Has anyone thought about what AI code does to the license of each file it’s used in?
If AI code can’t be copyrighted does it also follow that it can’t be protected by copyleft rules?
Do I have to make ai source available when I reuse some part of it in my project?
This should be a real concern for commercial software, maybe not Linux, but all the vibe coding game studios should lose copyrights on things that AI codes.
I have also been thinking about this, because as far as I know you're correct - at least under US copyright law, AI output is not copyrightable, and since you don't own it you can't license it. All AI code is public domain (again, at least in the US). It's surprising to me that there has been little discussion about this, and Linus himself has not addressed it
If the use and inclusion of LLM derived output is truly defensible, why would you need to conceal its provenance or existence?
The debasement and solvency of competency wrought by the unbridled abdication to responsibility to such an incompetent construct is beyond depressing, this Is truly a world no longer worth inhabiting.
The question is why it matters in the first place. As long as the person submitting code takes ownership of the code, and there is a review of the code being done the same as before, nothing actually changes. Your whole line of argument is absurd because it's premised on the idea that we can trust code produced by a human more than code produced by an LLM. And that's obviously not true because humans make mistakes all the time. So, the focus on how the code was produced is fundamentally misguided. The focus in any successful project is on validation through things like code reviews, specifications, testing, and other well established practices. That's what responsible teams have always done.
To me, it matters because the use and reliance on LLMs demonstrably erodes cognitive capacity and ability, and submissions tainted by them should be subjected to an elevated level of scrutiny, which can only be facilitated with a consummate element of transparency. That elevated scrutiny could, and probably should, also be applied to non-LLM infected submissions, but doing so wouldn’t negate the labelling of authorship.
Good faith proponents of LLM assisted tooling should be in favour of overt transparency and labelling, as it’s a requirement to facilitate future historical analysis of their utility, efficacy, and legitimacy; you know, to build a body of evidence.
I assume you're citing a couple of studies with tiny samples that have been going around here. There's very little solid evidence to support the claim that LLMs demonstrably erode cognitive capacity. But if you have large scale, peer reviewed studies definitively showing this to be the case feel free to share them.
People lose certain skills working with LLMs, but that has always been the case with automation. Very few people know how to write assembly by hand, and practically nobody knows how to operate punch cards. Yet, we hardly claim that there was some loss of cognitive capacity as a result. People just spend their time focusing on different things now.
And I've already explained to you why the focus on the tooling is deeply misguided. You ignored my points entirely, which tells me that you're not actually trying to have a discussion in good faith here yourself.
To me it matters because if you got code from someone else, you'd probably want to credit it to them, right? So why shouldn't LLM output be treated the same?
True in some regards, however the word completion in my IDE is only active when I'm typing new code in, it only picks words that already exist in the code (along with language specific keywords, etc). It never types the following word for me, and I have to manually accept the completion I want. It is inactive when I'm typing comments in, and so on.
The LLM you tell to write you a function, and it writes the whole thing, comments and all. It's not quite the same. The original GitHub Copilot was closest to traditional IDE completion though, and there if it wrote a whole long function for me I'd definitely give credit where it's due.
It's a different workflow, but all LLM does is just more automation. The intention and the ideas still come from the developer, just because the tool automates the work of typing out code doesn't really change anything. Nobody who's done any serious software development thinks that typing code is the important part of coding.
Anyone who believes, and confidently espouses, that the autocomplete from the dictionary included in an IDE is functionally indistinguishable from the function and output of a LLM, is betraying a foundational lack of understanding of either. The former is constrained and deterministic, whereas the latter is explosively imprecise and intrinsically unreliable.
You keep invoking the notion that LLMs are merely tools, and should be treated as mindless subservient instruments deployed by a programmer in command. The thing, however, with tools is they can often trivially become weapons if wielded with incendiary intent, or indiscriminate instruments of destruction under the direction of incompetence.
Skill is acquired through use over time. LLMs are far too new for anyone to have legitimately accrued enough experience which could be mistaken for competence. With this in mind, anyone claiming to know what they, or the model they’re poking with a prompt, are doing, is a charlatan.
Anyone who makes lazy straw man arguments is betraying utter lack of intellectual integrity. Nowhere did I say their output is indistinguishable, what I actually said is that they work on the same principles. These are both stochastic systems.
