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.

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.

  • atzanteol@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    623·
    4 days ago

    destroy the bargain that made free software spread like wildfire

    If you didn’t want your code to be used by others then don’t make it open source.

    • yoasif@fedia.ioOP
      23·
      4 days ago

      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.

      • atzanteol@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        42·
        3 days ago

        Yes. And this is kinda hand-wavy bullshit.

        By incorporating copyleft data into their models, the LLMs do share the work - but not alike. Instead, the AI strips the work of its provenance and transforms it to be copyright free.

        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 loop in 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.

        • yoasif@fedia.ioOP
          2·
          3 days ago

          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.

          Why is Clean-room design a thing then?

          • atzanteol@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
            11·
            3 days ago

            create my own code with the knowledge gained from your code

            Not copy your code. Use it to learn what algorithms it uses and ideas on how to implement it.

        • VoterFrog@lemmy.world
          2·
          3 days ago

          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.

          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.

      • atzanteol@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        32·
        3 days ago

        Also - this conclusion is ridiculous:

        By incorporating copyleft data into their models, the LLMs do share the work - but not alike. Instead, the AI strips the work of its provenance and transforms it to be copyright free.

        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.

      • atzanteol@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        14·
        3 days ago

        If you put a fucking sign on your door saying “come on in!” then don’t be angry when people do?

        • ImgurRefugee114@reddthat.com
          4·
          3 days ago

          We do hang signs on the doors but they say something sightly different

          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_license

          Public domain licenses are truly as you describe, but copyleft licenses are far from that. There are also many “source available” licenses which aren’t open at all. Just because you can read a book doesn’t mean you can print and sell it.

            • ImgurRefugee114@reddthat.com
              2·
              3 days ago

              Uh… Lots of people? That’s kinda the problem. Maybe use a search engine. There are plenty of cases of LLMs ‘laundering’ copyleft code into (often) proprietary codebases. And that’s just the most blatant and brain-dead obvious example; the use of GPL code to train commercial models is a bit more subtle and nuanced but no less nefarious, and the laws are currently unequipped to handle that part at all.