[HN Gopher] AI and the Ship of Theseus
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AI and the Ship of Theseus
Author : pixelmonkey
Score : 54 points
Date : 2026-03-05 15:49 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (lucumr.pocoo.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (lucumr.pocoo.org)
| moralestapia wrote:
| >I personally have a horse in the race here because I too wanted
| chardet to be under a non-GPL license for many years.
|
| Ugh, it's so disgusting to see people who are either malicious or
| non mentally capable enough to understand what is the purpose of
| software licenses.
|
| "But I wish that car was free", sure pal, but it's not. Are you
| like, 8 years old?
|
| Licenses exists for a reason, which is to enforce them. When the
| author of a project choose a specific license s/he is making a
| deliberate decision. S/he wants these terms to be reigning over
| his/her work, in perpetuity. People who pretend they didn't see
| it or play dumb are in for some well-deserved figuring out.
| jimmaswell wrote:
| This entirely misses the point. Re-implementing code based on
| API surface and compatibility is established fair use if done
| properly (Compaq v. IBM, Google v. Oracle). There's nothing
| wrong with doing that if you don't like a license. What's in
| question is doing this with AI that may or may not have been
| trained on the source. In the instance in the article where the
| result is very different, it's probably in the clear
| regardless. I'm sympathetic to the author as I generally don't
| like GPL either outside specific cases where it works well like
| the Linux kernel.
| blell wrote:
| This reminds me of people crying over toybox
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toybox#Controversy
| trueismywork wrote:
| The real test would be to see how much of generated code is
| similar to the old code. Because then it is still a
| copyright. Just becsuse you drew mickey mouse from memory
| doesnt above you if it looks close enough to original hickey
| mouse.
| the_mitsuhiko wrote:
| > The real test would be to see how much of generated code
| is similar to the old code.
|
| I have looked at the project earlier today there is
| effectively no resemblance other than the public API.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _Licenses exists for a reason_
|
| Yes, and the choice of license for a project is made for a
| reason that not necessarily everybody agree with.
|
| And the people who don't agree, have every right to implement a
| similar, even file-format or API compatible, project and give
| it another license. Gnumeric vs Excel, for example, or forks
| like MariaDB and Valkey.
|
| But whether they do that alternative licensed project or not,
| it's perfectly rational, to not like the choice of license the
| original is in. They legally have to respect it, but that
| doesn't mean there's anything irational to disliking it or
| wishing it was changed.
|
| And it's not merely idle wishing: sometimes it can make the
| original author/vendor to reconsider and switch license. QT is
| a big example. Blender. Or even proprietary to open (Mozilla to
| MPL).
|
| "It's so disgusting to see people who are either malicious or
| non mentally capable enough to understand this"
| moralestapia wrote:
| Hmm ... you don't have to ask for consent. You just slap the
| license you want to your code and that's it.
|
| It's not some sort of democracy, lol, it's a set of exclusive
| rights that are created the moment the work being copyrighted
| is produced.
|
| (For a quick intro I recommend:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bxVs7FCgOig)
|
| In the case of the license in question (L/GPL), it's one of
| the most strict ones out there, it explicitly forbids
| relicensing code under a different non-compatible license,
| like MIT; let me says that again, L/GPL EXPLICITLY FORBIDS
| the thing that happened here from happening.
|
| I sympathize with the guy that spent 12 years of his life
| maintaining the code, thank you for your service or
| something, but that does not make a difference. The wording
| of the (L/GPL) license is clear and the original author and
| most of the other 50 or so contributors did not approve of
| this.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _Hmm ... you don 't have to ask for consent_
|
| Nobody said you have.
|
| > _You just slap the license you want to your code and that
| 's it._
|
| Nobody said you can't.
|
| > _It 's not some sort of democracy, lol_
|
| Nobody said it is, lol.
|
| I'm answering to what you actually wrote, that those
| expressing their dislike of a project having a speicific
| license are "either malicious or non mentally capable
| enough" what licenses are for.
|
| That's a stupid argument putting other people down with a
| silly strawman.
|
| One can be perfecty capable to understand what licenses are
| for and still think a project made a mistake chosing a
| specific language, or want it to change to another (and
| sometimes, like in the examples I gave, the latter works
| too).
| the_mitsuhiko wrote:
| > "But I wish that car was free", sure pal, but it's not. Are
| you like, 8 years old?
|
| Just because things are not as one wants, does not stop that
| desire to be there.
|
| > When the author of a project choose a specific license s/he
| is making a deliberate decision.
