alt Hacker NewsI feel similarly for a different reason. I put my code out there, licensed under the GPL. It is now, through a layer of indirection, being used to construct products that are not under the GPL. That's not what I signed up for.
I know the GPL didn't have a specific clause for AI, and the jury is still out on this specific case (how similar is it to a human doing the same thing?), but I like to imagine, had it been made today, there probably would be a clause covering this usage. Personally I think it's a violation of the spirit of the license.
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GPL works via copyright. Since AI companies claim fair use no copyright applies. There is no fixing this. The only option is not to publish.
There are non-US jurisdictions where you have some options, but since most of them are trained in the US that won't help much.
One work-around would be to legislate that code produce by an LLM trained on GPL code would also be GPL.
The argument of the AI megacorps is that generated work is not "derivative" and therefore doesn't fall interact with the original authors copyright. They have invented a machine that takes in copyrighted works, and from a legal standpoint produces "entirely original" code. No license, be that GPL or otherwise, can do anything about that, because they ultimately rely on the authors copyright to required the licensee to observe the license.
They cannot violate the license, because in their view they have not licensed anything from you.
I think that's horse shit, and a clear violation of the intellectual property rights that are supposed to protect creatives from the business boys, but apparently the stock market must grow.
Now imagine how much more that sucks for artists and designers that were putting artwork out there to advertise themselves only to have some douchebag ingest it in order to sell cheap simulacra.
If you want, I made a coherent argument about how the mechanics of LLMs mean both their training and inference is plagiarism and should be copyright infringement.[0] TL;DR it's about reproducing higher order patterns instead of word for word.
I haven't seen this argument made elsewhere, it would be interesting to get it into the courtrooms - I am told cases are being fought right now but I don't have the energy to follow them.
Plus as somebody else put it eloquently, it's labor theft - we, working programmers, exchanged out limited lifetime for money (already exploitative) in a world with certain rules. Now the rules changed, our past work has much more value, and we don't get compensated.
Yep, this is my take as well. It's not that open source is being stolen as such, as if you abide by an open source license you aren't stealing anything, it's that the licenses are being completely ignored for the profit of a few massive corporations.