eschaton

5 ms·

31.
by eschaton 3mo ago
How do they enforce that contributions aren’t copied and pasted from AGPLv3 or proprietary codebases? The honor system and intuition and occasionally flat out asking people. Do you think sociopaths willing to lie about how they came up with
32.
by eschaton 4mo ago
A lot of people will disagree with you on that. A lot of people might also have coherent reasons to think that analogy applies equally to the US House of Representatives and the US Senate.
33.
by eschaton 4mo ago
I’m not even disagreeing, I’m saying that there are different (and somewhat opposed) ways in which someone could find an image offensive, so it’s worthwhile to provide further context.
34.
by eschaton 4mo ago
Would you treat an image of the US House of Representatives the same way? The United States has caused an enormous amount of suffering in the world and has in the past had an explicit policy of genocide and oppression against a number of gr
35.
by eschaton 4mo ago
Nope. I just evidently know people with more varied opinions on the USSR than you do. (Including people who grew up there.)
36.
by eschaton 4mo ago
Sure. But there are also a significant number of people who are nostalgic for it and might be offended by this use for that reason, hence why I asked. Given the existence of both groups I think just the claim that it’s offensive, without ex
37.
by eschaton 4mo ago
How about you just explain what you mean? You’re the one who made the statement. It’s on you to support it.
38.
by eschaton 4mo ago
> Extremely poor taste. How so?
39.
by eschaton 4mo ago
No, you are wrong. You are either willfully misunderstanding what I’m calling fraud, or you are misinformed as to what “material gain” means in many legal systems. With respect to the former, “fraud” is a shorthand for “fraudulent misrepres
40.
by eschaton 4mo ago
So it’s OK to just paste other people’s IP into a change you’re submitting to a project without caring about the license or originator?
41.
by eschaton 4mo ago
The fraud isn’t (directly) in hiding that the LLM generated some code. The fraud is in the (implicit) misrepresentation of ownership of and/or rights to the code. When you send a patch or pull request to a project, you’re saying (impli
42.
by eschaton 4mo ago
No, the functions weren’t trivial, and a lot of the surrounding code and structure bore substantial similarities as well. If you saw the two files next to each other, you’d assume it was the result of a copy-paste-adjust process if you didn
43.
by eschaton 4mo ago
I found exact matches. I also found inexact matches, where C functions had been turned into C++ member functions and the like. “Recognized” does not somehow imply a lack of precision. The LLM the person used was trained on a very large corp
44.
by eschaton 4mo ago
What cases can you cite that have determined it’s not? It’s clear on its face that LLMs can and do store and reproduce copyrighted works; using a form of (somewhat) lossy data compression. And using a lossy stochastic or perceptual form of
45.
by eschaton 4mo ago
Yes, in fact, this is why people who do that are looked down upon. They are in fact committing fraud if they do not attribute the code in their commit properly, because by committing it they’re claiming to have rights by virtue of authorshi
46.
by eschaton 4mo ago
Intent and custom both matter quite a bit in law. It is customary to treat the name attached to a commit as the copyright holder of any changes represented by that commit, just as it was for the sender of an email containing a patch back wh
47.
by eschaton 4mo ago
Or you’re misinformed about what my old employer is actually doing, or how they’re doing it.
48.
by eschaton 4mo ago
Not irrelevant. A large number of people who would not copy and paste code from one project to the another will attempt to contribute the copyright-infringing output of an LLM and not think twice.
49.
by eschaton 4mo ago
The Fortune 10 company that I spent decades at and retired from just a couple years ago noticed this issue immediately and issued a blanket ban on the use of these tools for the company’s own code that to my knowledge has not been rescind
50.
by eschaton 4mo ago
Yes, exactly. Unfortunately, a large number of people are being told—and here, you can see many who believe it—that the output of an LLM either carries no copyright or is copyright by the one prompting it. In other words, even right here on
51.
by eschaton 4mo ago
It is misrepresentation for gain, that gain does not need to be monetary to be material. For example, it can be reputational. It also is copyright infringement, because what the LLM “generates” are actually portions of its training set, whi
52.
by eschaton 4mo ago
Yes.
53.
by eschaton 4mo ago
No, these things don’t exist in a vacuum. Most LLMs were trained on huge amounts of copyrighted works that they then regurgitate portions of without regard to license or copyright holder, and without attribution.
54.
by eschaton 4mo ago
Even that small one-line contribution is not the contributor’s own work. Since the contributor does not hold the copyright to it, they do not have the right to contribute it to the project.
55.
by eschaton 4mo ago
That kind of fraud absolutely should. (I suspect you mean “undisclosed LLM use.”)
56.
by eschaton 4mo ago
That’s not the only thing that matters. The provenance of the code also matters enormously, specifically whether the person contributing it actually has the right to do so. If I contributed code to an Open Source project behind my old emplo
57.
by eschaton 4mo ago
It means “this contribution likely infringes someone else’s copyright.”
58.
by eschaton 4mo ago
It doesn’t help your case that your response is to say “well I’ll just hide my use.” That’s fraud.
59.
by eschaton 4mo ago
So we can know which commits will be infringing others’ copyright.
60.
by eschaton 4mo ago
“Don’t get mad at people for doing something unethical or immoral, or they’ll do something unethical or immoral!” Disabling attribution of LLM-generated code is fraud, because you’re saying you wrote the code. Of course that fits right in w

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