@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 @dalias
> but not actually true under the copyright regime that exists

Under the copyright regime that exists in the US specifically, the generated code is at best not copyrightable at all (and therefore cannot be included into any projects with licenses relying on copyright).
Of course maintainers of said projects might decide to yolo it, but also they might decide to not; and in this case, the intentional deception by antropic becomes even more significant fraud.

@dalias @IngaLovinde @aredridel AFAICT it merely confirms that AI output cannot be copyrighted as new work of its own (naturally, as the human creativity aspect is missing and it’s merely an algorithmic transformation on a deterministic machine, PRNG inputs notwithstanding).

It does not reduce the claims of the authors of the works it ingested to regurgitate the output.

@dalias @mirabilos @aredridel which still means that at best the generated code cannot be copyrighted, and at worst it violated copyright and license terms of the original authors (whose works were ingested to train the model). In both these cases, the resulting code cannot be incorporated into any FOSS project with any license.

Typically when people submit code to FOSS projects, they also (implicitly or explicitly) claim that they hold the copyright on the submitted code, and agree that this code will be licensed under the license the project uses (which they only have power to do if the first claim is actually true).
When LLMs are used to generate code, the first claim is false, and it _is_ a contamination.

@aredridel How similar is it? Are there appreciable portions that are exactly the same? If so, the default assumption if they've *memorized* and *already proven themselves to have memoried* the thing they allegedly plagiarized is that it's plagiarism. There have been plenty of court cases over this in literature, in music, etc. It's not some vague unknown.

If they had never seen the original or maybe only saw (or for music, heart) it in passing, there might be more leeway for doubt.

Part of the consequences of having spent so much time looking at a work that you've memorized it is that you lose the ability to make things of your own that are similar to it but meaningfully "your own".