Sure. But there are also a significant number of people who are nostalgic for it and might be offended by this use for that reason, hence why I asked.
Given the existence of both groups I think just the claim that it’s offensive, without explaining why, is ambiguous and just reacting defensively doesn’t address that.
Opinions... There are people with varied opinions on Nazi Germany. That doesn't mean squat.
The USSR eradicated everyone with a deviating opinion about the regime. They perished in the dungeons of the KGB and in the Gulags. What remained were opportunists and followers. Opinions!
Indeed, that accusation of bad faith is such blatant projection ... essentially "It's bad faith to disagree with me, and there's no need for me to justify my claims."
This whole diversion is off topic and can be seen as a form of bad faith.
I’m not even disagreeing, I’m saying that there are different (and somewhat opposed) ways in which someone could find an image offensive, so it’s worthwhile to provide further context.
This is a false equivalence between those who suffered from USSR and those who are ignorant of the suffering of others. I don't think we should care about feelings of a group who are for whatever reason nostalgic about a genocidal oppressive regime.
Would you treat an image of the US House of Representatives the same way? The United States has caused an enormous amount of suffering in the world and has in the past had an explicit policy of genocide and oppression against a number of groups (including my wife’s ancestors), as well as a number of other horrific policies. If you would not treat an image of the US House of Representatives the same way as you treat an image of the Supreme Soviet, it’s worthwhile to interrogate why.
Peoples’ feelings about the nations they are born into and told to love from birth are complex and multifaceted. The people I know who grew up in the USSR have both good and bad things to say about it, just like the people I know who grew up in the USA (like me) at the same time (the 1970s-1990s) have both good and bad things to say about it. And that isn’t just about our own experiences growing up in these respective nations, but about learning our birth nations’ true histories, and how closely (or not) the ideals espoused by their founders and politicians and important figures in their histories were reflected in their actions.
Thus I really, truly do believe it’s ambiguous for someone to say, without any further context, that they find an image of a legislature with some screen shots of an IDE placed into it offensive. Is it offensive because it’s referencing a body they consider evil or is it offensive because it’s trivializing a body they consider good? Without context it’s impossible to know, and acting like everyone shares the same context about this is just refusal to engage with the world as it is rather than the world as you’d like it to be.
Some people use My Little Pony characters as avatars, some use history books characters and propaganda poster characters. It means nothing in itself, people rarely stick to what they preach.
If you think that dumb nostalgia about “good old times” and complete ignorance/acceptance of any murders if they are considered state-sanctioned is somehow different in your own country (any country at any time), you must come to conclusion that some people inherently have lesser “quality” than others based on papers that they are given at birth by this or that organisation calling itself a state. Problematic, as they say.
No, these things don’t exist in a vacuum. Most LLMs were trained on huge amounts of copyrighted works that they then regurgitate portions of without regard to license or copyright holder, and without attribution.
Even that small one-line contribution is not the contributor’s own work. Since the contributor does not hold the copyright to it, they do not have the right to contribute it to the project.
That’s not the only thing that matters. The provenance of the code also matters enormously, specifically whether the person contributing it actually has the right to do so.
If I contributed code to an Open Source project behind my old employer’s back, that would have been bad, because that code was owned by them and not me, even if I wrote it on my own time using my own equipment, because of the contract I signed with them.
If I copied code out of an AGPLv3-licensed codebase and contributed it to a BSD-licensed codebase without telling anyone, that would have been bad, because I did not have the right to change the license on that code to BSD (or change the license on the codebase to which I was contributing to AGPLv3).
If you use an LLM to produce code, you may well be doing the latter since an LLM is actually just regurgitating portions of its inputs. This is not a hypothetical scenario; I’ve personally encountered a case of someone using an LLM attempt to contribute code I recognized from a specific Open Source project under one license to another project under a different license, while claiming they “wrote it themselves.”
Any project that accepts contributions needs to take liability seriously and manage their risk appropriately.
> This is not a hypothetical scenario; I’ve personally encountered a case of someone using an LLM attempt to contribute code I recognized from a specific Open Source project under one license to another project under a different license
You say you "recognized code". Does it mean that you weren't able to find the exact match?
