Because typing in text and syntax is now becoming irrelevant and mostly taken care of by language models. Computational thinking and sematics on the other hand will remain essential in the craft and always have been.
> Pre-training is, actually, our collective gift that allows many individuals to do things they could otherwise never do, like if we are now linked in a collective mind, in a certain way.
Is not a gift if it was stolen.
Anyway, in my opinion the code that was generated by the LLM is yours as long as you're responsible for it. When I look at a PR I'm reading the output of a person, independently of the tools that person used.
There's conflict perhaps when the submitter doesn't take full ownership of the code. So I agree with Antirez on that part
Licenses mean nothing if AI training on your data is fair use, which courts have yet to determine.
You can have a license that says "NO AI TRAINING EVER" in no uncertain terms and it would mean absolutely nothing because fair use isn't dictated by licenses.
It is knowledge, it can't be stolen. It is stolen only in the sense of someone gatekeeping knowledge. Which is as a practice, the least we can say, dubious. because is math stolen ? if you stole math to build your knowledge on top of it, you own nothing and can claim to have been stolen yourself
Code is the expression of knowledge and can be protected by copyright.
A lot of the popular licenses on GitHub (like MIT) permits you to use a piece of code on the condition that you credit the original author. If an LLM outputs code from such a project (or remixes code from several such projects) then it needs to credit the original authors or be in violation.
If Disney's intellectual property can be stolen and needs to be protected for 95+ years by copyright then surely the bedroom programmers' labor deserves the same protections.
We're not talking about the expression of knowledge. What is used in AI models is the knowledge from that expression. That code is not copied as is, instead knowledge is extracted from it and used to produce similar code. Copyright does not apply, IMHO
So you can train AI on Disney Movies to generate and sell your own disney movies because "knowledge is extracted" from it ? Betcha that won't fly in the courts. Here is "Slim Cinderella" - trained and extracted from all Disney Cinderella movies!
Sure, you can do it illegally - by breaking the law and recognizing that you need to be a fugitive. You can give up civilization and live in the wilderness. People can do whatever they want on their 10 year old Dell as long as they don't sell/distribute products made from other people's true efforts.
Independent of ones philosophical stance on the broader topic: I find it highly concerning that AI companies, at least right now, seem to be largely exempt from all those rules which apply to everyone else, often enforced rigorously.
I draw from this that no-one should be subject to those rules, and we should try to use the AI companies as a wedge to widen that crack. Instead, most people people who claim that their objection is really only consistency, not love for IP spend their time trying to tighten the definitions of fair use, widen the definitions of derivative works, and in general make IP even stronger, which will effect far more than just the AI companies they're going after. This doesn't look to me like the behavior of people who truly only want consistency, but don't like IP.
And before you say that they're doing it because it's always better to resist massive, evil corporations than to side with them, even if it might seem expedient to do so, the people who are most strongly fighting against AI companies in favor of IP, in the name of "consistency" are themselves siding with Disney, one of the most evil companies — from the perspective of the health of the arts and our culture — that's working right now. So they're already fine with siding with corporations; they just happened to pick the side that's pro-IP.
oh hey, let's have a thought experiment in this world with no IP rules
suppose I write a webnovel that I publish for free on the net, and I solicit donations. Kinda like what's happening today anyway.
Now suppose I'm not good at marketing, but this other guy is. He takes my webnovel, changes some names, and publishes it online under his name. He is good at social media and marketing, and so makes a killing from donations. I don't see a dime. People accuse me of plagiarism. I have no legal recourse.
There are also unfair situations that can happen, equally as often, if IP does exist, and likewise, in those situations, those with more money, influence, or charisma will win out.
Also, the idea that that situation is unfair relies entirely on the idea that we own our ideas and have a right to secure (future, hypothetical) profit from them. So you're essentially begging the question.
