[HN Gopher] AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel
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AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel
Author : hmokiguess
Score : 115 points
Date : 2026-04-10 18:35 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| bitwize wrote:
| Good. The BSDs should follow suit. It is unreasonable to expect
| any developer not to use AI in 2026.
| baggy_trough wrote:
| Sounds sensible.
| ipython wrote:
| Glad to see the common-sense rule that only humans can be held
| accountable for code generated by AI agents.
| pixel_popping wrote:
| Literally, insane that some projects blanket-ban AI despite
| being the human responsibility in the end.
| daveguy wrote:
| Not insane at all. Just a very useful shortcut. Not everyone
| wants to move fast and break shit.
| pixel_popping wrote:
| I still think it's insane, why would you care about the
| "origin" of the code as long as there is a human
| accountable (that you can ban anyway)?
| 59nadir wrote:
| Because you don't want to deal with people who can't
| write their own code. If they can, the rule will do
| nothing to stop them from contributing. It'll only matter
| if they simply couldn't make their contribution without
| LLMs.
| pixel_popping wrote:
| So tomorrow, if a model genuinely find a bunch of real
| vulnerabilities, you just would ignore them? that makes
| no sense.
| 59nadir wrote:
| An LLM finding problems in code is not the same at all as
| someone using it to contribute code they couldn't write
| or haven't written themselves to a project. A report
| stating "There is a bug/security issue here" is not
| itself something I have to maintain, it's something I can
| react to and write code to fix, then I have to maintain
| that code.
| streetfighter64 wrote:
| If your doctor told you he used an ouija board to find
| your diagnosis, would you care about the origin of the
| diagnosis or just trust that he'll be accountable for it?
| pixel_popping wrote:
| If the Ouija board was powered by Opus, who knows :D
| pydry wrote:
| And yet it puts a stop to the tsunami of slop and it's pretty
| much impossible to prove anything of value was lost.
| pixel_popping wrote:
| but why? it's a human making the PR and you can shame/ban
| that human anyway.
| yoyohello13 wrote:
| > it's a human making the PR
|
| Is it? Remember when that agent wrote a hit piece about
| the maintainer because he wouldn't merge it's PR?
| pixel_popping wrote:
| That's a different issue actually.
| podgietaru wrote:
| Volume - things take time to review. If you're inundated
| with so many PRs then it's harder to curate in general
| tom_ wrote:
| It no more insane than doing the opposite. This whole
| business has yet to play itself out.
| qsort wrote:
| Basically the rules are that you can use AI, but you take full
| responsibility for your commits and code must satisfy the
| license.
|
| That's... refreshingly normal? Surely something most people
| acting in good faith can get behind.
| galaxyLogic wrote:
| But then if AI output is not under GNU General Public License,
| how can it become so just because a Linux-developer adds it to
| the code-base?
| afro88 wrote:
| Same as if a regular person did the same. They are
| responsible for it. If you're using AI, check the code
| doesn't violate licenses
| sarchertech wrote:
| How could you do that though? You can't guarantee that
| there aren't chunks of copied code that infringes.
| shevy-java wrote:
| But the responsible party is still the human who added
| the code. Not the tool that helped do so.
| sarchertech wrote:
| In a court case the responsibility party very well could
| be the Linux foundation because this is a foreseeable
| consequence of allowing AI contributions. There's no
| reasonable way for a human to make such a guarantee while
| using AI generated code.
| Chance-Device wrote:
| It's not about the mechanism: responsibility is a social
| construct, it works the way people say that it works. If
| we all agree that a human can agree to bear the
| responsibility for AI outputs, and face any consequences
| resulting from those outputs, then that's the whole
| shebang.
| sarchertech wrote:
| Sure we could change the law. It would be a stupid change
| to allow individuals, organizations, and companies to
| completely shield themselves from the consequences of
| risky behaviors (more than we already do) simply by
| assigning all liability to a fall guy.
