GCC steering committee announces AI policy

* focusing on the US given this site and the outsized influence it has on global copyright

Who'd thought the Fall of Clang would be caused by Clangers Slop.

On the other hand, the architect using CAD tools to create those drawings did include the necessary human creativity/direction even if the tools did things like apply building code rules etc.

Source code being subject to copyright and also considered to be "speech" has provided much more protection to the public from government overreach, eg restrictions on cryptography source code.

There's a human authorship requirement for copyright protections. In context of AI, cf Stephen Thaler v. Perlmutter, eg. at [1].

[1] https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Thaler_v._Perlmutter,_Respons...

> Specifically, if a third party sues a commercial customer for copyright infringement for using Microsoft’s Copilots or the output they generate, we will defend the customer and pay the amount of any adverse judgments or settlements that result from the lawsuit, as long as the customer used the guardrails and content filters we have built into our products.

https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2023/09/07/copilot...

> Under the updated terms, we will defend our customers from any copyright infringement claim made against them for their authorized use of our services or their outputs, and we will pay for any approved settlements or judgments that result.

https://www.anthropic.com/news/expanded-legal-protections-ap...

> Output indemnity. OpenAI’s indemnification obligations to Enterprise customers under the Agreement include claims that Customer’s use or distribution of Output infringes a third party’s intellectual property right.

https://openai.com/policies/service-terms/

Also, it's worth noting that the USCO does not actually have the final say here. It's possible to register works that don't hold up in court or to fail to register works that do hold up. It's the courts that ultimately decide what the law is.

Even if the GP poster submitted these patches that may or may not exist, I'm not sure they would ever get merged.

Doubt. Whatever it is your app does, I bet corporations would have been forced to hire more people to do it for them, were it not for you.

And there's absolutely nothing "unethical" about it either. Toil is meant to be automated away. What I can't take is programmers thinking they're somehow above this.

The only crime here is stopping before AI replaces the CEOs and politicians. It should keep happening relentlessly until capitalism itself collapses and a post scarcity society is achieved.

What quality does it have that humans had eyes on code?

Elite teams likely still produce code of better quality with a higher qa bar than agentic code. But that category is dimishing everyday.

The core point is that so much trust is reduced to "Joe in cubicle". Also a lot more than what he can carry.

Most of the code that is being executed on your behalf is far from written by elite teams.

1. There is no indication that is at all likely except for purely vibe-coded projects. It seems highly unlikely and in some countries (e.g. the UK) the law clearly says otherwise.

2. There have been quite a few rulings in countries where it is unclear, and they all set some level of human input that will make AI generated code covered by copyright. Look at the cases that have been in HN stories about cases in the US, Germany and Japan, for example.

2. It would have to be all AI generated, and you would need to replace all the human written parts. Not a practical problem for a large, old project.

If this is their real reasoning they are jumping at shadows. However, this might be like where, the copyright (which is the explanation given in the ToS) is not the real reason (which was explained in the subsequent blog post).

It is interesting that proprietary software businesses, who have an even stronger interest in ensuring their software is covered by copyright in all countries seem to be quite happy to use LLM generated code. Microsoft and many others boast about how much of their code is now LLM generated.

I don’t think taking copyright off the table harms the practice of sharing code. They will still try to use trade secrets to restrict code sharing and contracts, but using GNU software won’t be stopped. It will reduce the ability to sue people not sharing their modifications but that was always outside the mainstream, and places like AWS, Apple, and Google find ways around it anyways since it doesn’t cover hosted services or non-linked code.

The core stream of openly developed and exponentially improving software does not need copyright to win if it cannot be sued for copyright violation.

Now I suppose some OpenAI lawyer is trying to find a way to sue humans for copyright infringement while keeping them safe from lawsuits, so we can worry about that attack.

By the way, do you have a source on Midjourney spitting out copyrighted stuff all the time? Does it happen at random or when users intentionally steer the prompt in that direction? I suspect it's the latter but I admit I'm not really familiar with this tool.

> In the kernel community we do open source because it results in better technology, not because of religious reasons.

> And so we make decisions primarily based on technical merit. Not fear of new tools.

You are not making an argument based on technical merit here.

It would be interesting to know why they decided for a general prohibition, rather than going with the default "a human must be responsible for the contribution" kind of policy.

Perhaps they have received a flood of undesirable AI generated contributions, and actual contributors do not use AI significantly.

