https://stackoverflow.com/help/licensing
Doesn't this imply the produced model has to be CC-BY-SA too?
Doesn't this imply the produced model has to be CC-BY-SA too?
The only theory under which training this sort of model is remotely legal is that doing so is not prohibited by copyright law in the first place. If that theory is correct they don't need a license, and they don't need to abide by any terms of licenses that they were granted without asking.
If that theory is incorrect, they have to comply with the stackoverflow license, but they also have to not use any of the (massive amounts) of unlicensed training data they are using, and comply with the numerous incompatible licenses other sources of training data are licensed under. In other words it's impossible to do this.
I tend to favour the view that in this case it is legal (by way of the de minimis doctrine), but I don't think it's a trivial question.
Distribution is when the issue arises - not consumption and construction of a mental model.
I acknowledge the parallels are imperfect and this all needs to be worked out in court. But it’s possible that at the pace LLMs are developing, by the time courts start addressing these questions we’ll already be questioning whether the distinction between machines and people is as big as we thought.
CC-BY-SA content needs attribution too, but I don’t see the(se) model(s) in the current state being able to do so.
I imagine we’re gonna see the IBM PC bios/Unix/ReactOS “tainted code” arguments again in court, this time is not the human who is more-or-less knowingly responsible for sneaking in copyrighted code.