|
| Potentially, potentially not. I used to release software under
| GPL and LGPL but changed my mind a few years after that. I did
| so in part because of conversations I had with others that
| convinced me that my values are closer aligned with permissive
| licenses.
|
| So engaging in a friendly discourse with a maintainer to ask
| them to relicense is a perfectly fine thing to do and an issue
| has been with chardet for many, many years on the license.
| scuff3d wrote:
| The solution to this whole situation seems pretty simple to me.
| LLMs were trained on a giant mix of code, and it's impossible to
| disentangle it, but a not insignificant portion of their
| capabilities comes from GPL licenced code. Therefore, any
| codebase that uses LLM code is now GPL. You have a proprietary
| product? Not anymore.
|
| Not saying there's a legal precedent for that right now, but it's
| the only thing that makes any sense to me. Either that or retain
| the models on only MIT/similarly licenced code or code you have
| explicit permission to train on.
| keithnz wrote:
| if you train yourself by looking at GPL code then go implement
| your own things, is that code GPL?
| AberrantJ wrote:
| Of course not, because everyone making these arguments wants
| people to have some magic sauce so they get to ignore all the
| rules placed on the "artificial" thing.
| bakugo wrote:
| If you genuinely believe that you are not above a literal
| text completion algorithm and do not deserve any more
| rights than it, that says more about you than anything
| else.
| estimator7292 wrote:
| If you copy and paste one line from a thousand different GPL
| projects, is the resulting program GPL?
|
| Let's be honest about what's happening here.
| dec0dedab0de wrote:
| it can be, depending on if it is different enough to convince
| a jury that it is not a copyright violation. See the lawsuits
| from Marvin Gaye's family to see how that can be
| unpredictable.
| nkmnz wrote:
| What about the code that wasn't even GPL, but "all rights
| reserved", i.e., without any license? That's even stronger than
| GPL and based on your reasoning, this would mean that any code
| created by an LLM is not licensed to be used for anything.
| moralestapia wrote:
| Yes.
| moralestapia wrote:
| 100% agree, if we are fair and honorable.
|
| In practice, well ... you saw what's been going on with the
| Epstein files, etc... we are _far_ from being ourselves in a
| world that 's fair and honorable.
|
| (I'm not condoning it, I think it's massively trashy to steal
| code like this then pretend you're the good guy because of some
| super weird mental gymnastics you're doing)
| nomdep wrote:
| In this emerging reality, the whole spectrum of open-source
| licenses effectively collapses toward just two practical choices:
| release under something permissive like MIT (no real
| restrictions), or keep your software fully proprietary and
| closed.
|
| These are fascinating, if somewhat scary, times.
| measurablefunc wrote:
| If you listen to the people who believe real AI is right around
| the corner then any software can be recreated from a detailed
| enough specification b/c whatever special sauce is hidden in
| the black box can be inferred from its outward behavior. Real
| AI is more brilliant than whatever algorithm you could ever
| think of so if the real AI can interact w/ your software then
| it can recreate a much better version of it w/o looking at the
| source code b/c it has access to whatever knowledge you had
| while writing the code & then some.
|
| I don't think real AI is around the corner but plenty of people
| believe it is & they also think they only need a few more data
| centers to make the fiction into a reality.
| HappyPanacea wrote:
| > b/c whatever special sauce is hidden in the black box can
| be inferred from its outward behavior.
|
| This is not always true, for an extreme example see
| Indistinguishability obfuscation.
| GaggiX wrote:
| >Real AI is more brilliant than whatever algorithm you could
| ever think of
|
| So with "Real AI" you actually mean artificial
| superintelligence.
| measurablefunc wrote:
| I wrote what I meant & meant what I wrote. You can take up
| your argument w/ the people who think they're working on AI
| by adding more data centers & more matrix multiplications
| to function graphs if you want to argue about marketing
| terms.
| GaggiX wrote:
| I was just thinking that calling artificial
| superintelligence "Real AI" was funny.
| measurablefunc wrote:
| Corporate marketing is very effective. I don't have as
| many dollars to spend on convincing people that AI is
| when they give me as much data as possible & the more
| data they give me the more "super" it gets.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Real AI will never be invented, because as AI systems become
| more capable we'll figure out humans weren't intelligent in
| the first place, therefore intelligence never existed.
| measurablefunc wrote:
| Don't worry, just 10 more data centers & a few more
| gigawatts will get you there even if the people building
| the data centers & powerplants are unintelligent & mindless
| drones. But in any event, I have no interest in religious
| arguments & beliefs so your time will be better spent
| convincing people who are looking for another religion to
| fill whatever void was left by secular education since such
| people are much more amenable to religious indoctrination &
| will very likely find many of your arguments much more
| persuasive & convincing.