| bpt3 wrote:
| In this case, the "fall guy" is the person who actually
| introduced the code in question into the codebase.
|
| They wouldn't be some patsy that is around just to take
| blame, but the actual responsible party for the issue.
| sarchertech wrote:
| Imagine your a factory owner and you need a chemical
| delivered from across the country, but the chemical is
| dangerous and if the tanker truck drives faster than 50
| miles per hour it has a 0.001% chance per mile of
| exploding.
|
| You hire an independent contractor and tell him that he
| can drive 60 miles per hour if he wants to but if it
| explodes he accepts responsibility.
|
| He does and it explodes killing 10 people. If the family
| of those 10 people has evidence you created the
| conditions to cause the explosion in order to benefit
| your company, you're probably going to lose in civil
| court.
|
| Linus benefits from the increase velocity of people using
| AI. He doesn't get to put all the liability on the people
| contributing.
| Chance-Device wrote:
| What law exactly are you suggesting needs to be changed?
| How is this any different from what already happens right
| now, today?
| sarchertech wrote:
| Right now it's very easy not to infringe on copyrighted
| code if you write the code yourself. In the vast majority
| of cases if you infringed it's because you did something
| wrong that you could have prevented (in the case where
| you didn't do anything wrong, inducement creation is an
| affirmative defense against copyright infringement).
|
| That is not the case when using AI generated code. There
| is no way to use it without the chance of introducing
| infringing code.
|
| Because of that if you tell a user they can use AI
| generated code, and they introduce infringing code, that
| was a foreseeable outcome of your action. In the case
| where you are the owner of a company, or the head of an
| organization that benefits from contributors using AI
| code, your company or organization could be liable.
| Chance-Device wrote:
| It's a foreseeable outcome that humans might introduce
| copyrighted code into the kernel.
|
| I think you're looking for problems that don't really
| exist here, you seem committed to an anti AI stance where
| none is justified.
| sarchertech wrote:
| A human has to willingly violate the law for that to
| happen though. There is no way for a human to use AI
| generated that doesn't have a chance of producing
| copyrighted code though. That's just expected.
|
| If you don't think this is a problem take a look at the
| terms of the enterprise agreements from OpenAI and
| Anthropic. Companies recognize this is an issue and so
| they were forced to add an indemnification clause,
| explicitly saying they'll pay for any damages resulting
| in infringement lawsuits.
| lo_zamoyski wrote:
| Responsibility is an objective fact, not just some
| arbitrary social convention. What we can agree or
| disagree about is where it rests, but that's a matter of
| inference, an inference can be more or less correct. We
| might assign certain people certain responsibilities
| before the fact, but that's to charge them with the care
| of some good, not to blame them for things before they
| were charged with their care.
| bitwize wrote:
| Because contributions to Linux are meticulously
| attributed to, and remain property of, their authors,
| those authors bear ultimate responsibility. If Fred
| Foobar sends patches to the kernel that, as it turns out,
| contain copyrighted code, then provided upstream
| maintainers did reasonable due diligence the court will
| go after Fred Foobar for damages, and quite likely demand
| that the kernel organization no longer distribute copies
| of the kernel with Fred's code in it.
| Cytobit wrote:
| That's not going to shield the Linux organization.
| cxr wrote:
| A DCO bearing a claim of original authorship (or
| assertion of other permitted use) isn't going to shield
| them entirely, but it can mitigate liability and damages.
| aargh_aargh wrote:
| The practical concern of Linux developers regarding
| responsibility is not being able to ban the author, it's
| that the author should take ongoing care for his
| contribution.
| Andrex wrote:
| Let me introduce you to the concept of submarine
| patents...
| martin-t wrote:
| As opposed to an irregular person?
|
| LLMs are not persons, not even legal ones (which itself is
| a massive hack causing massive issues such as using
| corporate finances for political gain).
