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Comment by Mtinie | Hacker News Reader

> If a human did this we probably would have a word for them.

I don’t think it’s fair to call someone who used Stack Overflow to find a similar answer with samples of code to copy to their project an asshole.

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Who brought Stack Overflow up? Stack Overflow does not magically generate code, someone has to actually provide it first.

I generally agree with your underlying point concerning attribution and intellectual property ownership but your follow-up comment reframes your initial statement: LLMs generate recombinations of code from code created by humans, without giving credit.

Stack Overflow offers access to other peoples’ work, and developers combined those snippets and patterns into their own projects. I suspect attribution is low.

Stack Overflow deals with that issue by having a license agreement.

GitHub, Bitbucket, GCE, AWS…all have licensing agreements for user contributions which the user flagged as “public” so I’m not exactly clear of your point if you are holding SO up as a bastion of intellectual property rights different from the other places LLM training sets were scraped from.

I was not the person that introduced SO to the discussion.

To be fair, their license agreement is pretty much impossible to enforce.

It has been for the last 15 years.

Using stack overflow recklessly is definitely asshole behavior.

Recklessly is a strong word. I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume your comment in good faith.

How do you describe the “reckless” use of information?

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