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Comment by bwfan123 | Hacker News Reader

Sometime, LLMs actually generate copyright headers as well in their output - lol - like in this PR which was the subject of a recent HN post [1]

https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/pull/14369/files#diff-062dbbe...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46039274

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I once had a well-known LLM reproduce pretty much an entire file from a well-known React library verbatim.

I was writing code in an unrelated programming language at the time, and the bizarre inclusion of that particular file in the output was presumably because the name of the library was very similar to a keyword I was using in my existing code, but this experience did not fill me with confidence about the abilities of contemporary AI. ;-)

However, it did clearly demonstrate that LLMs with billions or even trillions of parameters certainly can embed enough information to reproduce some of the material they were trained on verbatim or very close to it.

So what? I can probably produce parts of the header from memory. Doesn't mean my brain is GPLed.

If your brain was distributed as software, I think it might?

There is a stupid presupposition that LLMs are equivalent to human brains which they clearly are not. Stateless token generators are OBVIOUSLY not like human brains even if you somehow contort the definition of intelligence to include them

Even if they are not "like" human brains in some sense, are they "like" brains enough to be counted similarly in a legal environment? Can you articulate the difference as something other than meat parochialism, which strikes me as arbitrary?

All law is arbitrary. Intellectual property law perhaps most of all.

Famously, the output from monkey "artists" was found to be non-copyrightable even though a monkey's brain is much more similar to ours than an LLM.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput...

If IP law is arbitrary, we get to choose between IP law that makes LLMs propagate the GPL and law that doesn't. It's a policy switch we can toggle whenever want. Why would anyone want the propagates-GPL option when this setting would make LLMs much less useful for basically zero economic benefit? That's the legal "policy setting" you choose when you basically want to stall AI progress, and it's not going to stall China's progress.

All definitions are arbitrary if you're unwilling to couch them in human experience, because humans are the ones defining. And my main difference is right there in my initial response: an LLM is a stateless function. At best, it is a snapshot of a human brain simulated on a computer, but at no point could it learn something new once deployed. This is the MOST CHARITABLE interpretation of which I don't even concede in reality, it is not even a snapshot of a brain.

If LLMs are like human minds enough, then legally speaking we are abusing thinking and feeling human-like beings possessing will and agency in ways radically worse than slavery.

What is missing in the “if I can remember and recite program then they must be allowed to remember and recite proframs” argument is that you choose to do it (and you have basic human rights and freedoms), and they do not.

We're halfway to Roko's Basilisk here

To be clear I’m not saying I believe that’s the case, merely noting that logically there are two options (either it’s like a human and then it can remember & recite but we can’t abuse it, or more likely it’s just a tool and then the freedom to “remember & recite” is simply not applicable to it, whatever it does is liability of its operator and user).

The question was "if I train my model with copyleft material, how do you prove I did?"

not your brain, but the code you produce if it includes portions of GPL code that you remembered.

> So what? I can probably produce parts of the header from memory. Doesn't mean my brain is GPLed.

Your brain is part of you. Some might say it is your very essence. You are human. Humans have inalienable rights that sometimes trump those enshrined by copyright. One such right is the right to remember things you've read. LLMs are not human, and thus don't enjoy such rights.

Moreover, your brain is not distributed to other people. It's more like a storage medium than a distribution. There is a lot less furore about LLMs that are just storage mediums, and where they themselves or their outputs are not distributed. They're obviously not very useful.

So your analogy is poor.

How do you know I'm human?

> Doesn't mean my brain is GPLed.

It would be if they could get away with it. The likes of Disney would delete your memories of their films if they could get away with it. If you want to enjoy the film, you should have to pay them for the privilege, not recall the last time you watched it.

Imma pitch them a cinema exit turnstile with a barcode reader and a bat. You pay the retention tax or you get bonked. Once they see the ROI we can expand service via collaboration with services like Uber to ensure equal experience quality at home.

If you have seen say, for example, the Windows source code, you cannot take certain jobs implementing Windows-compatible interfaces that are supposed to be free from Microsoft IP. One could say your brain has been "infected". The same is true of many things around intellectual property.

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