|
| A human has moral value a text model does not. A human has
| limitations in both time and memory available, a model of
| text does not. I don't see why comparisons to humans have
| any relevance. Just because a human can do something does
| not mean machines run by corporations should be able to do
| it en-masse.
|
| The rules of copyright allow humans to do certain things
| because:
|
| - Learning enriches the human.
|
| - Once a human consumes information, he can't willingly
| forget it.
|
| - It is impossible to prove how much a human-created
| intellectual work is based on others.
|
| With LLMs:
|
| - Training (let's not anthropomorphize: lossily-compressing
| input data by detecting and extracting patterns) enriches
| only the corporation which owns it.
|
| - It's perfectly possible to create a model based only on
| content with specific licenses or only public domain.
|
| - It's possible to trace every single output byte to
| quantifiable influences from every single input byte. It's
| just not an interesting line of inquiry for the
| corporations benefiting from the legal gray area.
| rzmmm wrote:
| In certain law cases plagiarization can be influenced by
| the fact if person is exposed to the copyrighted work. AI
| models are exposed to very large corpus of works..
| cxr wrote:
| Copyright infringement and plagiarism are not the same or
| even very closely related. They're different concepts and
| not interchangeable. Relative to copyright infringement,
| cases of plagiarism are rarely a matter for courts to
| decide or care about at all. Plagiarism is primarily an
| ethical (and not civil or criminal) matter. Rather than
| be dealt with by the legal system, it is the subject of
| codes of ethics within e.g. academia, journalism, etc.
| which have their own extra-judicial standards and methods
| of enforcement.
| panzi wrote:
| If the output is public domain it's fine as I understand it.
| galaxyLogic wrote:
| Makes sense to me. But so anybody can take Public Domain
| code and place it under GNU Public License (by dropping it
| into a Linux source-code file) ?
|
| Surely the person doing so would be responsible for doing
| so, but are they doing anything wrong?
| robinsonb5 wrote:
| > Surely the person doing so would be responsible for
| doing so, but are they doing anything wrong?
|
| You're perfectly at liberty to relicense public domain
| code if you wish.
|
| The only thing you can't do is enforce the new license
| against people who obtain the code independently - either
| from the same source you did, or from a different source
| that doesn't carry your license.
| cwnyth wrote:
| This is correct, and it's not limited to code. I can take
| the story of Cinderella, create something new out of it,
| copyright my new work, but Cinderella remains public
| domain for someone else to do something with.
|
| If I use public domain code in a project under a license,
| the whole work remains under the license, but not the
| public domain code.
|
| I'm not sure what the hullabaloo is about.
| sambaumann wrote:
| Sqlite's source code is public domain. Surely if you
| dropped the sqlite source code into Linux, it wouldn't
| suddenly become GPL code? I'm not sure how it works
| miki123211 wrote:
| Linux code doesn't have to strictly be GPL-only, it just
| has to be GPL-compatible.
|
| If your license allows others to take the code and
| redistribute it with extra conditions, your code can be
| imported into the kernel. AFAIK there are parts of the
| kernel that are BSD-licensed.
| jaggederest wrote:
| The core thing about licenses, in general, is that they
| only _grant_ new usage. If you can already use the code
| because it 's public domain, they don't _further_
| restrict it. The license, in that case, is irrelevant.
|
| Remember that licenses are powered by copyright -
| granting a license to non-copyrighted code doesn't do
| anything, because there's no enforcement mechanism.
|
| This is also why copyright reform for software
| engineering is so important, because code entering the
| public domain cuts the gordian knot of licensing issues.
| martin-t wrote:
| This ruling is IMO/IANAL based on lawyers and judges not
| understanding how LLMs work internally, falling for the
| marketing campaign calling them "AI" and not understanding
| the full implications.
|
| LLM-creation ("training") involves detecting/compressing
| patterns of the input. Inference generates statistically
| probable based on similarities of patterns to those found
| in the "training" input. Computers don't learn or have
| ideas, they always operate on representations, it's nothing
| more than any other mechanical transformation. It should
| not erase copyright any more than synonym substitution.