> an LLM is actually just regurgitating portions of its inputs
You seem to be talking about the inputs to the autoregressive pretraining stage. Correct? Then it's not how LLMs work, unless we use a definition of portions as a "few letters blocks."
I found exact matches. I also found inexact matches, where C functions had been turned into C++ member functions and the like. “Recognized” does not somehow imply a lack of precision.
The LLM the person used was trained on a very large corpus of Open Source code, and reproduced that code exactly. Just like LLMs have reproduced chapters of books and articles from the New York Times exactly.
Were those functions trivial? With, say, 1% probability of someone who have not seen them writing them like that?
> Just like LLMs have reproduced chapters of books and articles from the New York Times exactly.
Have you read the articles? As far as I remember they fed large chunks of an article multiple times to an LLM to sometimes get a not-so-long exact match. It can mean that LLMs can infer a style and humans are predictable.
> […] fed large chunks of an article multiple times to an LLM […]
So they had to prompt? An LLM? I got this argument before and still don’t get what it’s trying to say. These models do not output anything unless prompted, that’s not any kind of gotcha.
On the code outputting front there is a lot of relevant evidence beyond the NYC lawsuit [0].
If I slightly modify GPL code, that doesn’t give me the right to relicense.
No, the functions weren’t trivial, and a lot of the surrounding code and structure bore substantial similarities as well. If you saw the two files next to each other, you’d assume it was the result of a copy-paste-adjust process if you didn’t know an LLM was involved.
I can only speculate that the model that generated the code hasn't undergone selective unlearning for verbatim data (SUV) or something similar. As you understand "sometimes generates verbatim code" and "just regurgitates [non-trivial] portions its input" are different statements.
The possibility of SUV clearly shows that a model does more than "just regurgitating."
"LLM produced licensed code and person contributed it" is indistinguishable from "person contributed licensed code". The LLM is irrelevant. Result is the same as if they had copy pasted it.
Unfortunately, a large number of people are being told—and here, you can see many who believe it—that the output of an LLM either carries no copyright or is copyright by the one prompting it. In other words, even right here on Hacker News it’s widely believed that LLMs “launder” copyright.
Not irrelevant. A large number of people who would not copy and paste code from one project to the another will attempt to contribute the copyright-infringing output of an LLM and not think twice.
Have fun with 1000x more Buns that literally no one is using or maintaining. An entire software industry built on top of a burning garbage pile of crappy, dead code.
You think Anthropic wants to be the sole maintainer of thousands of forked OSS projects...? I seriously doubt that would happen, for legal, marketing, and logistical reasons alike.
The Fortune 10 company that I spent decades at and retired from just a couple years ago noticed this issue immediately and issued a blanket ban on the use of these tools for the company’s own code that to my knowledge has not been rescinded. (They also started developing their own coding-specific LLM, training solely on code they owned, around the same time.)
You might consider that there is a very large incentive by the large and public players in this market to promote the idea that this is not true, that they consider themselves large and powerful enough to actually flout the law, and that they plan to use the argument that enforcement will be too damaging to the economy to make their view the “new normal.”
This playbook has been run before, by Uber and Lyft, by AirBnB, by Tesla with “FSD,” and so on. It’s very clearly the approach being taken.
Don't think calling a PR written by AI is the same thing as using a "tool". If code is largely generated by AI means that AI was an author and not you with some tool.
At what point does it cease to be AI generated and become my own work?
If LLM generates some code but I edit it, does it become my own work? How much editing must be done?
How large is "largely" ? Exactly how many bits of information must come from my fingers tapping the keyboard in order for me to qualify for authorship? Be precise.
If I write something but the LLM polishes it up a bit, is it still my work? Or is it AI generated?
I don't have an answer about the stage when something should be considered authored by AI - we are in an uncharted territory on this.
There are some precedents and rulings related to copyright and AI, so we have at least some rubric by which "authorship" can be determined. But when it comes to AI doing polishing of existing code - that is less certain.
Consider the rules around copyright. If your part of it is substantive, then it's your own work. If it isn't, then it isn't.
