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To my knowledge there is not a single known case where this happened. News back then were about intentionally prompting to output known copyrighted material.

To my knowledge there is not a single known case where this happened. News back then were about intentionally prompting to output known copyrighted material. The parent comment still stands in my opinion: When, despite millions of developers using agentic AI already, are these lawsuits supposed to manifest?

jryan49 3mo ago
I mean ai has generated copyright headers verbatim in code I asked it to make. I had a tutorial open from the web and asked the AI to generate an example for me and it was the example from the tutorial verbatim as well...
- user43928 3mo ago
  This never happened to me and there is not a single such occurrence in my main project, across 150k LOC. I would be surprised if a frontier model generated unexpected copyright headers during typical usage.
  - nemomarx 3mo ago
    the people blindly submitting prs are not going to be using expensive frontier models, though.
  - jryan49 3mo ago
    It was a frontier model from a few months ago. It hasn't done it recently. But it has happened. I imagine if there isn't a lot of training data for an idea it probably has a higher change of generating verbatim, so as time goes on, it should become less of a problem (at least with high quality models).
dijksterhuis 3mo ago
> To my knowledge there is not a single known case where this happened. > News back then were about intentionally prompting to output known copyrighted material. First, there are other cases if you take the time to dig. This is quite an old example (GPT-2) as i haven't kept up to date on this field recently, but it does show that this problem has been known about since before these systems were widely adopted: https://arxiv.org/abs/2012.07805 https://arxiv.org/abs/2012.07805 [0] Second, GP said nothing about the type of effort required to make it happen, just that it can be done and that the copyright owner could come along and cause legal problems later. It's absolutely possible to have a fly-by contributor who purposefully asks for code that reproduces X/Y/Z without a maintainer knowing about it. But then the maintainer is the one in legal trouble. > When, despite millions of developers using agentic AI already, are these lawsuits supposed to manifest? Legal / copyright / etc. cases often take a lot longer than a couple of years to come to fruition. --- [0]: edit -- to clarify this is an example of the reproduction problem, not an example copyright infringement case.
- user43928 3mo ago
  The problem you linked is an older example of intentional prompting for copyrighted material. The concern discussed here is copyrighted material being generated unintentionally and the original author asserting their rights. This has, to my knowledge, not happened once. If we are not talking about unintentional violations, I don't understand the point of the discussion. I can also intentionally copy paste the copyrighted material into my merge request without the use of AI in an attempt to get the maintainer into trouble.
  - dijksterhuis 3mo ago
    > The concern discussed here is copyrighted material being generated unintentionally and the original author asserting their rights. both intentional (malicious contributor) or unintentional (Large-Laundering-Model) are copyright issues -- which is the point of GCC's policy. > I can also intentionally copy paste the copyrighted material into my merge request without the use of AI in an attempt to get the maintainer into trouble. You can. You can also do it significantly faster with significantly less effort while being harder to detect using agents etc.
    - user43928 3mo ago
      I do not think some untested theory about sabotaging open-source projects by intentionally inserting copyrighted material using AI, causing legal issues for maintainers, is worthwhile to discuss here. That is obviously not what anyone was referring to, nor does it make sense, when there is a much more reasonable basis to prohibit the same contribution. Namely inserting vulnerabilities. This one actually happened before afaik, and provides a clear benefit to the attacker.
- olalonde 3mo ago
  > just that it can be done and that the copyright owner could come along and cause legal problems later. It's absolutely possible to have a fly-by contributor who purposefully asks for code that reproduces X/Y/Z without a maintainer knowing about it. If a contributor doesn't care about submitting copyrighted code, they can do it without an LLM as well.
eschaton 3mo ago
I have personally seen this happen: Someone tried to contribute “vibe-coded” device support to a project I’m involved with, they said they did it all based on the device documentation, the code their agents spit out was copied verbatim out of a (GPL’d) project with which I’m familiar which supports that device. LLMs are not learning things and then using that learning to construct new things. They are essentially a form of lossy compression of their training set. And you don’t need to be explicit about trying to reproduce a portion of that training set for an LLM to output one.
- user43928 3mo ago
  As it happens, all evaluations I have seen in the news were in fact explicit about trying to reproduce a portion of the training set. I am not aware of any study attempting to measure unintentional reproduction. With your example, I question whether you have seen this happen first hand. For all I know, the contributor could have explicitly prompted the model to reference the GPL project and had the agent clone the code from the web.
  - eschaton 3mo ago
    At a certain point you have to take people at their word; I’m reporting what the contributor said they did (used the documentation to generate the code).

