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Comment by pryelluw | Hacker News Reader

I’ve been feeling more and more that we should reconsider open source licenses to protect our rights as authors from LLM vendors. I’m not against them basing their models on my work. I do have reservations on them generating their models on my work and creating derivative works without respecting the license. It’s why I’ve started to use the MIT license less and less and have adopted various from the GPL family. Models trained in OSS should be open sourced IMO.

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AI companies believe copyright doesn't apply and all this is fair use or transformative enough. If copyright doesn't apply they are not bound by license terms either.

If they're not respecting MIT's attribution requirement for derived works, why would they respect GPL?

They argue their use is transformative and thus the works are not derivatives.

Do you mind explaining further ?

Not much to explain, that's just how Fair Use doctrine is currently interpreted. It's not really morally right in this context ("greater good" rationalists will argue with me on that) but so far the courts haven't spanked anyone too hard for using that loophole.

They take publicly accessible code and learn to predict good token strings from it to solve related or unrelated problems. I am not convinced this is not morally right.

What they are not doing, as far as I can tell, at least not intentionally, is just copying code and removing the license and attribution. Even if you don't see the AI output as legitimately "creative", it's certainly transforming and remixing existing solutions in ways that are transformative enough not to be just copies of anything except the most bog standard boilerplate, which is usually not a copyright issue.

People seem upset because there is money to be made, if there was no money involved I don't think anyone would see any issue here.

It's not about the greater good, and I don't mean to be an apologist, but I just legitimately don't see a problem with doing it, or how it's not fair use. It really does seem like fair use to me.

They take code with a license that prohibits using it to create preprietary software and use it to create proprietary software. It’s not about money.

But it's not forking or linking to any of that software. It's "using it" only in the sense of reading the code as examples of how to do things after mixing it with a million other sources. Sorry but I just don't see the problem with that. Very different, categorically, in my mind from what is intended by software licenses when they talk about derivative works.

One simple solution is just don't open source. A lot of folks forget that many open source licenses were produced to be "business friendly" to encourage participation by the private sector. The private sector, however, has largely done the bare minimum unless profit was involved. Then they'd either co-opt the project or fork it to their own ends in pursuit of profit with minimal returns to the original project WRT their gains.

That's a long way of saying, for what open source is and was, a lot of projects are mislicensed when juxtaposed to their goals and needs. It's okay to sell your software, it's okay to be "source available", it's okay to be entirely proprietary.

https://github.com/non-ai-licenses/non-ai-licenses

These aren’t official (& hosted on a different, proprietary data siphoner), but there are attempts to add anti-AI clauses.

Assuming copyright licenses are actually meaningful for this "anti-AI" clause, the only license that this actually changes an AIs ability to comply with is the CC0 license. All the rest are already violated by an AI agent (they all require attribution that an AI does not comply with).

And the CC0 license seems extremely contradictory with this added clause. I would definitely stay away from all of these licenses.

Companies are busy training their LLMs on totally unlicensed material. I'd be curious to know how much weight, legally speaking, anti-AI clauses can have. Naively I would expect no license should be maximally restrictive on what you can do with something.

The license in your repo is entirely meaningless when you grant an exclusive license to places like GitLab and GitHub to "display" your code.

That's a wild thing to say. Displaying is a very specific thing, having code displayed to you does not grant you any copyright or ownership over it (imagine if movies worked that way...)

It's so wild nobody has been able to successfully challenge it in court.

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