| timmmmmmay wrote:
| fortunately, you aren't only operating on
| representations, right? lemme check my Schopenhauer right
| quick...
| supern0va wrote:
| >LLM-creation ("training") involves detecting/compressing
| patterns of the input.
|
| There's a pretty compelling argument that this is
| essentially what we do, and that what we think of as
| creativity is just copying, transforming, and combining
| ideas.
|
| LLMs are interesting because that compression forces
| distilling the world down into its constituent parts and
| learning about the relationships between ideas. While
| it's absolutely possible (or even likely for certain
| prompts) that models can regurgitate text very similar to
| their inputs, that is not usually what seems to be
| happening.
|
| They actually appear to be little remix engines that can
| fit the pieces together to solve the thing you're asking
| for, and we do have some evidence that the models are
| able to accomplish things that are not represented in
| their training sets.
|
| Kirby Ferguson's video on this is pretty great:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9RYuvPCQUA
| martin-t wrote:
| So? Why should it be legal?
|
| If people find this cool and wanna play with it, they
| can, just make sure to only mix compatible licenses in
| the training data and license the output appropriately.
| Well, the attribution issue is still there, so maybe they
| can restrict themselves to public domain stuff. If LLMs
| are so capable, it shouldn't limit the quality of their
| output too much.
|
| Now for the real issue: what do you think the world will
| look like in 5 or 10 years if LLMs surpass human
| abilities in all areas revolving around text input and
| output?
|
| Do you think the people who made it possible, who spent
| years of their life building and maintaining open source
| code, will be rewarded? Or will the rich reap most of the
| benefit while also simultaneously turning us into
| beggars?
|
| Even if you assume 100% of the people doing intellectual
| work now will convert to manual work (i.e. there's enough
| work for everyone) and robots don't advance at all,
| that'll drive the value of manual labor down a lot. Do
| you have it games out in your head and believe somehow
| life will be better for you, let alone for most people?
| Or have yo not thought about it at all yet?
| noosphr wrote:
| Tab complete does not produce copyrightable material either.
| Yet we don't require software to be written in nano.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| AIs are not human and therefore their output is a human
| authored contribution and only human authored things are
| covered by copyright. The work might hypothetically infringe
| on other people's copyright. But such an infringement does
| not happen until a human decides to create and distribute a
| work that somehow integrates that generated code or text.
|
| The solution documented here seems very pragmatic. You as a
| contributor simply state that you are making the contribution
| and that you are not infringing on other people's work with
| that contribution under the GPLv2. And you document the fact
| that you used AI for transparency reasons.
|
| There is a lot of legal murkiness around how training data is
| handled, and the output of the models. Or even the models
| themselves. Is something that in no way or shape resembles a
| copyrighted work (i.e. a model) actually distributing that
| work? The legal arguments here will probably take a long time
| to settle but it seems the fair use concept offers a way out
| here. You might create potentially infringing work with a
| model that may or may not be covered by fair use. But that
| would be your decision.
|
| For small contributions to the Linux kernel it would be hard
| to argue that a passing resemblance of say a for loop in the
| contribution to some for loop in somebody else's code base
| would be anything else than coincidence or fair use.
| ninjagoo wrote:
| IANAL; this is what my limited understanding of the matter
| is. With that caveat: it is easy to forget that copyright
| is on output- verbatim or exact reproductions and
| derivatives of a covered work are already covered under
| copyright.
|
| So if the AI outputs Starry Night or Starry Night in
| different color theme, that's likely infringement without
| permission from van Gogh, who would have recourse against
| _someone_ , either the user or the AI provider.
|
| But a starry-night style picture of an aquarium might not
| be infringing at all.
|
| >For small contributions to the Linux kernel it would be
| hard to argue that a passing resemblance of say a for loop
| in the contribution to some for loop in somebody else's
| code base would be anything else than coincidence or fair
| use.