| vintagedave wrote:
| Or GPL. Which I'm increasingly thinking is the _only_ license.
| It requires sharing.
|
| And if anything can be reimplemented and there's no value in
| the source any more, just the spec or tests, there's no public-
| interest reason for _any_ restriction other than completely
| free, in the GPL sense.
| Hamuko wrote:
| > _Or GPL. Which I'm increasingly thinking is the only
| license. It requires sharing._
|
| It doesn't if Dan Blanchard spends some tokens on it and then
| licenses the output as MIT.
| jmalicki wrote:
| Who are you talking about? I can't find reference to this
| person.
| kccqzy wrote:
| He is the maintainer of chardet. The main topic of the
| article is the whole LGPL to MIT rewrite and relicense
| done by this person.
|
| https://github.com/chardet/chardet/releases/tag/7.0.0
| badc0ffee wrote:
| There were two other posts about this today on the HN
| front page:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47257803
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47259177
| embedding-shape wrote:
| > or keep your software fully proprietary and closed.
|
| I guess it depends on your intention, but eventually I'm not
| sure it'll even be possible to keep it "fully proprietary and
| closed" in the hopes of no one being able to replicate it,
| which seems to be the main motivation for many to go that road.
|
| If you're shipping something, making something available,
| others will be able to use it (duh) and therefore replicate it.
| The barrier for being able to replicate things like this either
| together with LLMs or letting the LLM straight it up do it
| themselves with the right harness, seems to get lowered real
| quick, massive difference in just a few years already.
| f33d5173 wrote:
| I don't think it changes much about licensing in particular.
| People are going on about how since the AI was trained on this
| code, that makes it a derivative work. But it must be borne in
| mind that AI training doesn't usually lead to memorizing the
| training data, but rather learning the general patterns of it.
| In the case of source code, it learns how to write systems and
| algorithms in general, not a particular function. If you then
| describe an interface to it, it is applying general principles
| to implement that interface. Its ability to succeed in this
| depends primarily on the complexity of the task. If you give it
| the interfaces of a closed source and open sourced project of
| similar complexity, it will have a relatively equal time of
| implementing them.
|
| Even prior to this, relatively simple projects licensed under
| share alike licenses were in danger of being cloned under
| either proprietary or more permissive licenses. This project in
| particular was spared, basically because the LGPL is permissive
| enough that it was always easier to just comply with the
| license terms. A full on GPLed project like GCC isn't in danger
| of an AI being able to clone it anytime soon. Nevermind that it
| was already cloned under a more permissive license by human
| coders.
| thangalin wrote:
| Translate an alternative?
|
| https://github.com/albfernandez/juniversalchardet
| coldtea wrote:
| > _Something related, but different, happened with chardet. The
| current maintainer reimplemented it from scratch by only pointing
| it to the API and the test suite._
|
| Only "pointing it". But the LLM, who can recite over 90% of a
| book in its training set verbatim *, would have also have had
| trained on the original code.
|
| Maybe "the slop of Theseus" is a better title.
|
| * https://the-decoder.com/researchers-extract-up-to-96-of-harr...
| the_mitsuhiko wrote:
| Maybe, but the LLM did not recite the chardet source code so
| that argument does not appear to apply here.
| irishcoffee wrote:
| This whole "today" fascination with chardet is a classic
| example of manipulation. I suggest you disregard this term
| instead of defending it.
| 4star3star wrote:
| I agree. If we look to music, how can a musician unhear what
| they've heard? We celebrate musicians when they cite their
| influences. In the case of a software library, it is a tool,
| not a work of art. Its beauty is in accomplishing a specific,
| useful task. If we can accept musicians drawing inspiration
| from all the music they've ever listened to, we should be
| able to do the same for software, especially when its
| internal code is unrecognizable from a similar tool.
| logicprog wrote:
| Also from that exact same study (why not cite the actual study?
| It's quite readable) the LLMs couldn't recite more than a small
| fraction of many other books, often ones just as well known[0]
| -- in fact, from the bar charts shown in the exact news article
| you cited, it's pretty clear that Sonnet 3.7 was a massive
| outlier, and so was Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, so
| it really seems to me like that's an extremely unrepresentative
| example, and if all the other LLMs couldn't recite even a small
| fraction of all the other books except that one outlier
| pairing, despite them being widely reproduced classics, why
| would we expect LLMs to actually regurgitate regularly,
| especially a relatively unknown open source project that
| probably hasn't been separately reproduced that many times?
