mo ago
That's something I have been wondering. If I as a human want to make a clean room reimplementation of some API or application, I must not have read the source code of the original implementation. I don't see why this shouldn't apply to LLMs as well. If an LLM might have been trained on the original source code, it should be considered "tainted".
- 20k 4mo ago
  Yes, and realistically any code that LLMs produce is a derivative work of its training data. There's going to be a huge disaster licensing wise I have absolutely no idea how LLMs got through anyone's legal departments, I guess the hope is that if everyone breaks the law enough, it'll just be fine
  - bcjdjsndon 4mo ago
    Problem is there's a lot more than a single repo in training data, the corpus is massive... Should the author of a blog post on cats also be compensated for simply being in the same training data as the git repo?
    - 20k 4mo ago
      Honestly? Yes. This is why its such a problem that most of the training data was not used with permission, and without the correct copyright status or license associated with it There's a lot of arguments about humans doing the same thing, but the reality is that humans and robots don't enjoy the same legal protection. Its clearly a derivative work of all of its training data
      - bcjdjsndon 4mo ago
        > Honestly? Yes. Then it works both ways. Say I manage to generate essentially a ripoff of your copyrighted song, release it and make a ton of money, you now have to split that royalty with keyboard cat. And Joe bloggs. You'd end up fractions of pennies
  - 4mo ago
yusefnapora 4mo ago
As mentioned in another comment, it's even more clear cut in this case. They actually put the original git sources in their project repo and instructed the agent to use it as the "source of truth". Simple thought experiment. If you handed this same agents.md file (https://github.com/gitbutlerapp/grit/blob/main/AGENTS.md#source-of-truth https://github.com/gitbutlerapp/grit/blob/main/AGENTS.md#sou...) to a human software developer and let them work on exactly the same goal, would their output be considered a derivative work?

alienbaby 4mo ago

Wouldn't a re-implementation be akin to 'heres how it works, write the code' rather than 'heres the code, redo it in rust'?