linus and being a stupid dipshit tech bro name a more iconic duo
All it takes is one person using an LLM tainted with proprietary code which then just gives them that code line for line to undo decades of courtroom defense.
Not only that, but AI output can’t be licensed/copyrighted. The GPL license no longer covers the kernel in legal terms.
There seems to be legal discussions about that. It’s not quite as simple as you say:
However, there may be cases in which a different assessment is justified, namely when users use and operate the LLM as a tool that merely implements their personal creative intent. This could be compared somewhat more vividly to using a paintbrush. If the brush merely rolls over the paper, for example because it is dropped, no copyright-protected work is created, even if paint remains on the paper. However, if a painter deliberately swings the brush in a certain way, a protected painting can be created. If AI is used in a comparable way a copyright-protected work can indeed be created.
https://kpmg-law.de/en/ai-and-copyright-what-is-permitted-when-using-llms/
Yeah any decision would be on a case by case basis, which is normally something you’d want to avoid.
I’ve seen a couple of Linux devs talk about how they just give a prompt to claude and walk away leaving it alone to spit out the code, none of which can be licensed as GPL. But good luck working out what specific lines of what specific patches of theirs used an LLM vs. were re-written or such.
I’ve seen a couple of Linux devs talk about how they just give a prompt to claude and walk away leaving it alone to spit out the code
While I share Linus opinion on LLMs, I think doing this shit is extremely stupid and lazy.
And extremely abusive, since they don’t review the code fully, but a human must review the whole commit before accepting it. They save their time but consume that of others.
I personally think both pro LLM and anti LLM are wrong. One group think they are gods. The other think they are demons. LLMs can be useful for programming to some extent. But they will create a disaster if you don’t know what are you doing. I have recently published a post about the matter on me blog. I think the best part is:
I strongly believe that LLMs are useful for programming to some extent. Imagine you have a shop and you get a robot to do the moves for you. So you instead focus on the main business concerns.
So if you want to make some changes to the code which don’t require intelligence, that is they are just mechanical tasks, LLMs are good. If you want the LLMs to understand semantics of your code, you have chosen the wrong tool. Maybe in future we’ll have new AI software and tools which also understand semantics to some extent. But I highly doubt a transformer will be able to do it. They just predict the next likely token.
There is something I haven’t yet added to the post. So I am writing it here. Our computers are Universal Turing Machines. There are some fundamental limits to what a turing machine can’t do. Those are called undecidable problems. For instance a turing machine can never check if two pieces of code are semantically equivalent[1]. But that’s what human programmers can do. That’s why I emphasize on tasks which require no intelligence.
[1] That’s about the general case. Sure there are exceptions. But as we say “exception is not the rule”.