|
| Not to mention the fact that, as the other commenters mention,
| that appears to just... not have happened at all in this case,
| so it's a moot point.
|
| [0]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.02671
| erelong wrote:
| hopefully this continues to show how awkward the idea of
| "intellectual property" (IP) is until people abandon it
|
| IP sounds good in theory but enables things like "patent
| trolling" by large corps and creating all kinds of goofy barriers
| and arbitrary questions like we're asking about if re-
| implementations of ideas are "really ours"
|
| (maybe they were never anyone's in the first place, outside of
| legally created mentalities)
|
| ideas seem to fundamentally not operate like physical things so
| asserting they can be considered "property" opens the door for
| all kinds of absurdities like as pondered in the OP
| AuthAuth wrote:
| I have no data to back this up but patent trolling seems to
| happen far less than companies that already own significant
| infra/talent ripping products from smaller companies and out
| competing them with their scale. I'd rather have patent
| trolling than have Amazon manufacturer everything i launch.
|
| The problem with IP laws and the US is that the big companies
| already do what IP is suppose to protect and the US refuses to
| legislate effectively against them.
| moralestapia wrote:
| Is there anything you have created, spending considerable
| resources and time, that you ended up giving up for free? For
| the betterment of humanity?
|
| If so, let's see it!
| cheesecompiler wrote:
| > I personally think all of this is exciting. I'm a strong
| supporter of putting things in the open with as little license
| enforcement as possible. I think society is better off when we
| share, and I consider the GPL to run against that spirit by
| restricting what can be done with it.
|
| I like sharing too but could permissive only licenses not
| backfire? GPL emerged in an era where proprietary software ruled
| and companies weren't incentivized to open source. GPL helped
| ensure software stayed open which helped it become competitive
| against the monopoly proprietary giants resting on their laurels.
| The restriction helped innovation, not the supposedly free
| market.
| cheesecompiler wrote:
| After cloning a test suite you're still left with ongoing
| maintenance and development, maintaining feature parity etc.
| There's a lot more than passing a test suite. If the rewrite is
| truly superior it deserves to become the new Ship of Theseus. But
| e.g. I doubt anyone's AI rewrites of SQLite will ever put a dent
| in its marketshare.
| 7777777phil wrote:
| The legal question is a distraction. GPL was always enforced by
| economics: reimplementation had to cost more than compliance. At
| $1,100 for 94% API coverage, it doesn't. Copyleft was built for a
| world where clean-room rewrites were painful but they aren't
| anymore.
| badc0ffee wrote:
| I don't think it's been established that clean-room rewrites
| are no longer painful. We don't know if chardet could have been
| rewritten so easily if the original code wasn't in the training
| set.
| rzerowan wrote:
| Strange this with this whole incident apart from the rewrite/LLM
| part is the general misundrstanding of the licences. LGPL being a
| pretty permissive one going as far as allowing one to incorporate
| it in propriety code without the linking reciprocity clause [1]
| and MIT is even more permissive. Importantly these were meant to
| protect the USER of the code.Not the Dev , or the Company or the
| CLA holder - the USER is primary in the FreeSoftware world.Or at
| least was supposed to be , OSS muddied the waters and forgetting
| the old lessons learned when thing were basically bigcorp vs
| indie hacker trying to getthir electronic device to connect to
| what they want to connect to and do what they need is why were
| here.
|
| Bikeshedding to eventually come full circle to understand why
| those decisions were made.
|
| In a world where the large OEMs and bigcorps are increasinly
| locking down firmware , bootloaders , kernels and the internet. I
| would think a reappraisal of more enforcement that benefits the
| USER is paramount.
|
| Instead we have devs looking to tear down the few user
| protections FLOSS provides and usher in a locked down hacker
| unfiendly future.
|
| [1] https://licensecheck.io/blog/lgpl-dynamic-linking
| the_mitsuhiko wrote:
| > Strange this with this whole incident apart from the
| rewrite/LLM part is the general misundrstanding of the
| licences. LGPL being a pretty permissive one going as far as
| allowing one to incorporate it in propriety code without the
| linking reciprocity clause
|
| The short version is that chardet is a dependency of requests
| which is very popular, and you cannot distribute
| PyInstaller/PyOxidizer builds with chardet due to how these
| systems bundle up dependencies.
|
| [1]: https://velovix.github.io/post/lgpl-gpl-license-
| compliance-w...
|
| [2]: https://github.com/indygreg/PyOxidizer/issues/142
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