It’s extremist to take the fact that you CAN get plagiaristic output and to conclude that all other output is somehow tainted.
You personally CAN quote copyrighted music and screenplays. If you’re an artist then you also CAN produce copyright violating works. None of these facts taint any of the other things that you produce that are not copyright or plagiarized.
In this situation, and in the current legal environment, the responsibility to not produce illegal and unlicensed code is on the human. The fact that the tool that they use has the capability to break the law does not mean that everything generated by it is tainted.
Photoshop can be used to plagiarize and violate copyright too. It would be just as absurd to declare all images created with Photoshop are somehow suspect or unusable because of the capability of the tool to violate copyright laws.
The fact that AI can, when specifically prompted, produce memorized segments of the training data has essentially no legal weight in any of the cases where it has been argued. It is a fact that is of interest to scientists who study how AI represent knowledge internally and not any kind of foundation for a legal argument against the use of AI.
Sure, but if they can be demonstrated to ever plagiarize without attribution, and the default user behavior is to pencil-whip the output, which it is, then it becomes statistically certain that users are unwittingly plagiarizing other works.
Its like using a tool that usually bakes cookies, but every once in a great while, it knocks over the building its in. It almost never does that, though.
Plagiarism and copyright violation are two different things, one is ethical and the other is legal.
Copyright has a body of case law which helps determine when a work significantly infringes on the copyrighted work of another. Plagiarism has no body of law at all, it is an ethical construct and not a legal one.
You can plagiarize something that has no copyright protection and you can infringe on copyright protection without plagiarizing. They’re not interchangeable concepts.
In your example, some institutions would not allow such a device to operate on their property but it would not be illegal to operate and the liability would be on the person and not on the oven.
To further strain the metaphor, Linus is saying that you can use (possibly) exploding ovens, because he isn’t taking a moral stance on the topic, but you are responsible for the damages if they cause any because the legal systems require that this be the case.
It’s less extremist if you look at how easily these LLMs will just plagiarize 1:1, apparently:
https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/38072#issuecomment-4105681567
Some see “AI slop” as “identified by the immediate problems of it that I can identify right away”.
Many others see “AI slop” as bringing many more problems beyond the immediate ones. Then seeing LLM output as anything but slop becomes difficult.
It’s extremist to take the fact that you CAN get plagiaristic output and to conclude that all other output is somehow tainted.
You personally CAN quote copyrighted music and screenplays. If you’re an artist then you also CAN produce copyright violating works. None of these facts taint any of the other things that you produce that are not copyright or plagiarized.
In this situation, and in the current legal environment, the responsibility to not produce illegal and unlicensed code is on the human. The fact that the tool that they use has the capability to break the law does not mean that everything generated by it is tainted.
Photoshop can be used to plagiarize and violate copyright too. It would be just as absurd to declare all images created with Photoshop are somehow suspect or unusable because of the capability of the tool to violate copyright laws.
The fact that AI can, when specifically prompted, produce memorized segments of the training data has essentially no legal weight in any of the cases where it has been argued. It is a fact that is of interest to scientists who study how AI represent knowledge internally and not any kind of foundation for a legal argument against the use of AI.
Sure, but if they can be demonstrated to ever plagiarize without attribution, and the default user behavior is to pencil-whip the output, which it is, then it becomes statistically certain that users are unwittingly plagiarizing other works.
Its like using a tool that usually bakes cookies, but every once in a great while, it knocks over the building its in. It almost never does that, though.
Plagiarism and copyright violation are two different things, one is ethical and the other is legal.
Copyright has a body of case law which helps determine when a work significantly infringes on the copyrighted work of another. Plagiarism has no body of law at all, it is an ethical construct and not a legal one.
You can plagiarize something that has no copyright protection and you can infringe on copyright protection without plagiarizing. They’re not interchangeable concepts.
In your example, some institutions would not allow such a device to operate on their property but it would not be illegal to operate and the liability would be on the person and not on the oven.
To further strain the metaphor, Linus is saying that you can use (possibly) exploding ovens, because he isn’t taking a moral stance on the topic, but you are responsible for the damages if they cause any because the legal systems require that this be the case.