I'm not going to define substantive for you. That's something you should feel obligated to research and learn about yourself; anything less is dishonest.
Copyright provides for works made for hire. You are the author, yet your employer owns it. Your employer owns your output and gets credit for it despite not having written even a single bit of it. You're essentially ghostwriting your employer's software.
So "consider copyright" isn't really strengthening your position.
“Don’t get mad at people for doing something unethical or immoral, or they’ll do something unethical or immoral!”
Disabling attribution of LLM-generated code is fraud, because you’re saying you wrote the code.
Of course that fits right in with the use of an LLM to generate code in the first place, since what it’s actually doing is regurgitating its inputs stripped of any license and copyright notice.
I'm very certain that this is not fraud, across multiple legal systems, both roman and common law. In both cases fraud requires a person is deprived of a material good. Neither the defrauded person or their material loss is present in this case. Maybe there is a oddball legal system somewhere in the world where fraud is something entirely different, but i doubt it. "Fraud", just like "Decorator Pattern" is a well established concept and pretty simple concept, even if there are edge cases. This does not fit at all.
In academia this is miss-attribution, outside of academia this does not exist.
This is clearly not not copyright infringement either as LLMs do not claim copyright, nor could they. Just like the photograph taken by the monkey, or pictures drawn by crows. LLM output is not a creative work either.
If this is unethical or immoral is a totaly different question. I really dont think so and I dont think you argue that position well.
It is misrepresentation for gain, that gain does not need to be monetary to be material. For example, it can be reputational.
It also is copyright infringement, because what the LLM “generates” are actually portions of its training set, which were covered by copyright. Just passing through an LLM does not remove that copyright from that work.
In German and French (roman) legal systems this is a "Vermögensdelikt", and explicitly about material damage and gain. Yes, common law can be more broad (in canada it isn't really, it just also includes service, btw.), and yet it clearly does not meet the definition, as there is a damaged/defraued party and fraudulent/gaining party. We are not talking about somebody usurping somebody else reputation, after all.
You misuse a technical term that is well established since antiquity.
You do not know what this word means. If you want to argue about semantics, look up the definition. This works especially well for legal terms as laws define them.
(That said, IANAL and there are very many different legal systems and I am not ruling out there exists one that is competently different - laws can be changed a will, after all.)
It is also obviously not copyright infringement, because this is simply not how copyright works, at all. I cannot and will explain of all copyright here. Instead I will point this out: Every code produced by a human who read copyrighted code would fall under your definition.
No, you are wrong. You are either willfully misunderstanding what I’m calling fraud, or you are misinformed as to what “material gain” means in many legal systems.
With respect to the former, “fraud” is a shorthand for “fraudulent misrepresentation,” which is what you’re doing when you take someone else’s IP and try to contribute it to a project without securing the right to do so. It can be read as implicit in the attempt to contribute to the project that you have secured this permission (or do not need to, because the work is original to you). Whether the code came out of an LLM or was copied from another project or Stack Overflow doesn’t matter, it’s that you’re misrepresenting the rights you have that’s the fraudulent part.
For the latter, I specifically pointed out that the gain from fraudulent misrepresentation need not be monetary. The gain can be reputational or any other sort of benefit. For example, someone pretending to a fictional person to gain access to a space they otherwise wouldn’t is still committing fraud.
Finally, you’re wrong about whether the output of an LLM infringes copyright of material in its training set. Just running a copyrighted work through an LLM does not remove the copyright on that work if reproduced by the LLM.
You are misinformed, I suspect you have no idea what you are talking about.
As I said, I do not know all legal systems in the world. If there one where "material gain" matches your idea, please cite the law or a case that includes LLM usage. As I explained in the canadian law even includes services and yet it is so much very much not matching the defintion for reasons explained.
I do understand very well what you mean by "fraud", I do not miss represent it - your opinion on what it should be is plain and simple wrong. I explained why in my previous posts.
You are under the impression that legal science is some kind of folk etymology. It absolutely is not. Fraud is §263 StGB, Art. 313-1 Code penal or §380 of the canadian criminal code. (They all are remarkably similar, because they share a millennia old tradition. Making them IMHO fascinating cultural artifacts.) Here [0] is a structured version of on of these texts. Think of it as a symbolic execution of the law. You can see there is structural mismatch with your "case". Nobody ubsurbs anything from somebody else, and all three laws incude that in their defintion. That was my original claim.
