Attribution and copyright are separate. Who says that, even if copyright didn't exist for software, attribution also wouldn't?

If anything, the remark that I have to make to the parent is that in principle attribution is also required by non-copyleft licenses. However, I doubt it's respected for the hundreds of crates or npm modules in a typical Rust or JavaScript project...

Even the true copyright abolitionists (who want companies like Oracle to be able to fork their software and make a billion dollars releasing the binaries) still use MIT license which requires attribution.

The spirit of free software is about learning from others and having control of your hardware.

Given the supposed commoditization of intelligence and recent memory prices, I'd say LLMs are literally anathema to the spirit of the GPL.

What you said doesn't disagree with what the parent said.

LLM can be trained on a code and at the same time reproduce the core ideas. That's what LLMs do after all - they convert the training data into their own internal models and representations, and then reproduce the ideas.

Sure, some things/patterns, that were repeated multiple times, LLMs will tend to repeat verbatim as well, but that's not that big of a problem.

As a person who invented a few algorithms on my own I absolutely love LLMs and I don't mind them being trained on my work, but yeah - I've been way less likely to publish open source over the last year. In the past, if some of my stuff got traction, the credit was close to automatic (early adopters credited or at least knew where they got it from). Nowadays, LLMs will train on these ideas, rewrite them, and give no credit.

Still, I prefer this to having no LLMs at all.

> but stick to the code samples from the books. > I'm certain it'll be able to change the color of a CSS button, right?

A good enough LLM will just decompile a browser, figure out CSS spec from it, and yes - figure out how to change the color of a CSS button from first principles. There is no point to do this with CSS, but with other things it's now easier to just dig through sorces or direct bytecode than to bother checking docs.

> Then they don't need to train on github, no? Why not release a new model trained from Knuth's Art of Programming, Cormen's Introduction to Algorithms and the C specification.

Because they're really really stupid and only make up for this by being really really stupid really really fast.

This has been ruled, by actual courts, to not be "stealing" (not even in the "you wouldn't steal a car, piracy is theft" sense that film and music studios campaigned on).

The last I heard was the "Chinchilla" scaling law was ~20 training tokens per parameter. Humans are, if you'll excuse a very hand-waving Fermi estimate, 100,000 times more data-efficient at learning stuff (it's really hard to tell given we're visual creatures that happen to speak, while LLMs are text-based things that happen to see).

To be fair, you also don't restrict yourself to those texts either. You read news, you use other programs, you look at websites and so on. And while the norms vary per field, things aren't really reinvented from scratch. The standard FPS controls aren't reinvented for every shooter game. The standard website layouts aren't reinvented for every website. The standard command line behaviour isn't reinvented for every CLI program and so on.

> "Why not release a new model trained from Knuth's Art of Programming, Cormen's Introduction to Algorithms and the C specification."

What makes you think that wouldn't work? I think a lot of the hype around AI is vastly overblown but that seems to be well within the scope of what they can be expanded to do in the not too distant future. AlphaGo was trained through self-play reinforcement learning IIRC and I don't really see a reason that some sort of equivalent couldn't be done for generating code starting with textbooks and access to a Linux CLI as a reference. It would be an interesting experiment at least.

I'm sorry, but what are you trying to say here? There are books that teach you how to change the color of a CSS button...

What do you consider "moderately complex software"?

The ability to audit the code.

If not that, the ability to trust the reputation of the author which creates an incentive not to willingly insert a backdoor.

Yes, `npm install` was always bullshit because most people didn't bother to check, which is exactly why it was exploited multiple times, which created a conversation about "supply chain security".

If you want to argue that "npm changed the world" then you are correct. It did not change the world for the better though.

> I look at the person wielding the tool.

I look at the whole chain of influence behind them, and it's quite a lot more upsetting than the smiling face I interact with.

The whole "AI is a Lovecraftian tentacle monster wearing a smiley face" thing applies to simple bureaucracies (replace Lovecraft with Kafka), to corporations (replace Lovecraft with IDK, most anarchists?), and governments (Orwell?)

Tools made by tools made by tools, along more steps than most people know even when their job is one of them. Somewhere there's a kid working a dangerous mine without the right safety equipment, elsewhere there's a sweatshop, another place a "reeducation camp".

But who do I see? A cashier, mostly. Someone whose job involves smiling to customers even when we're idiots.

Then you best hope that person has read https://people.cs.umass.edu/~emery/classes/cmpsci691st/readi...

I'd wager 99 % of the OSS the world runs on is people that never have cared about credit or building a portfolio.

What they do want, however, is to not have to spend time on the thousands of AI generated pull requests and bug reports.

Neither of your guesses is reality based. Open source contributors get no credit in general. To the point that even commenters on HN dont seem to know who they, in general are.

That being said there is absolutely nothing wrong with building a portfolio. It is 100% valid motivation. The only issue with that theory is that no one cares about your open source contributions. Not employers, not peers, no one.

What I do find fascinating tho is that fans of the most selfish egoistical companies and tech groups ... insinuate artists, open source programmers, writers or anyone else is selfish or otherwise disapponting if any part of their work involve actual human motivation.

Why do we need more? Why is that not a big enough reason.

If a modern-day Beethoven were told that his work will be slurped in by a machine and he will remain unknown to the world, would it be acceptable to him? To you?