@hbons Phrased differently it's also the end of copyright and that was always the goal of the Free Software movement or not? With copyleft being a necessary hack for the current system.

Next let's make sure the patent system goes down the same path.

What we're losing here is mostly attribution. (And gaining various other problems but you talked about copyleft specifically)

@ebassi @slomo @hbons Indeed, the only thing that is going to usher in a better alternative, is to work out what that better alternative is, campaign for it, and implement it.

(As always.)

@ebassi @nirbheek @pwithnall @hbons Whether something is a "clean room" implementation or not is also not that easy. Maybe the LLM saw other implementations of the same thing during training, but is that different from you having read some other implementation of something some time before in your life and then writing your own? In either case it's not like the LLM or you can recite* any of the originals but you have an abstract model of it and anything else you ever learned that you work from.

* Give it a try: let a recent LLM write you the FreeBSD implementation of /bin/yes that was surely in its training data and is small enough, and then compare to the original. Or maybe more interesting: let an LLM write Rust/GStreamer code, and you'll clearly see that it learned from code I have written. Just like most humans did if you look over github/etc. Unlike what some humans do, you don't see 1:1 copy&paste of whole little helper functions though.

Very different to that is the case when you (or an LLM) actively look, compare, copy another implementation during development. (Which is also probably more common than we'd like to pretend based on all the code I've seen over the years)

I'm sure we're going to have lots of interesting philosophical discussions between lawyers and courts in the future, ideally with outcomes that don't backfire at us.

@slomo @ebassi @nirbheek @hbons Because humans are bad at license and copyright attribution on a small scale, does not mean that LLMs should be allowed to get away with bad license and copyright attribution on a vast scale.

1/3

@slomo @ebassi @nirbheek @hbons As a thought experiment: if there was an LLM which had been trained purely on (say) LGPL-2.1+ code, had low environmental impact, was not funded by VCs who are counting down the time until they turn on the monetisation switch, and which ran local-only and didn’t exfiltrate your stuff to the cloud, and someone used it to rewrite my project, I think I would still be massively pissed off.

Why? Because it’s a social problem.

2/3