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 think Linus is probably being pressured by the corporate lobby that funds his org. And I think with the bubble inflating out of control, the tech bros are desperate to push AI really hard down everyone’s throats.
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.
jesus christ… it’s been said over a million times, the development of the linux kernel is not some fucking 5 star github repo. it goes through a shit ton of review, it’s seen by a lot of eyes. a small piece of text that says it was assisted or not by ai is irrelevant if the code is good or not, which is the work of maintainers to decide.
On the contrary, a small piece of text that says “this code deserves more review because humans may not have seen it” is absolutely necessary.
All this is doing is making it so I can hide that I didn’t touch the code.
On the contrary, a small piece of text that says “this code deserves more review because humans may not have seen it” is absolutely necessary.
All this is doing is making it so I can hide that I didn’t touch the code.
Why are you assuming that everyone would honestly disclose AI use if it was a rule?
The honest ones that would disclose it to say “this needs more eyes, guys” can still do just that. The dishonest ones that would hide AI use will do exactly that whether it’s a rule or not.
The only difference here is there’s no punitive action to follow for non-disclosure because that would be a gigantic waste of time when, AI or not, all code needs to be reviewed anyway.
I have to say the same thing I said to the other commenter; I’m really not sure that “some people lie so nobody should care about the truth” is the argument you think it is.
I have to say the same thing I said to the other commenter; I’m really not sure that “some people lie so nobody should care about the truth” is the argument you think it is.
Nice attempt at spin but relies too much on readers having room temperature IQ to believe that’s what my argument is. And just to be clear, by ‘Nice attempt’ I’m being sarcastic.
What kind of psycopath quotes the entire comment they’re replying to? As if your opinions weren’t enough of a red flag.
What kind of psycopath quotes the entire comment they’re replying to? As if your opinions weren’t enough of a red flag.
i think you’re being a little rude.
Do you have an actual counter to my original argument or are you just going to throw vague insults at anyone who disagrees with you like everywhere else you’ve commented in this post?
As time goes by, you just learn to understand that some people are just not worth your time.
Also, you did not disagree with me because you didn’t reply to any comment of mine. Oh, and there was nothing vague about the insult.
Cheers.
because there is no guarantee the code will be wrong per se. should junior developers need to disclose this fact, then? because according to your logic their code could be wrong! furthermore, there’s the fact people will do whatever the fuck they want, regardless of you raging on an internet forum about disclosure. people might not even read that shit because they don’t give a fuck. so you end up with half assed policy which you cannot enforce. job well done, let’s go home boys.
Junior developers’ code always goes through more review, yes. Also, I’m not sure “some people lie so nobody should care about the truth” is the argument you think it is.
It’s been said a billion times: you don’t get to decide what I find relevant. The only reason these clowns want to hide their behavior is because they’re ashamed of the criticism. There is no other reason to hide attribution, your patronization notwithstanding.
the developers of the linux kernel, people who have probably been coding for at least 20 years, are clowns.
The biggest clowns can be found in online comments though. (And yes, I deliberately include myself in that group)
Completely this.
As long as the code is good,. does it matter where it came from?
Yes.
If a piece of art is “good” who cares where it came from? The “where it came from” is as integral to the “quality” of the art as the “art” itself.
This is a very “product” mindset, concerned with the end result and how it serves you. Myself, and many others, are not as concerned with that or they may be against AI for other ethical or environmental reasons.
The take you’re giving presupposes that the utility of the end result is the only axis upon which to judge something.
In the universe where the “where it came from” can’t affect the end quality, the question itself indeed becomes irrelevant. And in case of the Linux kernel it is indeed irrelevant, as the code will be reviewed, appraised and tested before releasing.
And yes, the utilitary mindset is more applicable towards code than it is to art. Unless we’re talking about stuff like ioccc, where the code itself is the form of art, code is just a mean, not the end.
Why is it more applicable to code than art?
You can see my other posts in this same thread but I think you are taking that claim as a given. If I’m judging two pieces of software, why should I only use utility to my needs as the axis upon which I judge them? Why is that ontologically the correct method of judgement?
Why shouldn’t I treat alignment with my values, the degree to which the code fostered a community that was pro-social, or the beauty of the code as the means by which I judge the code?
Because the main utility of Art is to be observed. The main utility of code is to be compiled into a piece of software.
Why shouldn’t I treat alignment with my values, the degree to which the code fostered a community that was pro-social, or the beauty of the code […]
I never said you shouldn’t. Just that it’s secondary to code’s functionality. Also, specifically in case of the Linux kernel, the community and its values stay the same. All that changed is a clause in the rules.
