Free software has a principle of "freedom to run, to do whatever you wish" (freedom 0), so arguably has said that training AI is OK. (We could quibble over the word Run, but the Gnu.org,and RMS clearly say "freedom 0 does not restrict how you use it."
GPL code can be used by the military to develop nuclear weapons. Given that the is a guiding principle of the FSF its hard to argue that the current usage is not OK.
The problem is Copilot training on source code and then discarding any restrictions of the licenses. Maybe it is legal right now but I'm sure this case will find it's way into open source licenses pretty soon.
Additionally I'm not sure if AGPL does anything.
I suspect the ethics and such of licensing when large fractions of work are training AI and using AI need to be worked out rather than getting mad at any individual.
What does copy left look like for AI?
I can only hope, that lawmakers hurry to catch up with reality and impose transparency obligations for AI models.
When a person learns from GPL code this question doesn't arise. The state of a person's brain is outside of copyright. But is the state of an LLM also outside of copyright or outside of the terms covered by the GPL? I'm not sure.
An LLM can not only emit source code derived from code published under the GPL, it can also potentially execute a program and could therefore be considered object code.
This isn't necessarily a problem as long as the model isn't distributed and does not include any AGPL code.
It clearly isn’t. Which is why clean-room reverse engineering always requires at least two people. Or why a musician that accidentally recreates a chord progression they heard years ago but don't remember the source might still get sued.
When I read and remember a text, possibly also learning from it, I'm not making a copy and I'm not creating a derivative work. The state of my brain is outside of copyright. Only at the point where I create a new representation based on what I have read I may be violating someone's copyrights.
But is it the same for an AI? Is the act of reading, remembering and learning (i.e. adjusting model weights) not in itself tantamount to creating a derivative work?
Is it actually? If we could fully pull out the state of your brain, and understand that you stored a copy of a copyrighted work, I think you could be on the hook for licensing it, paying fees every time you remember the work as a performance of it.
They don't impact the current legality of a licence, but it will affect future ones.
GPL/BSD/Apache/proprietary, they are all picked for ideological concerns which all stem from feelings. It is good to discuss these things, and it is good to recognise that these are emotionally driven.
Don't they? Even the most liberal licenses require that you at least keep the license and attributions. Which are exactly the parts that AI systems remove. I would have no problem with an AI system trained on GPL code if the output was still covered by the GPL.
It's the licence I choose for new projects.
edit: to clarify, he's allowing you to _use_ it however you like, including making a derivative work, including it wholesale, etc. However, claiming authorship of the original code would still run afoul of the original copyright.
edit2: oh - if you mean relicensing the code - that is allowed.
The reality is, these models don't copy or distribute anything directly, which makes applying copyright a bit of a stretch. Many people feel like it is a use that should have some sort of IP law applying to it, which is why I think there's some chance that courts or legislators will decide to screw the letter of existing law and just wedge new interpretations in, but it's not super simple: they'd have to thread the needle and not make things like search illegal, and that's tricky. Besides that, these models are out there, they're useful, and if they're ruled infringing they'll just be distributed illegally anyways.
I don't envy the people who will have to decide these cases, I suspect what's better for the world overall is to leave the law as-is and clarify that fair use holds (nobody will stop publishing content or code just because AI is slurping it up, a few weirdos like the article author excepted), but there are going to be a lot of pissed off people either way...
If they rule that it's ok to do that, I might be ok with AI being ruled as fair use.
It's the whole point of the discussion… is it really?
And if it's not fair use to train on windows source code because of copyright… doesn't that same copyright law cover everything else as well?
Just like Covid introduced epidemiological terms to the general public, this issue can introduce design choices around licensing, copyright and watermarking to more people.
I assume there is a group of researchers building tools to provide fine-grained historical views into AI output. And yes, for billions of parameters trained on billions of documents, linking every letter to a source document is a UX nightmare.
But what a cool problem. That's the interesting part. Yeah, something like TileBars[1] or Seesoft[1] seems like the right tool. But maybe keeping it all text with some graphical marker of authenticity is the better choice.
So many cool problems. But, that authenticity marker is the hard sell. Can enough sane discussions be enough to introduce that, or is drama required?
https://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~hearst/irbook/10/node7....
There are plenty of arguments to choose a licence, and as the world changes we will evolve. See how the GPL itself evolved to handle TiVo. These things arent static.
I personally agree that GPL trained code should produce GPL code, I see a distiction between teaching people and teaching computers but that isn't my call.
This is exactly what code laundering ANNs circumvent and that might open up a dystopian future for all of us, not only us code monkeys, but society in general.
Or, perhaps more commonly, they were picked for business model reasons or (related) because building a community that includes commercial interests tends to favor more permissive licensing.
This may seem a bit nitpicky and philosophical, but anyway: these feelings you mention are about things, and these things the feelings come from are what is most important. Feelings are never standalone, if they are they are just moods which are so personal its hard to have a conversation over.
Let's call 'the things' values. I'd say feelings are perceptions of values, and as such they invariably have a conceptual element to them. And exactly that conceptual aspect makes them suitable for conversation and sometimes even debate, insofar as they can be incorrect. We can acknowledge the subjective, emotive aspect of feelings as highly and inalienably personal, respect the individual opinion behind them and contest the implicit truth-claims all at the same time.
I think we're in a new enough situation that we can look beyond what's legal in a license. When many of us started working on open source projects, AI was a far-off concept. Speaking for myself, I thought we'd see steady improvement in code-completion tools, but I didn't think I'd see anything like GPT-4 in my lifetime.
Licenses were written for humans working with code. We can talk about corporations as well, but when I've thought about corporations in the past, I thought about people working on code at corporations. The idea of an AI using my open source project to generate working code for someone or some corporation feels...different.
Yes, I'm talking explicitly about feelings. I know my feelings don't impact the legalities of a license. But feelings are worth talking about, especially as we're all finding the boundaries of new tools and new ways of working.
I don't agree with everything in the post, but I think this is a great conversation to be having.