You're also relying on a premise that, when drawn out, seems fundamentally absurd to me: that you should own not just the money you earn, but the rights to any money you might earn in the future, had someone not done something that caused unrelated others to never have paid you. If you extend that logic, any kind of competition is wrong!
there are two programmers.
first is very talented technically, but weak at negotiations, so he earns median pay.
second is average technically, but very good at negotiations, and he earns much better.
In China, engineers hold the most power, yet the country prospers. I don't think the problem is giving engineers power, rather a cultural thing. In china there is a general feeling of contributing towards the society, in the US everyone is trying to screw over each-other, for political or monetary reasons.
This is obviously false on the face of it. Let’s say I have a patent, song, or a book that that I receive large royalty payments for. It would obviously not be logical for me be in favor of abolishing something that’s beneficial to me.
Declaring that your side has a monopoly on logic is rarely helpful.
Either by democracy (more consumers than produces), or ethically (thoughts and intellect are not property), it's logical. I guess it is not logical for someone who makes money with it today.
I agree with GP, and so, yes, I release everything I do — code and the hundreds of thousands of painstakingly researched, drafted, deeply thought through words of writing that I do — using a public domain equivalent license (to ensure it's as free as possible), the zero clause BSD.
Personal blog: https://neonvagabond.xyz/ (591,305 total words, written over 6 years; feel free to do whatever you want with it)
My personal github page: https://github.com/alexispurslane/ (I only recently switched to Zero-Clause BSD for my code, and haven't gotten around to re-licensing all my old stuff, but I give you permission to send a PR with a different license to any of them if you wanna use any of it)
Went full circle: static, PHP+mysql, python+tornado+redis (I had a nosql phase), python+Django+sqlite, and now static again (but this time with a generator, so it is all md).
What burden are you talking about? Using LLMs isn't that hard, we have done harder things before.
Sure, there will be people that refuses to "let go" and want to keep doing things the way the like them, but hey! I've been productive with vim (now neovim) for 25 years and I work with engineers that haven't mastered their IDEs at the same level. Not even close!
Sure, they have have never been "burdened" by knowing other editors before those IDEs existed, but claiming that I would have it harder to use any of those because I've mastered other tools before is ridiculous.
Not sure how to address this without just restating TFA. Not all change builds on existing knowledge, and sometimes it is so rapid that keeping up is difficult.
It has been years now that I only care about my subscriptions. I also installed an extension to remove anything else (especially shorts!), and that works great for me.
The downside is perhaps that I rarely discover new content, but YT can't be trusted to give me that organically.
Every time I access YT without being logged to my account and this extension, I'm surprised by the amount of garbage that YT feeds me based on my IP and/or location they infer from it. I worry what effect that is having in the population that consume it without safeguarding.
Sure, there's always been garbage TV, but this is the next level, and on demand.
Thanks for the suggestion. I just bought the UnTrap creator’s bundle social media product and tested with YouTube, X, Facebook, and LinkedIn. This is a safari extension. My biggest surprise was how pleasant it was to spend t minutes in Facebook.
I couldn't get past the awful sex scenes of "Altered Carbon". OK, after having watched the TV series I should have known, but reading it is completely different. Also, the main character is so dislikeable.
It has been a while since my last Heinlein, you reminded me I should read more.
I read 14 books this year and my favourite was Eversion by Alastair Reynolds, followed closely by Pushing Ice by the same author. I "discovered" Cory Doctorow this year, reading 4 books (and I have another in my queue), being "Attack Surface" the one I liked most.
The only technical book I read was Programming in Lua (4th edition), and still didn't work for me. I guess I don't like Lua, and that's OK.
Alastair is on my S tier for sci-fi. Read so much of him. But didn't read Eversion. Adding it!
In your reading journey, which other authors/books have similar grand space scale as how Alastair writes? I mean, there are a lot, I know, but some overdo it and others oversimplify it. I find Alastair striking perfect balance of being "hardcore" in a way, but still making sense:)
Strong recommendation for Alistair Reynold’s Century Rain if you want another of his. It’s part 20th century alternate history, part hard boiled crime noir, and part hard space opera.
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