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Wow, got about 9 repos of mine there and a few from my startup’s, only public ones are scraped so I say fair enough. Happy to have switched to running my own git infra a year ago
Get off of Github if you think this is a problem 🤷 There are alternatives like Forgejo (Codeberg), Gitlab, and Radicle (decentralised).
Those are obviously scraped as well?
Sure, but they can’t discover them all. Especially radicle is not easy to crawl, due to it’s decentralised nature. It can even be hosted on TOR and I2P
Genuinely surprised it’s even opt-out.
These companies train on Disney DVDs. Permission is not a factor. Training is transformative use, as much for counting letter frequency as for building a chatbot that can sort of code.
no, officer, you misunderstand! I’m not pirating this movie, I’m just training my intelligence on it! it is transformative use, see, I can now write you this summary!
Quoting one sentence from a book is fair use even if you shoplifted that book.
I would say this is a gray area of law. It hasn’t been tested yet. There are a few factors in determining “fair use”. One of those factors is commercialization, which could nullify fair use. Another is the amount you’re using.
Commercial parody is commonplace fair use. If it surpasses the original… oh well.
The amount being used becomes negligible as the corpus grows. Filtering a billion webpages into one gigabyte means their average contribution is one byte. Play with the numbers all you like, it’s gonna come out to less than a paragraph.
If we went full copyright maximalist, and criminally banned using anything but public-domain / BSD / CC0 works, the commercial impact would not be much different. The technology itself shifts the economics of text, images, video, and code.
A number of my repos are listed.
But the weird part is that it also lists a repo I don’t recognize. The repo does actually exist on my github account, but it’s marked as “ignored”, and the description says it was automatically exported from Google Code. The code seems to be a MacOS shareware file encryption tool called “BitClamp”, published circa 2008.
No idea how it got on my account.
Also, all this reminds me of drama in the Skyrim and Minecraft modding scenes, when devs publish stuff under Apache or MIT or whatever.
Then the devs find out they don’t like what others are doing with their code. Drama ensues.
…That’s kinda the deal with permissive licenses. Or posting publicly, like here on Lemmy. People will do things you don’t like with your code or content.
Eh, I don’t think it’s hypocritical to contribute to a commons and then get mad when someone comes along and tries to use the commons to undermine the commons.
Like yes, the commons is there to be used… but not to kill the commons.
https://www.citationneeded.news/free-and-open-access-in-the-age-of-generative-ai/
It’s kind of a tragedy if you think about it
Really? In front of my Elinor Ostrom poster?
The most important thing is to protect the people’s right to use open source / weight AI models without licensing. Because the AI companies permanently monopolizing AI models and collecting rent forever on the commons, that would be a tragedy. It would forever shift the balance of power to use advanced technology.
I’m not using AI.
Well truly profitable applications for LLMs are pretty limited so far, but they will come. Lets say you can replace a tax advisor / accountant with a specialized LLM agent (one that doesn’t hallucinate tax code lol). Imagine oyu have an open source project that uses a coding AI agent to frequently update and retrain the tax LLM with the new regulations and laws and unit tests all this. So it’s ultimately easy to use, you just talk to the tax AI agent. Or alternatively, because they managed to make open weight LLMs illegal because they are piracy because they use books and posts without permission to train and can’t afford to pay the license fees. Now everybody has to use a commercial AI tax service. At the same price at what it cost previously to hire a real human.
As AI models get better they replace human labor. This is a problem under capitalism, otherwise we could just all just be working less and chill. But it gets even worse if “we” (like the 99%) can’t make use of open source models. Then the plutocrats get to own this newly replaced labor as free labor and collect rent.
This is why I believe the IP argument of anti-AI is so dangerous. They can afford to pay license fees, we / open source can’t. See patents, or see healthcare insurance purposefully making healthcare costs go up.
That’s all well and good, but AI makes me want to die, so I’m not using it.
Nah if you’re a massive AI company and you scrape without contribution, you’re a huge piece of shit.
It’s just stealing plain and simple like anything else.
They’re not a small user getting open source software, they’re scraping what is already done to try and make you obsolete.
On the other hand, totally did not see this particular shit coming. I wonder if we’ll see a rash of “permissive, except LLMs can fuck right off” licenses.
Right, I mean I literally published my code openly, so idc lol
…and now, suddenly, github being overrun by vibecoded garbage isn’t so bad
AI will poison itself trust, like when it links AI made articles.
In theory, it’s all supposed to be permissively licenced code and the opt out is more than other models give. I saw Starcoder as one of the more ethical models. I thought the underlying principals to be fair at least.