The LLMs are very obviously mere tools that are instruments programmers use. Every tool can be wielded as a weapon, there's nothing unique about LLMs in this regard. I also have no idea what this has to do with AI use disclosure which is the context for this thread.
How LLMs work is well understood, and that's a completely different subject from how to use them effectively as a skill. With this in mind, the person who can't even make a coherent argument, and keeps conflating unrelated things, is the actual charlatan here.
Who said anything about concealing it? Not making a disclaimer mandatory and concealing something are two different things.
From the point of view of a reviewer, the code of the PR is all that matters. You shouldn't look at who wrote the code or what tools they used.
If the code is slop, it does not matter that a human or an AI wrote it, it is slop. Same if the code does what it's supposed to do and has a high enough quality to pass review.
Do you talk about everyone in the tech involved? That's hardly a single community under one umbrella. You ask everyone using any tech to believe what you want to, by just asking them to.
stop dick riding Linus
Whatever that even means to you. No one of rides on Linus' dick.
accept that he sold out to big tech
He didn't sold out to big tech.
Linus explained multiple times that he just uses Ai to help him and their maintainers. Everyone involved still need to understand the code.
Does not matter how he uses AI. It is a fundamentally unethical technology. Environmental damage, job losses, stealing work from open source programmers and artists, poisoning the young generations mind etc.
I don't give a fuck how Linus uses AI. Linux was here before LLMs were a thing and it can continue to be like this. Linus chose the easy way and disregarded every single negative aspect of it and decided to call it 'just a tool". The exact same excuse every single cuckcoder uses btw.
It is a fundamentally unethical technology. Environmental damage, job losses, stealing work from open source programmers and artists, poisoning the young generations mind etc.
Agreed.
I don’t give a fuck how Linus uses AI.
Doesn't matter what you give a fuck.
Linux was here before LLMs were a thing and it can continue to be like this.
Linux was much different back then and changed multiple times over the course of its existence.
Linus chose the easy way and disregarded every single negative aspect of it and decided to call it 'just a tool".
I do not believe that Linus disregarded every single negative aspect. He still expresses his issues with it if there are. Linus was always pragmatic and practical thinking. From his perspective it is just a tool, like a compiler is.
The exact same excuse every single cuckcoder uses btw.
What is a cuckcoder? (I start thinking with your language and choice of words in both replies, that you have a dick problem.)
no it is not fundamentally unethical. Please stop perpetuating this stupid take. AI is not designed to do unethical things. The profit motive drives companies to doing unethical things with it. If it weren’t for AI, they’d use something else.
Please don’t lose sight of the root cause of the problems, which is profit above everything.
Equally you could say that fossil fuel combustion engines are fundamentally unethical because they cause climate change and all sorts of health issues.
Most technologies are neither ethical nor unethical. It is how you use them and what for that might be ethical or unethical. Sure they can be more or less useful. We can argue about that. But technology itself is orthogonal to ethics. Unless it is nukes or anything that is explicitly designed to do harm and nothing else.
As some one here summarised it: it is to stop AI companies from getting free advertisement and endorsement, the kernel itself goes through an unbelievable amount of scrutiny so the disclosure requirement was irrelevant
What would be the point of jumping through these hoops in the first place? As OP pointed out, the disclosure requirement is itself irrelevant due to the amount of scrutiny the code goes through. So we're forcing disclosure to... shame AI users? Discourage its use?
The code, or parts of the code, may not be under copyright, but why does that matter? I suppose in the rare cases when it leaks we could freely use the AI generated parts of it, but how do you untangle the AI stuff from the human written stuff? It’s a minefield for a for-profit company. And for the open source community it doesn’t really matter since AI can reverse engineer pretty much any game now and generate copyright free code from it.
48 replies
Has anyone thought about what AI code does to the license of each file it’s used in?
If AI code can’t be copyrighted does it also follow that it can’t be protected by copyleft rules?
Do I have to make ai source available when I reuse some part of it in my project?
This should be a real concern for commercial software, maybe not Linux, but all the vibe coding game studios should lose copyrights on things that AI codes.
I have also been thinking about this, because as far as I know you're correct - at least under US copyright law, AI output is not copyrightable, and since you don't own it you can't license it. All AI code is public domain (again, at least in the US). It's surprising to me that there has been little discussion about this, and Linus himself has not addressed it
I find this exceptionally upsetting.