Again, and I brought up more details elsewhere in this thread. This is assuming utility as the principal axis. You highlighting art as having a utility "to be observed* is more of this neo-liberal hyper optimization psychology.
I am awash in projects that compile. Frankly, for most use cases, getting the code to compile is a pretty easy step. But all those other axis? Those are much tougher.
So, yes, “does it compile and run” is generally table stakes as I can’t interact much with the code without that step. However, comparing it to art, that is functionally the equivalent to “is it visible to a human somehow” as far as requirements to be considered art.
Because of this, the utility of code, that is “does it serve my needs”, is not the principal axis by which to judge it for me. It is just one of many axis’ that are used to judge.
This isn’t limited to code by the way. Every field, and every technology, gets this treatment. It is simply not enough to make a product that does a task. I’m looking for conviviality.
You see, it is the principled axis though. Let me paint an analogy: suppose, you’re very thirsty, but there’s no water to be found. You see chips, dried fruit, cakes, biscuits, but no water. Would you really care about how ethically all of those were sourced, how nice they are, or how much the cook loved to make them? If someone started to tell you all of this snacks’n’deserts lore while you were literally dying of thirst, you’d most probably become very irritated, because all of those beautiful snacks and desserts is not what you need right now. What you need is water, and hour by hour you’re starting to care less and less about how muddy it should be, or where it comes from.
What I’m saying is, when a certain niche is overflowing with various pieces, it might seem like utility is not primary, but the opposite becomes really apparent as soon as there’s nothing to fill in that said niche. The rest is just a privilege that we all have, thanks to the abundance of literally everything that we live in. I too have the privilege to avoid projects written in Python, simply because i have a personal preference against it, or to avoid shady vibe-coded slop. With linux kernel tho? I mean, if someone clones it, and does a better job at not letting bugs into production, while releasing at the same pace or quicker than the current kernel project does, i’ll switch to it too. Except i doubt somebody could compete with a team of seasoned vets, that know how to use their tools and can with ~95% accuracy tell which parts of code would break at a first glance. Until then, i’ll stay on vanilla linux kernel, because it does its job of keeping my pc functional, which i need to win some bread.
But that doesn’t matter! Join the crusade!! AI is either the devil incarnate or our lord and savior! No in-between (no sanity in particular) allowed.
And as long as you have still not gone insane and argue rationally the bombardment of at least one pro-, one anti-AI post/article about Linux per day has to continue…
There’s something darkly enjoyable about seeing a comment that urges both sides of the argument to see reason get downvoted into oblivion.
I agree with you, though. For 4 years now, we have perpetually been 90 days from both the AI bubble collapsing and AI stealing all of our jobs. AI is just a tool. Can you do horrible things with it? Yep. Can you do wonderful things with it? Also yep.
Literally every argument you can make for/against it has an equal and opposite argument that can be made that counters what you said.
For 4 years now, we have perpetually been 90 days from both the AI bubble collapsing and AI stealing all of our jobs.
Also: AGI soon™
ai is owned and marketed by completely evil people.
Ah yes, because anthropic, openai and whatnot own the very concept, the principles behind modern llm and transformer models.
I’m not talking about starscream
who?
i feel you, i honestly been feeling the need to avoid the linux community (although i’ve obviously failed) for some time because is tiring.
tiring
Hate to tell you this but that’s probably a core feature here.
Someone was trying to argue here that code is less about what it actually does and more about the feelings that drove them (as distinct from thought processes or motivating logic behind them) and since AI betrays this, must AI disclosure blah blah!!!
Once arguments have entered the realm of absurdity and legitimate discourse is overshadowed by bad faith discussions of shifting goalposts and gish gallops, the only question that remains is who stands to gain the most from the english speaking world being slow to adopt AI.
Once reasonable heads have left the room and decline to discuss any topic on AI (because they expect the toxic environment devoid of reason), only agenda driven collectives and a handful of their useful idiots will steer future discourse.
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.
Can we as the tech community
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.
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.
Does not matter how he uses AI.
It matters a lot.
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.)
Cuck coder is an evolution of vibe coding because the programmer watches a LLMs do its job.
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 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.
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.
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.
Atleast NT is not vibecoded yet, not sure about BSD.
NT isn’t open source too. So nobody cares about NT.
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.
LLM code can be committed with “written approval by core.” https://www.netbsd.org/developers/commit-guidelines.html#%3A~%3Atext=written+approval
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.
Good
