6 ms·
The comments are worth it... the full spectrum of personalities and the hottest of takes. 10/10, would recommend to a bored friend.
by unprovable 2mo ago
The comments are worth it... the full spectrum of personalities and the hottest of takes. 10/10, would recommend to a bored friend.
- fractorial 2mo ago> Do anti-LLM types expect to be vindicated in an orgy of copyright lawsuits that resets the industry back to 2022? What do people pushing expect to accomplish? You weren’t kidding, huh.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- randusername 2mo agoThe GCC stance seems reasonable to me, where do we think the rage is coming from in comments like this? Off the cuff, I would be surprised if the GNU project embraced AI, so I'm confused that people think so strongly otherwise.
- user43928 2mo agoAt face value a policy that essentially prohibits AI generated implementation seems entirely unreasonable to me.
- natebc 2mo ago[dead]
- user43928 2mo agoI said at face value because there was no reason given in either the policy nor the article submitted here. It would be interesting to know why they decided for a general prohibition, rather than going with the default "a human must be responsible for the contribution" kind of policy. Perhaps they have received a flood of undesirable AI generated contributions, and actual contributors do not use AI significantly.
- archagon 2mo agoCode is communication. Open source is community. Engineering is understanding systems in depth. LLMs fundamentally hinder all three. I'm not sure you even need to look much further than that.
- user43928 2mo agoI disagree, and quote here Linus' recent comment: > In the kernel community we do open source because it results in better technology, not because of religious reasons. > And so we make decisions primarily based on technical merit. Not fear of new tools. You are not making an argument based on technical merit here.
- archagon 2mo agoI am making an argument based on the fundamental nature of the tool, which is to make stochastic, unvetted decisions our behalf — categorically different from everything else in our toolbox. The technical and social repercussions to this are potentially vast: no other tool comes close. So it is actually Linus who is making an unconvincing appeal to emotion (and authority) by pretending that LLMs resemble hammers.
- account42 2mo agoThere seem to be a set of people who treat AI as religion which then makes anything opposing it (even mildly) into heresy.
- cozzyd 2mo agoOr they're self conscious about their use of AI so they take a maximalist stance to compensate.
- Planktonne 2mo agoI think definitely a combination; there are those who believe that LLMs are the entire future, and those who are ashamed of themselves for using it. Both lead to rage at people who don't approve totally.
- olalonde 2mo agoCan't speak for others but I'm just tired of hearing far-fetched copyright concerns that mask the real motivation (ideological opposition to LLMs).
- leonidasv 2mo agoThey still allow LLM-generated code for tests, LLM-assisted debugging, bug discovery and code reviews. It doesn't seem so.
- olalonde 2mo agoAt the same time, they would be somewhat forced to concede those use cases if they wanted to stick to the copyright story. Maybe you're right but I remain skeptical.
- amusingimpala75 2mo agoYes but if the concern is being forced to remove code in the case of copyright violation it is trivial to remove code that is a test case as opposed to a feature of the compiler
- olalonde 2mo agoYes, that's what I meant. It's harder to use the copyright excuse for those use cases.
- randusername 2mo agoIt's far-fetched that the GNU project is authentically concerned about software licensing?
- olalonde 2mo agoNo, it's far-fetched to believe GCC would get sued for incorporating LLM-generated code.
- mrgoldenbrown 2mo agoIf the only way you know how to code is via LLM, it makes sense you would get defensive/ragey when someone discourages it.
- archagon 2mo agoEntitlement, insecurity, a demand to be treated as a "real" engineer while understanding only a fraction of the code you produce.
- olalonde 2mo agoHe's correct though. You would need 3 extremely low probability events to all occur simultaneously for the concern to actually manifest. 1) Courts reverse their previous decisions and declare LLM generated code as belonging to LLM labs. 2) LLM labs decide to assert their copyright and sue open source projects. 3) They are able to prove that the code was generated by an LLM and not just any LLM but their LLM.
- Retr0id 2mo agoIsn't there also a concern that an LLM may reproduce copyrighted code verbatim (or close enough), and the original author asserts their copyright?
- worthless-trash 2mo agoI had early chatGPT spit my own erlang code back at me WITH my comments.
- justthehuman 2mo ago+1, I also thought this was the actual concern.
- olalonde 2mo agoThis doesn't really happen by accident, especially where it's significant enough to constitute copyright infringement. And to my knowledge, there hasn't been a single lawsuit over this in the entire history of LLM-assisted coding.
- dijksterhuis 2mo ago> there hasn't been a single lawsuit over this in the entire history of LLM-assisted coding. the "entire history of" is circa 3-4 years, which is very much a tiny period of time compared to normal legal system / copyright law stuff (IANAL).
- olalonde 2mo ago
- freakynit 2mo agoYou are absolutely right.
- prymitive 2mo agoIs it "anti-LLM" or is it anti "here's some code I don't understand that a machine generated for me kthxbye"? Code is not just code, it's also liability and trust.
