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Comment by Topfi | Hacker News Reader

> This content is fully generated by AI because fuck AI.

Maybe this is a language barrier, but what is meant by this sentence in particular? Why "generate with AI" (i.e. an LLM, most certainly not any form of "AI") if the author dislikes that so much? Wouldn't such a deeply held stance motivate someone to more heavily rely on consulting with experts in the fields of licensing and the current state of models rather than outsourcing such a project in its entirety to an LLM? In general, I can understand using an LLM for an initial draft when working on a project, then going over the output with some actual input from various expert sources, though not if one has major objections to the use and existence of LLMs in general. That just seems self-defeating.

Or am I misunderstanding something?

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Using AI against itself.

Demonstrating the problems of AI (what it has produced is dodgy in various ways).

A sense of bitter futility, hating AI but realising they can’t actually stop it like this and so it’s not worth the effort of proper drafting.

Perhaps some mixture of these, but mostly the first.

> Demonstrating the problems of AI (what it has produced is dodgy in various ways).

So you believe the LLM was prompted to produce faulty or imperfect licenses on purpose with the intent of highlighting the deficiencies of the current tech, and they did not intend anyone to use these licenses?

That'd actually be an interesting way of protesting, even if it ignores both how prompting can affect LLM output quality and that these models will only improve. Add to that, if one such as myself (and seemingly most people on HN) misses this part of ironic protesting and just takes them seriously (i.e. their intent is that people use these licenses), that harms their cause by making them seem unintentionally unprofessional, rather than intentionally unprofessional.

> prompted to produce faulty or imperfect licenses on purpose

I don’t read it that way.

You could prompt it perfectly “honestly” for the following:

> create a license for creative works, similar to the Creative Commons licenses, but which disallows using the content in any AI context

OpenAI GPT4 tells me about some considerations, and proceeds to give me a template that I can build on, which is very very near in fact to the kind of content you see in OP link.

No need to tell the AI to create a faulty or imperfect license. The LLM is perfectly able to do that on its own. And then instead of refining what it gave you, set up a basic website hosting the content.

Hell, you can even prompt the LLM to make the HTML version of the document for you, if you want.

I have absolutely no doubt that you may have received such output from the prompt you provided, but I'd like to enter into the record what GPT-4-turbo via the Chat Website provided to me using your specific prompt[0], which was more generalized advice on the different aspects of how such a license could be written, rather than a license as seen on their homepage. These also, very specifically, pointed to the issues such an undertaking will inevitably have:

> [...] Definitions: Clearly define what constitutes "AI context" to avoid ambiguity. This could include the use of content in machine learning, algorithm training, data scraping, AI-generated art, automated content creation, predictive modeling, etc. [...]

LLMs, by their nature, are not deterministic, so getting differing outputs is no surprise. Considering, however, that, using your prompt, I got a rather differentiated output that points to the very issues that are inherent to these licenses, namely whether things such as data scraping would fall under "technologies designed to simulate human intelligence" (clearly define human intelligence and the simulation thereof, I'd argue LLMs may not fall under that at this point in time either), showcases that the creator most likely did not receive such a faulty license from the get-go, and if they did, the output was likely littered with severe warnings to employ legal advice and lean on experts rather than just post that first draft.

To me, while a LLM may provide such a license draft with such casual prompting in limited cases (perhaps someone could prompt this 100 times and see how often they get a license over general advice using your prompt), the license on that website still seems more like the result of actively prompting for erroneous results to make LLMs appear incapable of such a task (or again and much worse for their cause, this is in fact a serious attempt at a license by someone inexperienced yet unwilling to contact any expert who'd explain things like search engine crawlers and the wider implications of such an undertaking).

Regardless, even if these licenses were the first output the LLM provided and even if they are meant to be taken as a joke/way to start a conversation rather than something people should use for their projects in earnest, what remains is that LLMs are not static and will improve, so any point made concerning the current day's capabilities only undercuts the serious and important discussion on licensing and the future of copyright. LLMs will get better, pointing out temporary imperfections only distracts from actually important topics.

So, whatever their intent and whether this license is serious or not, I feel this does not help their alleged cause.

[0] https://chat.openai.com/share/bf36f182-ba20-4f66-a702-2b636b...

> I have absolutely no doubt that you may have received such output from the prompt you provided

I didn’t want to spam the thread with copy-pasting the full response that GPT-4 gave me for my prompt. But for completeness, here is a link to the conversation:

https://chat.openai.com/share/7295ca81-cff4-4f01-a932-35a3d6...

Archived copy of link:

https://archive.is/xmPci

There you can see the prompt I used (which I also included in my comment above), and the response it gave me.

This was the first and only time I asked it. But as you say, LLMs are inherently using a bit of randomness. So other people using the same prompt will get different variations in the responses.

I think author was thinking that by using AI model to roast itself it would be an ultimate win in their book, the AI kills itself.

But for any LLM they may have used to produce this, it was most likely trained on various sources in just the manner they are protesting. Can you truly protest something by engaging in just the thing you are protesting? Trying to keep this within the HN space, the Windows Refund day organizers didn't utilize Microsoft software products when planning their protest by claiming they'd "use their own weapons against them", that'd only hurt their cause.

LLM's are definitely the sort of thing people in general mean when they say "AI".

The act of using "an AI" to generate a license restricting the use of AI can have many motivations, but an obvious one is the simple "use their own weapons against them" principle.

I think the author is trying to be a bit flippant by using the AI against itself

Satire.

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