|
| I would argue that if it was a verbatim reproduction of a
| copyrighted piece of software, that would likely be
| infringing. But if it was similar only in style, with
| different function names and structure, probably not
| infringing.
|
| Folks will argue that some things might be too small to do
| any different, for example a tiny snippet like python
| print("hello") or 1+1=2 or a for loop in your example. In
| that case it's too lacking in original expression to
| qualify for copyright protection anyway.
| Lerc wrote:
| _> AIs are not human and therefore their output is a human
| authored contribution and only human authored things are
| covered by copyright._
|
| That is a non sequitur. Also, I'm not sure if copyright
| applies to humans, or persons (not that I have encountered
| particularly creative corporations, but Taranaki Maunga has
| been known for large scale decorative works)
| nitwit005 wrote:
| That you can't copyright the AI's output (in the US, at
| least), doesn't imply it doesn't contain copyrighted
| material. If you generate an image of a Disney character,
| Disney still owns the copyright to that character.
| shevy-java wrote:
| But why should AI then be attributed if it is merely a tool
| that is used?
| plmpsu wrote:
| it makes sense to keep track of what model wrote what code to
| look for patterns, behaviors, etc.
| streetfighter64 wrote:
| It isn't?
|
| > AI agents MUST NOT add Signed-off-by tags. Only humans can
| legally certify the Developer Certificate of Origin (DCO).
|
| They mention an Assisted-by tag, but that also contains stuff
| like "clang-tidy". Surely you're not interpreting that as
| people "attributing" the work to the linter?
| lonelyasacloud wrote:
| Having an honesty based tag could be only way to monitor
| impact or get after a fix in code bases if things go south.
|
| That is at the moment: - Nobody knows for sure what agents
| might add and their long term effects on codebases.
|
| - It's at best unclear that AI content in a codebase can be
| reliably determined automatically.
|
| - Even if it's not malicious, at least some of its
| contributions are likely to be deleterious and pass
| undetected by human review.
| dataviz1000 wrote:
| This is discussed in the Linus vs Linus interview, "Building the
| PERFECT Linux PC with Linus Torvalds". [0]
|
| [0] https://youtu.be/mfv0V1SxbNA?si=CBnnesr4nCJLuB9D&t=2003
| newsoftheday wrote:
| > All code must be compatible with GPL-2.0-only
|
| How can you guarantee that will happen when AI has been trained a
| world full of multiple licenses and even closed source material
| without permission of the copyright owners...I confirmed that
| with several AI's just now.
| tmp10423288442 wrote:
| Wait for court cases I suppose - not really Linus Torvalds' job
| to guess how they'll rule on the copyright of mere training.
| Presumably having your AI actually consult codebases with
| incompatible licenses at runtime is more risky.
| philipov wrote:
| You take responsibility. That means if the AI messes up, you
| get punished. No pushing blame onto the stupid computer. If
| you're not comfortable with that, don't use the AI.
| sarchertech wrote:
| There's no reasonable way for you to use AI generated code
| and guarantee it doesn't infringe.
|
| The whole use it but if it behaves as expected, it's your
| fault is a ridiculous stance.
| philipov wrote:
| If you think it's an unacceptable risk to use a tool you
| can't trust when your own head is on the line, you're
| right, and you shouldn't use it. You don't have to
| guarantee anything. You just have to accept punishment.
| sarchertech wrote:
| That's just it though it's not just your head. The
| liability could very likely also fall on the Linux
| foundation.
|
| You can't say "you can do this thing that we know will
| cause problems that you have no way to mitigate, but if
| it does we're not liable". The infringement was a
| foreseeable consequence of the policy.
| philipov wrote:
| This policy effectively punts on the question of what
| tools were used to create the contribution, and states
| that regardless of how the code was made, only humans may
| be considered authors.
