> I was made redundant recently "due to AI" (questionable) and it feels like my works in some way contributed to my redundancy where my works contributed to the profits made by these AI megacorps while I am left a victim.

I think anyone here can understand and even share that feeling. And I agree with your "questionable" - its just the lame HR excuse du jour.

My 2c:

- AI megacorps aren't the only ones gaining, we all are. the leverage you have to build and ship today is higher than it was five years ago.

- It feels like megacorps own the keys right now, but that’s a temporary. In a world of autonomous agents and open-weight models, control is decentralized.inference costs continue to drop, you dont need to be running on megacorp stacks. Millions (billions?) of agents finding and sharing among themselves. How will megacorps stop?

- I see the advent of LLMs like the spread of literacy. Scribes once held a monopoly on the written word, which felt like a "loss" to them when reading/writing became universal. But today, language belongs to everyone. We aren't losing code; we are making the ability to code a universal human "literacy."

These companies pirated their training material and reached settlements with the copyright holders. I imagine they’d do the same with software licenced under Not For Training terms too. It’d be up to you to find out it is happening and then pursue them legally for compensation.

I think there's no meaningful case by the letter of the law that use of training data that include GPL-licensed software in models that comprise the core component of modern LLMs doesn't obligate every producer of such models to make both the models and the software stack supporting them available under the same terms. Of course, it also seems clear in the present landscape that the law often depends more on the convenience of the powerful than its actual construction and intent, but I would love to be proven wrong about that, and this kind of outcome would help

The foreman had pointed out his best man - what was his name? - and, joking with the puzzled machinist, the three bright young men had hooked up the recording apparatus to the lathe controls. Hertz! That had been the machinist's name - Rudy Hertz, an old-timer, who had been about ready to retire. Paul remembered the name now, and remembered the deference the old man had shown the bright young men.

Afterward, they'd got Rudy's foreman to let him off, and, in a boisterous, whimsical spirit of industrial democracy, they'd taken him across the street for a beer. Rudy hadn't understood quite what the recording instruments were all about, but what he had understood, he'd liked: that he, out of thousands of machinists, had been chosen to have his motions immortalized on tape. And here, now, this little loop in the box before Paul, here was Rudy as Rudy had been to his machine that afternoon - Rudy, the turner-on of power, the setter of speeds, the controller of the cutting tool. This was the essence of Rudy as far as his machine was concerned, as far as the economy was concerned, as far as the war effort had been concerned. The tape was the essence distilled from the small, polite man with the big hands and black fingernails; from the man who thought the world could be saved if everyone read a verse from the Bible every night; from the man who adored a collie for want of children; from the man who . . . What else had Rudy said that afternoon? Paul supposed the old man was dead now - or in his second childhood in Homestead.

Now, by switching in lathes on a master panel and feeding them signals from the tape, Paul could make the essence of Rudy Hertz produce one, ten, a hundred, or a thousand of the shafts.

Kurt Vonnegut, Player Piano

If you use GitHub, you’re automatically opted into having your code used for training. Private repo or not. You have to actually opt out and even then, will they honor that? No…

I feel kind of good knowing that my code, design decisions, styles, are now part of the data shaping all software now.

My personal take is that LLMs are so transformative that they are likely not going to qualify under derivative works and therefore GPL wouldn't hold sway. There's already some evidence that courts will consider training on copyrighted material fair use, so long as it is otherwise obtained legally, which would be the case with software licensed under GPL.

I realize this is an unpopular opinion on HN, but I believe it is best because it's a weakener interpretation of copyright law, which is overall a good thing in my view.

> I've been looking for a copy-left "source available" license that allows me to distribute code openly but has a clause that says "if you would like to use these sources to train an LLM, please contact me and we'll work something out". I haven't yet found that.

Personally, I want a viral (GPL-style) license that explicitly prohibits use of code for LLM training/tuning purposes — with the asterisk that while current law might view LLM training as fair use, this may not be the case forever, and blatant disregard of the terms of the license should make it easier for me to sue offenders in the future.

Alternatively, this could be expressed as: the output of any LLM trained on this code must retain this license.

I wish Anthropic or someone would take a leadership role and re-train their models without any GPL code, or at least stop doing so in the future tense.

> I've been looking for a copy-left "source available" license that allows me to distribute code openly but has a clause that says "if you would like to use these sources to train an LLM, please contact me and we'll work something out". I haven't yet found that

Frankly do you think AI companies have even the remotest amount of respect for these licenses anyways? They will simply take your code if it is publicly scrapeable, train their models, exactly like they have so far. Then it will be up to you to chase them down and try to sue or whatever. And good luck proving the license violation

I dunno. I just don't really believe that many tech companies these days are behaving even remotely ethically. I don't have much hope that will change anytime soon

> it certainly feels against the spirit of what I intended when distributing my works

You can own the works, but not the vibes. If everyone owned the vibes we would all be infringing others. In my view abstractions should not be protected by copyright, only expression, currently the abstraction-filtration-comparison standard (AFC) protects abstractions too, non-literal infringement is a thing.

Trying to own the vibes is like trying to own the functionality itself, no matter the distinct implementation details, and this is closer to patents than copyrights. But patents get researched for prior art and have limited duration, copyright is automatic and almost infinite duration.