You think you somehow can make up your own private definitions, develop your own private theories about them, apply them and argue about the semantics your made up terms. That is the opposite of how jurisprudence works. It rigorous, with well established scientific and scholastic methods. It operates on term defined by the law. In the case of "fraud" the previous citations, especially in criminal law, and nothing else. German legal science has its own theory what counts as "nothing else" under the name "Wortlautgrenze".
These terms and methods vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, but by surprisingly little.
Dont call your code a decorator pattern, because you think it is decorative. Different pattern libraries have definitions for that and you need to be able to argue it fits. Like wise, if you feel something involves some kind of misrepresentation its probably not fraud. If things have different names, that probably for a good reasons, especially in legal science.
Yes, in fact, this is why people who do that are looked down upon.
They are in fact committing fraud if they do not attribute the code in their commit properly, because by committing it they’re claiming to have rights by virtue of authorship that they do not have. (Namely, the right to contribute that code to the project,.) They may also be committing copyright infringement, depending on the copyright and license status of some code they found via Google or Stack Overflow.
It’s always fascinating to me to see how many people on Hacker News have such extremely poor understanding of how intellectual property actually works, and how misrepresenting themselves or their work can actually have consequences.
Are there any court cases you can point to that have clearly established that using LLM generated code can be a copyright violation? My understanding is that this is very far from being settled law.
What cases can you cite that have determined it’s not?
It’s clear on its face that LLMs can and do store and reproduce copyrighted works; using a form of (somewhat) lossy data compression. And using a lossy stochastic or perceptual form of compression to reproduce a copyrighted work doesn’t somehow make it not storage or reproduction, otherwise sharing MP3 files wouldn’t be copyright infringement.
Anyone engaging in responsible risk management should assume that anything LLM-generated is infringing until determined otherwise by the courts, not the other way around.
It's only fraud if a person signed their name stating such.
Their name being attached to the commit is itself, irrelevant, as their is no way to submit a patch otherwise. You could use a fake name, but you're just moving this fraud problem around.
You're going to have a hard time convincing anyone that using a tool constitutes fraud. Frankly, it's silly, if not genuinely stupid.
Film photographers in the early 2000s routinely called digital "not real photography" and Photoshop "cheating" because you could delete bad shots and fix everything later. Traditional musicians and critics dismissed drum machines, synthesizers, and autotune as soulless tools.
Intent and custom both matter quite a bit in law. It is customary to treat the name attached to a commit as the copyright holder of any changes represented by that commit, just as it was for the sender of an email containing a patch back when that was how such work was done.
Often this is also spelled out in a project’s contribution guidelines, and some projects have even had more explicit copyright assignment policies they required contributors to agree to, but the lack of such guidelines or assignment policies does not mean the custom as normally observed in the field is irrelevant.
> Intent and custom both matter quite a bit in law.
Indeed, and I'm not aware of any (Western, at least) legal system that would consider it fraud to not disclose that an LLM had generated some code.
I'd like to gently point out that your insistence of fraud here is hurting your overall argument, and is causing people to focus on the language you're using, instead of the substance of what you're trying to say. I do agree with you that people should disclose LLM generation when writing commits. But the way you're going about arguing this "fraud" thing is an unproductive dead end.
The fraud isn’t (directly) in hiding that the LLM generated some code. The fraud is in the (implicit) misrepresentation of ownership of and/or rights to the code.
When you send a patch or pull request to a project, you’re saying (implicitly) that you have the necessary rights to contribute the intellectual property it contains. If you used an LLM to “generate” some of it, that is not necessarily the case.
A similar situation would occur if you agreed to pay someone else to create a patch, and then submitted it under your own name without paying them. Because it’s a work for hire, it’s not yours until they’re paid for it, so you’re fraudulently misrepresenting your rights to that patch to the project. If you did pay the creator, you don’t have to attribute them unless it’s in the contract between you and the creator, or unless the project requires such attribution.
How so?
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