|
| From the foundation's point of view, humans are just as
| capable of submitting infringing code as AI is. If your
| argument is sound, then how can Linux accept contributors
| at all?
|
| EDIT: To answer my own question:
| Instead of a signed legal contract, a DCO is an
| affirmation that a certain person confirms that it is
| (s)he who holds legal liability for the act of sending of
| the code, that makes it easier to shift liability to the
| sender of the code in the case of any legal litigation,
| which serves as a deterrent of sending any code that can
| cause legal issues.
|
| This is how the Foundation protects itself, and the
| policy is that a contribution must have a human as the
| person who will accept the liability if the foundation
| comes under fire. The effectiveness of this policy (or
| not) doesn't depend on how the code was created.
| empath75 wrote:
| The only lawsuits so far have been over training on open
| source software. You're inventing a liability problem
| that essentially does not exist.
| streetfighter64 wrote:
| Yeah, but that's not a useful thing to do because not
| everybody thinks about that or considers it a problem. If
| somebody's careless and contributes copyrighted code,
| that's a problem for linux too, not only the author.
|
| For comparison, you wouldn't say, "you're free to use a
| pair of dice to decide what material to build the bridge
| out of, as long as you take responsibility if it falls
| down", because then of course somebody would be careless
| enough to build a bridge that falls down.
|
| Preventing the problem from the beginning is better than
| ensuring you have somebody to blame for the problem when
| it happens.
| philipov wrote:
| It was already necessary to solve the problem of _humans_
| contributing infringing code. It was solved by having
| contributors assume liability with a DCO. The policy
| being discussed today asserts that, because AI may not be
| held legally liable for its contributions, AI may not
| sign a DCO. A human signature is required. This puts the
| situation back to what it was with human contributors.
| What you are proposing goes beyond maintaining the status
| quo.
| adikso wrote:
| Their position is probably that LLM technology itself does
| not require training on code with incompatible licenses,
| and they probably also tend to avoid engaging in the
| philosophical debate over whether LLM-generated output is a
| derivative copy or an original creation (like how humans
| produce similar code without copying after being exposed to
| code). I think that even if they view it as derivative,
| they're being pragmatic - they don't want to block LLM use
| across the board, since in principle you can train on
| properly licensed, GPL-compatible data.
| newsoftheday wrote:
| > That means if the AI messes up
|
| I'm not talking about maintainability or reliability. I'm
| talking about legal culpability.
| dec0dedab0de wrote:
| _All code must be compatible with GPL-2.0-only_
|
| Am I being too pedantic if I point out that it is quite possible
| for code to be compatible with GPL-2.0 and other licenses at the
| same time? Or is this a term that is well understood?
| philipov wrote:
| GPL-2.0-only is the name of a license. One word. It is an
| alternative to GPL-2.0-or-later.
| compyman wrote:
| You might be being too pedantic :)
|
| https://spdx.org/licenses/GPL-2.0-only.html It's a specific GPL
| license (as opposed to GPL 2.0-later)
| martin-t wrote:
| This feels like the OSS community is giving up.
|
| LLMs are lossily-compressed models of code and other text (often
| mass-scraped despite explicit non-consent) which has licenses
| almost always requiring attribution and very often other
| conditions. Just a few weeks ago a SOTA model was shown to
| reproduce non-trivial amounts of licensed code[0].
|
| The idea of intelligence being emergent from compression is
| nothing new[1]. The trick here is giving up on completeness and
| accuracy in favor of a more probabilistic output which
|
| 1) reproduces patterns and interpolates between patterns of
| training data while not always being verbatim copies
|
| 2) serves as a heuristic when searching the solution-space which
| is further guided by deterministic tools such as compilers,
| linters, etc. - the models themselves quite often generate
| complete nonsense, including making up non-existent syntax in
| well-known mainstream languages such as C#.
|
| I strongly object to anthropomorphising text transformers (e.g.
| "Assisted-by"). It encourages magical thinking even among people
| who understand how the models operate, let alone the general
| public.