- tossandthrow 2mo agoYou literally spend 99.999% og your time blindly trusting code - and that is only because I assume ymthat you write code yourself. For 99.999% of people, it is literally kthxbye on all code they execute on all their devices.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- EvanAnderson 2mo agoI don't think that's accurate. Until recently the code we rely on wasn't blindly trusted. People wrote and QA'd it. We may not have reviewed it personally, but that's one of the functions we outsource to software maintainers or "manufacturers". I'm not "blindly trusting" code on my computing devices. I'm trusting the vendors / maintainers to do their job. Until very recently the norm has been that the vast majority of code had human eyes and hands on it. Edit: The owners of those human eyes and hands had some type of accountability (either reputationally, in the case of free/open-source software, or occupationally, in the case of proprietary software). The LLM has no accountability as to the output it generates. The companies who make the LLMs also seem to have very little accountability, too. We've assumed a "blame the victim" stance when people use LLM-generated output in some inappropriate ways (legal briefs with "hallucinated" citations, articles "written" by LLMs). Whether that's the right location for accountability to be placed isn't for me to say, but that seems to be how it is. I'm not sure that we're applying accountability to LLM-generated code in the same way we are for, say, the LLM-generated legal brief.
- jadar 2mo agoA compiler is not an LLM, and I do not want to equivocate, but there are aspects of similarity. We do not assume people read the bytes of machine code to ensure it’s correct — there could be mistakes. We also write and run automated tests to ensure the code outputted from a compiler and an LLM behaves correctly. At some point, we won’t have to literally read every byte of code that comes out because we have a reasonable assurance that it’s correct.
- m4tthumphrey 2mo agoI like the top reply: > "The true purpose of AI is to allow wealth to access skill without allowing skill to access wealth."
- rolandog 2mo agoExactly; AI is to intellectual property or skills what shell corporations are to lobbying... they're a tool that won't benefit everyone equally and is unaffordable to most people. It COULD be used for good (that's why its proponents use tone-deaf analogies comparing AI to seats on a rocket)... but we know that --- for the most part --- it WON'T be used for good... (It's already being used to spread more disinformation and to fan the flames of fascism). Technically, you could argue that shell corporations could protect journalists, but you don't see journalists destabilizing democracies by fueling dark money to alt-right groups here and there.
- ModernMech 2mo agoOne of the very first things the government used it for when they got their hands on it was for targeting missiles, and then they promptly bombed a school full of kids. It's like Idiocracy meets Terminator.
- esafak 2mo agoBecause the AI relied on outdated data; it was not a hallucination.
- TZubiri 2mo agoIsn't that a possibility? Is anyone expecting case law to evolve and adapt instantly? To say nothing of new laws.
- beepbooptheory 2mo agoCurrently the top one has a nice kind of supervillain flair to it: > Denying it is denying human nature, Mr. Bond, and the gods tend to punish the hubris of denying nature.
- snowram 2mo agoLwn.net is the last place I would have expected prophets to lecture us on gods plan for large language models.
- pocksuppet 2mo agoI believe LWN comments are chronological, so the top one will remain the top one.
- a-french-anon 2mo agoThat guy is stupid, the part of human nature containing dishonesty also houses "following the path of least resistance", which means that these people will simply contribute to another leading compiler without these rules. So the real question is: what's LLVM policy?
- compiler-guy 2mo agoFull text is linked below, but it is getting revised pretty regularly. tl;dr: Requirement is that a human must be in the loop; the contributor must have reviewed the change by hand already; and is always accountable; the human must be able to answer questions about the change, such as strategy chosen, corner cases, etc. etc. Even with this very permissive and well considered policy, they get a lot of slop submissions. Huge amounts of pure trash. And the debate continues about what to do about it. Some are in favor of forbidding it simply because it would reduce the amount of slop they have to wade through, and the 10% good prs done with AI don't outweigh the 90% pure junk prs. Reviewer time is way too scarce. But it is just as controversial there as it is over on lwn. https://llvm.org/docs/AIToolPolicy.html https://llvm.org/docs/AIToolPolicy.html
- matheusmoreira 2mo ago
- datakan 2mo agoAI psychosis seems to be on all sides of the debate. We've truly lost our moderate speech and the ability to discuss.
- kmlx 2mo agoi agree but it’s not due to or about AI but more about polarisation of society in general: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/psychologylse/2023/06/08/building-bridges-how-to-overcome-polarisation/ https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/psychologylse/2023/06/08/building-br...
- anon373839 2mo agoAt least AI polarization seems to cut across the tired old red/blue divide (in the US anyway). So it may produce some interesting coalitions.
- tavavex 2mo agoMaybe it's not a full and clean correlation, but there still is one. In my experience, AI boosterism is often linked to conservatism, because the current US administration is all in on AI, the spoils of AI disproportionately reward the rich and increase inequality, and because leaving AI labs alone is fully consistent with most conservatives not wanting to bother private business and letting them do what they want.
- anon373839 2mo agoThe thing with AI is there are multiple axes of division that are in tension, and they don’t map conveniently to standard politics. For example, Anthropic in one sense seems to occupy a caricature of the nanny state worldview, with their constant calls for safety regulation. But then when you examine the motives, it becomes pretty clear that giving them what they ask for will give them unprecedented consolidation of economic power. So if you are a liberal normally inclined toward regulation, you have to consider: is it worth living in a world with even more trillionaires controlling an even larger share of the world’s resources? Or would it be better for AI to become fully commoditized so that its benefits are more broadly dispersed? Or suppose you are right wing, free market capitalist, deeply nationalist person. Are you for or against Chinese AI models? Your desire for America to “win” AI may be tempered by knowing that the biggest winners will be some power-mad EA people in the SF Bay. Judging from social media interactions, this space seems to make for strange bedfellows at times.
- addandsubtract 2mo agoMore and more of these AI comment threads are starting to read like messages in The Talos Principal.