TL;DR: The big tech AI company LLMs have gobbled up all of our data, but the damage they have done to open source and free culture communities are particularly insidious. By taking advantage of those who share freely, they destroy the bargain that made free software spread like wildfire.
Do you understand how free software works? Did you read the post? I’d love to clarify, but I’m not going to rewrite the article.
Yes. And this is kinda hand-wavy bullshit.
That’s not how it works. Your code is not “incorporated” into the model in any recognizable form. It trains a model of vectors. There isn’t a file with your
for loopin there though.I can read your code, learn from it, and create my own code with the knowledge gained from your code without violating an OSS license. So can an LLM.
No you can’t. In the same way you can’t watch a Mickey mouse movie and then draw your own Mickey mouse from what you recall from the movie.
Copying can be done manually by memory, it doesn’t need to be a 1:1 match. Otherwise you could take a GPL licensed file, change the name of 1 variable, and make it proprietary code.
LLMs are just fancy lossy compression algorithms you can interact with. If I save a Netflix series in my hard drive, then re encode it, it is still protected by copyright, even if the bytes don’t match.
Yes, I can. I can create a legally distinct mouse-bases cartoon.
You’re right that if an llm gives you copyrighted code that it would be a potential problem. But the article saying that it somehow “strips the code of any copyright” is ridiculous.
Is there anything in the LLMs code preventing it from emitting copyrighted code? Nobody outside LLM companies know, but I’m willing to bet there isn’t.
Therefore, LLMs DO emit copyrighted code. Due to them being trained on copyrighted code and the statistical nature of LLMs.
Does the LLM tell its users that the code it outputted has copyright? I’m not aware of any instance of that happening. In fact, LLMs are probably programmed to not put a copyright header at the start of files, even if the code it “learnt” from had them. So in the literal sense, it is stripping the code of copyright notices.
Does the justice system prosecute LLMs for outputting copyrighted code? No it doesn’t.
I don’t know what definition you use for “strip X of copyright” but I’d say if you can copy something openly and nobody does anything against it, you are stripping it’s copyright.
Just what was stated in the fucking article
That’s bullshit.
Why is Clean-room design a thing then?
Not copy your code. Use it to learn what algorithms it uses and ideas on how to implement it.
No, sometimes they spit out shit verbatim.
You are assuming way too much about how the models work.
Then that code world still be under the oss copyright. There’s no “licence washing” going on.
Not even just an OSS license. No license backed by law is any stronger than copyright. And you are allowed to learn from or statistically analyze even fully copyrighted work.
Copyright is just a lot more permissive than I think many people realize. And there’s a lot of good that comes from that. It’s enabled things like API emulation and reverse engineering and being able to leave our programming job to go work somewhere else without getting sued.
Also - this conclusion is ridiculous:
That is absolutely not true. It doesn’t remove the copyright from the original work and no court has ruled as such.
If I wrote a “random code generator” that just happened to create the source code for Microsoft Windows in entirety it wouldn’t strip Microsoft of its copyright.