|
| Just like stealing fractional amounts of money[3] should not be
| legal, violating the licenses of the training data by reusing
| fractional amounts from each should not be legal either.
|
| [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47356000
|
| [1]: http://prize.hutter1.net/
|
| [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA_effect
|
| [3]: https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/14925/has-a-
| pro...
| tmp10423288442 wrote:
| On https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47356000, it looks like
| the user there was intentionally asking about the
| implementation of the Python chardet library before asking it
| to write code, right? Not surprising the AI would download the
| library to investigate it by default, or look for any installed
| copies of `chardet` on the local machine.
| martin-t wrote:
| The comment says "Opus 4.6 without tool use or web access"
| KK7NIL wrote:
| > I strongly object to anthropomorphising text transformers
| (e.g. "Assisted-by").
|
| I don't think this is anthropomorphising, especially
| considering they also include non-LLM tools in that "Assisted-
| by" section.
|
| We're well past the Turing test now, whether these things are
| actually sentient or not is of no pragmatic importance if we
| can't distinguish their output from a sentient creature,
| especially when it comes to programming.
| martin-t wrote:
| Would you say "assisted by vim" or "assisted by gcc"?
|
| It should be either something like "(partially/completely)
| generated by" or if you want to include deterministic tools,
| then "Tools-used:".
|
| The Turing test is an interesting thought experiment but
| we've seen it's easy for LLMs to sound human-like or make
| authoritative and convincing statements despite being
| completely wrong or full of nonsense. The Turing test is not
| a measure of intelligence, at least not an artificial one.
| (Though I find it quite amusing to think that the point at
| which a person chooses to refer to LLMs as intelligence is
| somewhat indicative of his own intelligence level.)
|
| > whether these things are actually sentient or not is of no
| pragmatic importance if we can't distinguish their output
| from a sentient creature, especially when it comes to
| programming
|
| It absolutely makes a difference: you can't own a human but
| you can own an LLM (or a corporation which is IMO equally
| wrong as owning a human).
|
| Humans have needs which must be continually satisfied to
| remain alive. Humans also have a moral value (a positive one
| - at least for most of us) which dictates that being rendered
| unable to remain alive is wrong.
|
| Now, what happens if LLMs have the same legal standing as
| humans and are thus able to participate in the economy in the
| same manner?
| zbentley wrote:
| If a linter insists on a weird line of code, I'm probably
| commenting that line as "recommended by whatever-linter",
| yes.
| ninjagoo wrote:
| > Just like stealing fractional amounts of money[3] should not
| be legal, violating the licenses of the training data by
| reusing fractional amounts from each should not be legal
| either.
|
| I think you'll find that this is not settled in the courts,
| depending on how the data was obtained. If the data was
| obtained legally, say a purchased book, courts have been
| finding that using it for training is fair use ( _Bartz v.
| Anthropic, Kadrey v. Meta_ ).
|
| Morally the case gets interesting.
|
| Historically, there was no such thing as copyright. The English
| 1710 Statute of Anne establishing copyright as a public law was
| titled 'for the Encouragement of Learning' and the US
| Constitution said Congress may secure exclusive rights to
| promote the progress of science and useful arts; so essentially
| public benefits driven by the grant of private benefits.
|
| There is an argument to be made that authors have a claim in a
| pre-post-scarcity economy where they have to fend for
| themselves for a living, and so without copyrights they would
| not be inclined to generate original works (we'll leave aside
| the case of the driven creators that create because they want
| to). But again, that's the same public benefit argument.
|
| In a post-scarcity economy, that moral case is weaker. There's
| no dependency for livelihood, so what benefit copyright? The
| matter then shifts to credit/attribution, integrity of the
| work, respect, reputation etc. So more like an MIT or Apache
| 2.0 license, essentially.
|
| That's a long winded way of saying: if you didn't have to eat,
| do you care who copies your work as long as you get credited?
