@aral Honestly I don't actually hate this.

It's a tool. The _user_ is responsible for what they're submitting. It's putting code generated by them in their name. I think this is actually good.

@glyph Yeah, I disagree. Code isn't ingredients and it's not “contamination" any more than you should label “I used search and replace on this”

What you want to know is whether it was well engineered or not.

And in fact, this is almost entirely orthogonal to "safety”. This is an engineering product. The safety comes from processes and whether or not _anyone checked the work done was right_, not the inputs.

@aredridel @glyph What "AI coding tools" *should* be putting in commit messages is:

Co-Authored-By: An unknown and unknowable set of people who did not consent to their work being used this way and to which there is no license for inclusion.

@dalias Morally arguable but not actually true under the copyright regime that exists.

At what point does learning from others constitute their authorship?

@aredridel LLM slop is nothing like "learning from others".

But if you recall, we even took precautions against that. FOSS projects reimplementing proprietary things were careful to exclude anyone who might had read the proprietary source, disassembled proprietary code, worked at the companies who wrote or had access to that code, etc.

@dalias @aredridel A test which LLMs fail by the very virtue of their functioning mechanisms.

It's all fundamentally derivative of the training dataset and it has been exposed both to AGPL and to proprietary datasets.

@aredridel @lispi314 The facts of the matter are completely and utterly obvious.

Now, we live in a world where legal authorities are under complete capture by billionaires pushing this drug, so I am not going to make any predictions about how courts will rule. Even if they do rule in favor of these companies, those rulings will not be treated as precedents that benefit us.

And they will not be accepted by our communities.

What defines FOSS is not whether a court says it's non-infringing, but whether our communities agree that it was made respecting the intent and consent of the authors who licensed it.

@dalias Have you checked with the Free Software Foundation about that?

(Seriously, if it's a moral argument you're making, it's way stronger if you actually make it!)

Now "respect the intent of the author" is a fascinating concept and one worth examining!

@dalias Right. You're appealing to a definition of "FOSS" that isn't entirely clear what it is. And the people who do usually have (some) claim to that authority, the common uses of it, are not the ones you're using.

I'm sympathetic to that but I can't tell what it is in an appeal to an unstated norm for a community that I can't quite identify.