I do believe though that, if the LLMs were found to be derivative works of their training set, it would follow almost directly that their output is also a derivative work of that same training set - given how these LLMs operate. And even if the liability fell with the LLM providers (which may not be so clear cut for, say, local models, fine tuning, etc), that would still mean everyone would have to excise any LLM generated content they are distributing.

Furthermore, I don’t think you can really assume that the courts will rule a certain way on this just because of the money involved; there’s a lot of money involved when it comes to the copyright holders too, and they’ve long enjoyed a rather favorable status with the courts and legislators. (For example, in the days of P2P file sharing lawsuits and attempts to legislate P2P file sharing, the software industry was already many times the size of the media industry, but the media industry consistently won.)

> News back then were about intentionally prompting to output known copyrighted material.

First, there are other cases if you take the time to dig. This is quite an old example (GPT-2) as i haven't kept up to date on this field recently, but it does show that this problem has been known about since before these systems were widely adopted: https://arxiv.org/abs/2012.07805 [0]

Second, GP said nothing about the type of effort required to make it happen, just that it can be done and that the copyright owner could come along and cause legal problems later. It's absolutely possible to have a fly-by contributor who purposefully asks for code that reproduces X/Y/Z without a maintainer knowing about it.

But then the maintainer is the one in legal trouble.

> When, despite millions of developers using agentic AI already, are these lawsuits supposed to manifest?

Legal / copyright / etc. cases often take a lot longer than a couple of years to come to fruition.

---

[0]: edit -- to clarify this is an example of the reproduction problem, not an example copyright infringement case.

Someone tried to contribute “vibe-coded” device support to a project I’m involved with, they said they did it all based on the device documentation, the code their agents spit out was copied verbatim out of a (GPL’d) project with which I’m familiar which supports that device.

LLMs are not learning things and then using that learning to construct new things. They are essentially a form of lossy compression of their training set. And you don’t need to be explicit about trying to reproduce a portion of that training set for an LLM to output one.

the "entire history of" is circa 3-4 years, which is very much a tiny period of time compared to normal legal system / copyright law stuff (IANAL).

> The complaint argued that "the basis of the Gaye defendants' claims is that "Blurred Lines" and "Got To Give It Up" "feel" or "sound" the same. Being reminiscent of a "sound" is not copyright infringement. The intent in producing "Blurred Lines" was to evoke an era. In reality, the Gaye defendants are claiming ownership of an entire genre, as opposed to a specific work"

they lost (eventually) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pharrell_Williams_v._Bridgepor...

wider point -- whether or not a copy is a copy and whether it is is infringing on copyright or not ultimately has to be decided by a court case when it's not an obvious and clear cut violation. especially in the USA with the utterly mental fair use law.

(and not, I'm not slyly trying to say LLMs are like guns, yeesh)

For example, Anthropic in one sense seems to occupy a caricature of the nanny state worldview, with their constant calls for safety regulation. But then when you examine the motives, it becomes pretty clear that giving them what they ask for will give them unprecedented consolidation of economic power. So if you are a liberal normally inclined toward regulation, you have to consider: is it worth living in a world with even more trillionaires controlling an even larger share of the world’s resources? Or would it be better for AI to become fully commoditized so that its benefits are more broadly dispersed?

Or suppose you are right wing, free market capitalist, deeply nationalist person. Are you for or against Chinese AI models? Your desire for America to “win” AI may be tempered by knowing that the biggest winners will be some power-mad EA people in the SF Bay.

Judging from social media interactions, this space seems to make for strange bedfellows at times.

I sometimes gen code without a harness and copy paste it or manually type it, maybe I can do like 200 lines in a day? Whenever I see someone coding with a harness it's like 100x times that, so this phenomenon will happen hundreds times more.

Feature wise I don't do bitint, decimal and FloatX. No auto-vectorization, but better than most simd/neon projects, which don't use __attribute__((vector_size(N))). Manual vectorization.

no sanitizers nor flto.

rcc is for the people who want to compile their projects sanily, and fast. And who want to find unicode attacks. And for those who run into tcc bugs, there are many still. gcc and clang are insanily slow.

Auto vectorization would need extensive -O3 opts, which I dont do yet. No ssa, no escape analysis. The compiler should stay fast. And I prefer manual vectorization via attributes. Still better than using the insane and platform dependent SSE/neon apis, everyone else is using. See the torture/vect/ tests. They all pass