|
| The more the people that copy your work with attribution, the
| more famous you'll be. Now _that 's_ the _currency of the
| future_.
| shevy-java wrote:
| Fork the kernel!
|
| Humans for humans!
|
| Don't let skynet win!!!
| aruametello wrote:
| > Fork the kernel!
|
| pre "clanker-linux".
|
| I am more intrigued by the inevitable Linux distro that will
| refuse any code that has AI contributions in it.
| sarchertech wrote:
| This does nothing to shield Linux from responsibility for
| infringing code.
|
| This is essentially like a retail store saying the supplier is
| responsible for eliminating all traces of THC from their hemp
| when they know that isn't a reasonable request to make.
|
| It's a foreseeable consequence. You don't get to grant yourself
| immunity from liability like this.
| SirHumphrey wrote:
| Quite a lot of companies use and release AI written code, are
| they all liable?
| sarchertech wrote:
| 1. Almost definitely if discovered
|
| 2. Infringement in closed source code isn't as likely to be
| discovered
|
| 3. OpenAI and Anthropic enterprise agreements agree to
| indemnify (pay for damages essentially) companies for
| copyright issues.
| nitwit005 wrote:
| Yep, and honestly it's going to come up with things other
| than lawsuits.
|
| I've worked at a company that was asked as part of a merger
| to scan for code copied from open source. That ended up being
| a major issue for the merger. People had copied various C
| headers around in odd places, and indeed stolen an odd bit of
| telnet code. We had to go clean it up.
| lowsong wrote:
| At least it'll make it easy to audit and replace it all in a few
| years.
| spwa4 wrote:
| Why does this file have an extension of .rst? What does that even
| mean for the fileformat?
| adikso wrote:
| reStructuredText. Just like you have .md files everywhere.
| jdreaver wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReStructuredText
|
| This format really took off in the Python community in the
| 2000's for documentation. The Linux kernel has used it for
| documentation as well for a while now.
| the_biot wrote:
| Linux has fallen. Linus Torvalds is now just another vibe coder.
| I give it less than a year, or maybe a month, until Linux gets
| vibe-coded patches approved by LLMs.
|
| Open source is dead, having had its code stolen for use by vibe-
| coding idiots.
|
| Make no mistake, this is the end of an era.
| _blaise_ wrote:
| Linus is the original vibe coder. He barks orders at cadre of
| human contributor agents and subsystem maintainer agents until
| the code looks the way he likes.
| ninjagoo wrote:
| > Signed-Off ... > The human submitter is responsible for:
| > Reviewing all AI-generated code > Ensuring compliance
| with licensing requirements > Adding their own Signed-
| off-by tag to certify the DCO > Taking full
| responsibility for the contribution > Attribution: ...
| Contributions should include an Assisted-by tag in the following
| format:
|
| Responsibility assigned to where it should lie. Expected no less
| from Torvalds, the progenitor of Linux and Git. No demagoguery,
| no b*.
|
| I am sure that this was reviewed by attorneys before being
| published as policy, because of the copyright implications.
|
| Hopefully this will set the trend and provide definitive guidance
| for a number of Devs that were not only seeing the utility behind
| ai assistance but also the acrimony from some quarters, causing
| some fence-sitting.
| themafia wrote:
| > All contributions must comply with the kernel's licensing
| requirements:
|
| I just don't think that's realistically achievable. Unless the
| models themselves can introspect on the code and detect any
| potential license violations.
|
| If you get hit with a copyright violation in this scheme I'd be
| afraid that they're going to hammer you for negligence of this
| obvious issue.
| NetOpWibby wrote:
| inb4 people rage against Linux
| KhayaliY wrote:
| We've seen in the past, for instance in the world of compliance,
| that if companies/governments want something done or make a
| mistake, they just have a designated person act as scapegoat.
|
| So what's preventing lawyers/companies having a batch of people
| they use as scapegoats, should something go wrong?
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