jryan49 3mo ago

I mean ai has generated copyright headers verbatim in code I asked it to make. I had a tutorial open from the web and asked the AI to generate an example for me and it was the example from the tutorial verbatim as well...

user43928 3mo ago
This never happened to me and there is not a single such occurrence in my main project, across 150k LOC. I would be surprised if a frontier model generated unexpected copyright headers during typical usage.
- nemomarx 3mo ago
  the people blindly submitting prs are not going to be using expensive frontier models, though.
- jryan49 3mo ago
  It was a frontier model from a few months ago. It hasn't done it recently. But it has happened. I imagine if there isn't a lot of training data for an idea it probably has a higher change of generating verbatim, so as time goes on, it should become less of a problem (at least with high quality models).

dijksterhuis 3mo ago

> To my knowledge there is not a single known case where this happened. > News back then were about intentionally prompting to output known copyrighted material. First, there are other cases if you take the time to dig. This is quite an old example (GPT-2) as i haven't kept up to date on this field recently, but it does show that this problem has been known about since before these systems were widely adopted: https://arxiv.org/abs/2012.07805 https://arxiv.org/abs/2012.07805 [0] Second, GP said nothing about the type of effort required to make it happen, just that it can be done and that the copyright owner could come along and cause legal problems later. It's absolutely possible to have a fly-by contributor who purposefully asks for code that reproduces X/Y/Z without a maintainer knowing about it. But then the maintainer is the one in legal trouble. > When, despite millions of developers using agentic AI already, are these lawsuits supposed to manifest? Legal / copyright / etc. cases often take a lot longer than a couple of years to come to fruition. --- [0]: edit -- to clarify this is an example of the reproduction problem, not an example copyright infringement case.

user43928 3mo ago
The problem you linked is an older example of intentional prompting for copyrighted material. The concern discussed here is copyrighted material being generated unintentionally and the original author asserting their rights. This has, to my knowledge, not happened once. If we are not talking about unintentional violations, I don't understand the point of the discussion. I can also intentionally copy paste the copyrighted material into my merge request without the use of AI in an attempt to get the maintainer into trouble.
- dijksterhuis 3mo ago
  > The concern discussed here is copyrighted material being generated unintentionally and the original author asserting their rights. both intentional (malicious contributor) or unintentional (Large-Laundering-Model) are copyright issues -- which is the point of GCC's policy. > I can also intentionally copy paste the copyrighted material into my merge request without the use of AI in an attempt to get the maintainer into trouble. You can. You can also do it significantly faster with significantly less effort while being harder to detect using agents etc.
  - user43928 3mo ago
    I do not think some untested theory about sabotaging open-source projects by intentionally inserting copyrighted material using AI, causing legal issues for maintainers, is worthwhile to discuss here. That is obviously not what anyone was referring to, nor does it make sense, when there is a much more reasonable basis to prohibit the same contribution. Namely inserting vulnerabilities. This one actually happened before afaik, and provides a clear benefit to the attacker.
olalonde 3mo ago
> just that it can be done and that the copyright owner could come along and cause legal problems later. It's absolutely possible to have a fly-by contributor who purposefully asks for code that reproduces X/Y/Z without a maintainer knowing about it. If a contributor doesn't care about submitting copyrighted code, they can do it without an LLM as well.

eschaton 3mo ago

I have personally seen this happen: Someone tried to contribute “vibe-coded” device support to a project I’m involved with, they said they did it all based on the device documentation, the code their agents spit out was copied verbatim out of a (GPL’d) project with which I’m familiar which supports that device. LLMs are not learning things and then using that learning to construct new things. They are essentially a form of lossy compression of their training set. And you don’t need to be explicit about trying to reproduce a portion of that training set for an LLM to output one.

user43928 3mo ago
As it happens, all evaluations I have seen in the news were in fact explicit about trying to reproduce a portion of the training set. I am not aware of any study attempting to measure unintentional reproduction. With your example, I question whether you have seen this happen first hand. For all I know, the contributor could have explicitly prompted the model to reference the GPL project and had the agent clone the code from the web.
- eschaton 3mo ago
  At a certain point you have to take people at their word; I’m reporting what the contributor said they did (used the documentation to generate the code).