If the use and inclusion of LLM derived output is truly defensible, why would you need to conceal its provenance or existence?
The debasement and solvency of competency wrought by the unbridled abdication to responsibility to such an incompetent construct is beyond depressing, this Is truly a world no longer worth inhabiting.
The question is why it matters in the first place. As long as the person submitting code takes ownership of the code, and there is a review of the code being done the same as before, nothing actually changes. Your whole line of argument is absurd because it's premised on the idea that we can trust code produced by a human more than code produced by an LLM. And that's obviously not true because humans make mistakes all the time. So, the focus on how the code was produced is fundamentally misguided. The focus in any successful project is on validation through things like code reviews, specifications, testing, and other well established practices. That's what responsible teams have always done.
To me, it matters because the use and reliance on LLMs demonstrably erodes cognitive capacity and ability, and submissions tainted by them should be subjected to an elevated level of scrutiny, which can only be facilitated with a consummate element of transparency. That elevated scrutiny could, and probably should, also be applied to non-LLM infected submissions, but doing so wouldn’t negate the labelling of authorship.
Good faith proponents of LLM assisted tooling should be in favour of overt transparency and labelling, as it’s a requirement to facilitate future historical analysis of their utility, efficacy, and legitimacy; you know, to build a body of evidence.
I assume you're citing a couple of studies with tiny samples that have been going around here. There's very little solid evidence to support the claim that LLMs demonstrably erode cognitive capacity. But if you have large scale, peer reviewed studies definitively showing this to be the case feel free to share them.
People lose certain skills working with LLMs, but that has always been the case with automation. Very few people know how to write assembly by hand, and practically nobody knows how to operate punch cards. Yet, we hardly claim that there was some loss of cognitive capacity as a result. People just spend their time focusing on different things now.
And I've already explained to you why the focus on the tooling is deeply misguided. You ignored my points entirely, which tells me that you're not actually trying to have a discussion in good faith here yourself.
To me it matters because if you got code from someone else, you'd probably want to credit it to them, right? So why shouldn't LLM output be treated the same?
LLM is a tool that a human uses, do you also credit your IDE when you write code?
My IDE does not write the code for me, at most it autocompletes words.
The LLM works on the exact same principle as autocomplete does. You're just drawing an arbitrary line on technology you're used to.
True in some regards, however the word completion in my IDE is only active when I'm typing new code in, it only picks words that already exist in the code (along with language specific keywords, etc). It never types the following word for me, and I have to manually accept the completion I want. It is inactive when I'm typing comments in, and so on.
The LLM you tell to write you a function, and it writes the whole thing, comments and all. It's not quite the same. The original GitHub Copilot was closest to traditional IDE completion though, and there if it wrote a whole long function for me I'd definitely give credit where it's due.
It's a different workflow, but all LLM does is just more automation. The intention and the ideas still come from the developer, just because the tool automates the work of typing out code doesn't really change anything. Nobody who's done any serious software development thinks that typing code is the important part of coding.
Anyone who believes, and confidently espouses, that the autocomplete from the dictionary included in an IDE is functionally indistinguishable from the function and output of a LLM, is betraying a foundational lack of understanding of either. The former is constrained and deterministic, whereas the latter is explosively imprecise and intrinsically unreliable.
You keep invoking the notion that LLMs are merely tools, and should be treated as mindless subservient instruments deployed by a programmer in command. The thing, however, with tools is they can often trivially become weapons if wielded with incendiary intent, or indiscriminate instruments of destruction under the direction of incompetence.
Skill is acquired through use over time. LLMs are far too new for anyone to have legitimately accrued enough experience which could be mistaken for competence. With this in mind, anyone claiming to know what they, or the model they’re poking with a prompt, are doing, is a charlatan.
Anyone who makes lazy straw man arguments is betraying utter lack of intellectual integrity. Nowhere did I say their output is indistinguishable, what I actually said is that they work on the same principles. These are both stochastic systems.
The LLMs are very obviously mere tools that are instruments programmers use. Every tool can be wielded as a weapon, there's nothing unique about LLMs in this regard. I also have no idea what this has to do with AI use disclosure which is the context for this thread.
