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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • Not all thoughts are original.

    Agreed, and I am also 100% opposed to SW patents. No matter what I wrote, if someone came up with the same idea on their own, and finds out about my implementation later, I absolutely do not expect them to credit me. In the use case you describe, I do not see a problem of using other people’s work in a license breaking way. I do however see a waste of time - you have to triple check everything an LLM spits out - and energy (ref: MS trying to buy / restart a nuclear reactor to power their LLM hardware).

    Further, whether I should be at fault for LLM vendors who may be breaking copyright law, is like trying to make a case for me being at fault for murder because I drive a car when car manufacturers lobby to the effect that people die more.

    If you drive a car on “autopilot” and get someone killed, you are absolutely at fault for murder. Not in the legal sense, because fuck capitalism, but absolutely in the moral sense. Also, there’s legal precedent in a different example: https://www.findlaw.com/legalblogs/criminal-defense/can-you-get-arrested-for-buying-stolen-goods/

    If you unknowingly buy stolen (fenced) goods, if found out, you will have to return them to the rightful owner without getting your money back - that you would then have to try and get back from the vendor.

    In the case of license agreements, you would still be participant to a license violation - and if you consider a piece of code that would be well-recognizable, just think about the following thought experiment:

    Assume someone trained the LLM on some source code Disney uses for whatever. Your code gets autocompleted with that and you publish it, and Disney finds out about it. Do you honestly think that the evil motherfuckers at Disney would stop at anything short of having your head served on a silver platter?




  • You are right. My apologies, and my congratulations for finding the correct “tone” to respond to me ;) The thing is, I am absolutely fed up with especially the bullshit about snake oil vendors selling LLMs as “AI”, and I am much more fed up with corporations on a large scale getting away with - since it’s for profit - what I guess must already be called theft of intellectual property.

    When people then use said LLMs to “develop software”, I’m kind of convinced they are about as gone mentally as the MAGA cult and sometimes I just want to vent. However, I chose the word parasite for a reason, because it’s a parasitic way of working: they use the work of other people, which for more specific algorithms, an LLM will reproduce more or less verbatim, while causing harm to such people by basically copy-pasting such code while omitting the license statement - thereby releasing such code (if open source) into the “wild” with an illegally(*) modified license.

    • illegal of course only in such countries whose legal system respects copyright and license texts in the first place

    Considering on top the damage done to the environment by the insane energy consumption for little to no gain, people should not be using LLMs at all. Not even outside coding. This is just another way to contribute missing our climate goals by a wide margin. Wasting energy like this - basically because people are too lazy to think for themselves - actually gets people killed due to extreme weather events.

    So yeah, you have a valid point, but also, I am fed up with the egocentric bullshit world that social media has created and that has culminated in what will soon be a totalitarian regime in the country that once brought peace to Europe by defeating the Nazis and doing a PROPER reeducation of the people. Hooray for going off on a tangent…