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Comment by golergka | Hacker News Reader

If a person can read it and learn from it, AI should be able to do the same.

If it's patented they can't use it...

If it's a copy left license I would say that at that point anything made by the ai should be copy left as well.

Just because you think a machine should have the right to use open source code doesn't mean the author or the license agree.

You can still read and learn from something patented. That is, after all, the whole point of a patent!

You can also read and learn from copyleft and use that learning elsewhere.

Remember, copyright does not apply to ideas. It applies to a specific individual instantiation. In theory.

There's a valid moral question here, in short: why?

I care about helping other people.

Helping some type of amoral entity that's usually controlled by another amoral for-profit entity: why would I help those?

Because you get to use it too?

Llama, mistral and co.

Not all models have Free weights and not all models that are Free can run on your hardware.

Normally the "can't run on your hardware" is a little dubious, but given how insanely high the hardware requirements can get to run these I think it's meaningful here.

I'm still here to create a product/tool/script/solve something and not just to write code.

If anything i do helps to make the ecosystem around me better i'm for it.

And if you look at anything LLM right now, all the research happening, its not opensource doing the research. Its high paid google, ms, etc. people and academy replicates it fast for opensource.

We already have a give and take on both sides.

Without them, we would not have that at all.

> And if you look at anything LLM right now, all the research happening, its not opensource doing the research.

I assume you mean open weight rather than open source, but: https://ai.meta.com/research/

Then use a license that say your code can't be used to train AI models.

Honestly I agree that in the current state of things, it's fair for them to train on public data as long as the license doesn't forbid it. I learned to code this way, so it makes sense to allow AIs to do the same, for now. If it's a problem, just use another license.

Atmost all open source code has a licence requiring attribution. Where is the attribution?

When you read some source code to learn how to do anything, do you attribute it? It’s the same thing, attribution doesn’t apply to training material.

You want to explicitly forbid AI training, not require attribution.

The problem is that there are software evolutions not foreseen by older licenses. Cloud providers, AI. Relicensing can be non trivial. Choosing the right license is non trivial.

Who can say for sure which license is good in this new age?

Oh easy, there’s not appropriate license yet. Some organizations need to step up and create a license that forbids AI training. But it will probably not happen because of "but is it libre open source" useless debates.

Why would you call these entities amoral? Through vcs and pension funds they are owned exactly by the people you want to help.

VCs?!? :-)))

Pension funds I'd kind of understand, on the other hand there is a huge generational conflict, the pensioners that rely on this in many places are actually the comparatively rich older people.

Who do you think gives money to VCs, private equity and other finance boogeymen? It’s pension funds, banks and other institutions that hold regular people's money. Of course, older people have more savings, but its still the same people that you wanted to help in the first place, aren't they?

If my code is included in a training set which then helps someone else solve a problem, then I am helping other people.

Why should I care if some 3rd party is the middleman that builds the system that performs the transformation? I put out my code so that people can use it. The existence of said 3rd party doesn't restrict that in the slightest, in fact it enhances the reusability of my work which seems like a win-win.

That's a claim not an argument. Why do you believe this? Why should we?

I agree. Given the effort that has been put in to ensure code isn't copied verbatim, I don't see much of a philosophic difference between a human doing it or AI doing it.

That said I think it's weasely that they would just explicitly say it. It's obviously a question a lot of people have if it's in the FAQs, and a non-answer like, "we never train on private code" is ridiculous.

People are not software.

i would prefer it to learn from better verified solutions, reviewed and battle tested.

Instead I get AI companions writing comments like "This code is unintelligible and batshit complicated, kill it with fire" when I was hoping for a doc string

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