Some people are informally "banned" from working on whole categories of open source projects because they've had provable exposure to closed source code in the same domain.
That's a partial motivator in maintaining pseudonymity online. If no one knows who you are, and they don't know you've done kernel work at Microsoft, you or the open source kernel project you're contributing to can't be sued by Microsoft, hypothetically, for "inspiration".
There's legal questions here for which there's never been precedent, so nobody knows where the line is -- and this is all before LLMs ever entered the picture. For other countries, whose courts don't rely on precedent, it's even more of a minefield since the legal outcome of a case is always undefined behavior.
I can imagine that some similar licensing concept could be applied to copyrightable works with respect to AI training. Use a legally restricted work for AI training, and your entire AI training set is subject to free public release?
Isn't the whole point of fair use that it's stuff you can do even if the copyright holder isn't okay with it?
Fair use can be a bit ambiguous, but I think there are definitely grounds to claim that what the AI companies are doing is not fair use.
I imagine it will have to be tried in court for anyone to say for certain. (And I imagine whatever court ruling happens would be contested. We may actually need multiple court rulings...)
The inability to precisely enforce license abuse has always been a problem with Open-Sourcing your code. I don't understand how someone would see AI as a dealbreaker in the real-world of Open Source pragmatism.
Even when they were called out on it, it took them years to respond. And this was before LLMs; even then we knew that releasing things under Open Source is mostly a good-faith social contract.
These "is it still okay to x because AI exists" questions are besides the point. If you weren't considering the worst-case scenario outcome of your actions already then maybe you should. If AI forces your hand, so be it. But you can always Open Source your code, as long as you've accepted the same risks that existed for the past 20-30 years.
Were you one of those saying that Tesla's FSD would come "soon", too?
It's not a question of humans vs machines: it's rather a question of whether those who train AI get to ignore copyright or not.
FWIW, learning from copyrighted data should not be a copyright violation. This applies equally to both humans and machines. I see no reason to differentiate.
And those who disagree with you precisely see reasons to differentiate. I do.
Admittedly, humans haven't created a ton of great things in the last couple of decades. The evolution of Tech in the last 20 years is depressing. I guess I can understand how you may consider it "amazing", though I would expect that a teenager could understand how their life is going to get a lot harder in the future, and that Tech is a big part of the problem.
I am optimistic and cheerful considering the mind-blowing advancements in generative AI. Given my good fortune to be alive during this time, I'm pleased to see these developments unfold, and I try my best to disregard the haters who are disparaging one of the greatest achievements in my lifetime.
I, a teenager who create their account here in 2016, instructed a locally run LLM to write the above message.
I am a luddite. I didn't used to be, and I don't want to be, and it's positioning myself on the wrong side of history, consigning me to a diverging function of increasing bitterness, but I feel forced into it by the direction tech is going. I think we've bitten the apple in our greed, and now we have to worry about our car spying on us because it's equipped with an autonomous and intelligent agent of oppression where, just a few years ago, that wasn't possible. "Progress", huh?
Anyway, I had to say that before saying I totally agree with you about your open source philosophy. I hate Microsoft, but, before, Microsoft employees could read my code, take inspiration, and write stuff with it. Hell, they could even paste snippets of it in. I have no way of knowing. Now, I'm uploading my code directly to Microsoft (okay: this fucks with me), and a Microsoft virtual mind is reading my code, taking inspiration, and/or pasting snippets of it in. It's a petty difference. The idea of free software is that anyone, man or machine, can see it and learn from it.
If you truly believe in the idea of free software, you should de facto be okay with AIs, Nazis, terrorists, $MEGACORP_YOU_DESPISE, ANYONE using your code.
The biggest differences are the increased probability that someone else will now be using your code and that you won't be accredited or your GPL license will be violated, but I consider those pretty ethereal issues.
On the one hand, "working in tech" became so accessible that titles like "prompt engineer" don't sound completely ridiculous. Those people don't seem interested in understanding how technology works, but rather in making profit with whatever low-hanging fruit they find.
On the other hand, actually competent engineers get paid a ton to ignore any kind of ethics. They just get rich while having fun building tech that the first group will use.
The combination of both (unethical tech and not-so-competent "engineers" building on top of it) is destroying the world.
> The biggest differences are the increased probability that someone else will now be using your code and that you won't be accredited or your GPL license will be violated, but I consider those pretty ethereal issues.
Because you don't care about Free Software. I do.