How LLMs work is well understood, and that's a completely different subject from how to use them effectively as a skill. With this in mind, the person who can't even make a coherent argument, and keeps conflating unrelated things, is the actual charlatan here.
Who said anything about concealing it? Not making a disclaimer mandatory and concealing something are two different things.
From the point of view of a reviewer, the code of the PR is all that matters. You shouldn't look at who wrote the code or what tools they used.
If the code is slop, it does not matter that a human or an AI wrote it, it is slop. Same if the code does what it's supposed to do and has a high enough quality to pass review.
Can we as the tech community stop dick riding Linus and accept that he sold out to big tech?
100%, just don't worship anyone and have some personality / spine.
Do you talk about everyone in the tech involved? That's hardly a single community under one umbrella. You ask everyone using any tech to believe what you want to, by just asking them to.
Whatever that even means to you. No one of rides on Linus' dick.
He didn't sold out to big tech.
Linus explained multiple times that he just uses Ai to help him and their maintainers. Everyone involved still need to understand the code.
Does not matter how he uses AI. It is a fundamentally unethical technology. Environmental damage, job losses, stealing work from open source programmers and artists, poisoning the young generations mind etc.
I don't give a fuck how Linus uses AI. Linux was here before LLMs were a thing and it can continue to be like this. Linus chose the easy way and disregarded every single negative aspect of it and decided to call it 'just a tool". The exact same excuse every single cuckcoder uses btw.
It matters a lot.
Agreed.
Doesn't matter what you give a fuck.
Linux was much different back then and changed multiple times over the course of its existence.
I do not believe that Linus disregarded every single negative aspect. He still expresses his issues with it if there are. Linus was always pragmatic and practical thinking. From his perspective it is just a tool, like a compiler is.
What is a cuckcoder? (I start thinking with your language and choice of words in both replies, that you have a dick problem.)
Cuck coder is an evolution of vibe coding because the programmer watches a LLMs do its job.
There is a meme on Lemmy from a week or two ago that explains the development of cuck-coder.
no it is not fundamentally unethical. Please stop perpetuating this stupid take. AI is not designed to do unethical things. The profit motive drives companies to doing unethical things with it. If it weren’t for AI, they’d use something else.
Please don’t lose sight of the root cause of the problems, which is profit above everything. Equally you could say that fossil fuel combustion engines are fundamentally unethical because they cause climate change and all sorts of health issues.
Most technologies are neither ethical nor unethical. It is how you use them and what for that might be ethical or unethical. Sure they can be more or less useful. We can argue about that. But technology itself is orthogonal to ethics. Unless it is nukes or anything that is explicitly designed to do harm and nothing else.
As some one here summarised it: it is to stop AI companies from getting free advertisement and endorsement, the kernel itself goes through an unbelievable amount of scrutiny so the disclosure requirement was irrelevant
That would be solved by removing public mentions of ai companies in the ai disclosure notice.
What would be the point of jumping through these hoops in the first place? As OP pointed out, the disclosure requirement is itself irrelevant due to the amount of scrutiny the code goes through. So we're forcing disclosure to... shame AI users? Discourage its use?
This decision baffles me.
I guess, as he suggested, it's time to fork it.
the hardest part is to come pu with a good project name and mascot.
I’ll say we go the opposite of a penguin - a polar bear. And then go the way of Open Office and call it Librux.
I’m sure that will catch on
The code, or parts of the code, may not be under copyright, but why does that matter? I suppose in the rare cases when it leaks we could freely use the AI generated parts of it, but how do you untangle the AI stuff from the human written stuff? It’s a minefield for a for-profit company. And for the open source community it doesn’t really matter since AI can reverse engineer pretty much any game now and generate copyright free code from it.
Atleast NT is not vibecoded yet, not sure about BSD.
NT is definitely vibecoded at this point. Not like we can check anyway.
If NT is refering to the windows kernal then I got bad news for ya
The userspace is 30% vibecoded as the world has seen with w11 on a daily basis jajaja.
NetBSD has a clear stance on no ai.
As much as NetBSD takes a stand against AI, it's not banned. They just said AI code has to be signed off by the core team.
LLM code can be committed with "written approval by core." https://www.netbsd.org/developers/commit-guidelines.html#%3A%7E%3Atext=written+approval
Also Haiku OS and Ironclad OS
NT isn't open source too. So nobody cares about NT.
Good