I’m interested in this gut hostility to it regardless. Kind of shows how you can’t present LLMs in a positive angle no matter what. They shouldn’t be using anything GPL or similar.
Kind of shows how you can’t present
LLMsharvesting peoples data without consent or even warning and making it difficult to impossible for people to avoid it in a positive angle no matter what.Fixed it for you.
An LLM built from only consensually provided data would be perfectly fine, as long as it works without environmentally ruinous data centers.
In fact, that was how EVERY LLM was to begin with, until regulatory capture and corporate impunity reached the current crescendo.
But if it’s permissively licenced, couldn’t I just copy bits and pieces for my own project without asking?
Like I understand asking is always better and an opt in process for “the stack” or wtv would have been better received. Nevertheless, did they really have a legal obligation, rather than moral obligation, to ask given how this is licensed?
Taking GPL code would be a different situation right? They would have to also include it in their model creation… which theoretically they just could.
Most of those “permissive” licenses require redistributors to redistribute copies of the license texts in derivative works.
But I bet these AI models aren’t doing that. And it’s a damn neat certainty that the vibe coders who use the AI model are not attaching a license disclosure containing every permissive licenses in GitHub. Even if their vibe coded app is arguably a derivative work.
…do you know what the word “consensually” means? 🤦🏻
I do not believe a permissive license has any notion of consent. You can’t stop someone from forking your code as long as they follow the rules of the license, like crediting you.
Even in GPL, you can’t stop someone from using your code, see Gnome’s recent arguements with Mint over their usage of an old version of their Calender app.
Others in the thread have mentioned we’ll see permissive licenses with exceptions for Ai in the near future. It’s a solution because that door is currently open.
I do not believe a permissive license has any notion of consent. You can’t stop someone from forking your code as long as they follow the rules of the license, like crediting you.
Does the LLM ever credit the original author when it spits out code?
You can’t stop someone from forking your code as long as they follow the rules of the license, like crediting you
In that case,though, you’re still respecting the wishes of the person applying that permissive license consensually, though.
That’s VERY different from mass harvesting all data without permission (or credit) for profit, which would probably be against the terms of even the most permissive licenses.
Their claim was they followed the licenses and only used code they were implicitly allowed to use. I’d like to see if that was just astroturf and bullshit.
Honestly, though this is one of the reasons why people prefer copyleft and avoid permissive licenses, because yeah anyone can profit monetarily off your work otherwise.
Their claim was they followed the licenses and only used code they were implicitly allowed to use
Was likely bullshit. Just like just about everything else people behind for profit LLMs say about their business practices.
I’d like to see if that was just astroturf and bullshit.
Almost certainly
You can host copyleft as well as all rights reserved code on GitHub. It’s not like Codeberg.
Yeah, they aren’t supposed to scrape that stuff. That’s kind of where I’m wondering if they limited their collections.
Well, they included some MPL 2.0 repos of mine at least, but skipped others that use GPL3. Yet another that is a mirror of some otherwise lost firmware files for early 2000s wifi cards (and definitely isn’t free software) is also included.
So possibly they filter out GPL2/3 specifically, rather than only include known permissive licenses. Which is a pretty bad way of doing it.
Okay, I see you, I think I may have misunderstood how you were phrasing it. Thinking you were saying they were scanning all of GitHub because it’s all permissive.
We’ll they said they only scanned stuff that would have allowed them implicitly, now did they really respect that? Their ‘‘stack’’ is public, so people can review it. It’s opensource, people can audit it at least.
The big giants can lift whatever they want from Github and we wouldn’t have the means to prove it. I’m sure Microsoft is using private repos as they like. It’s not a coincidence that Copilot was one of the earlier coding LLMs.
Machine learning is more than just “transformative use” and is not copying. Currently that is only like 98% true, because memorization does occur in a few cases. Like 0.8-2% and that number is probably less now 2 years later than that study. Ultimately once they fix the memorization issue and “purge” these memories and can no longer reproduce licensed code (which is mostly textbook examples and boilerplate code or very popular code) this will be true transformative learning.
Then they do not require any more permission to read and learn from a book or from code than a human would. As long as you own a book or have the right to read something, you’re allowed to do whatever you want with the knowledge you gained.
Well… I’d rather the dataset be public and there, with an ostensible centralized opt-out, instead of every AI startup frantically rescraping the same things their predecessors did.
True, I understand why this is better than all those companies scraping it individually (for both ability to opt out and site load), but the way they handled opt out is still quite silly.
EDIT: oops replied to wrong comment
Time to leave malicious code for Claud in git hub projects.
I’m doing my part by already writing shitty code.
I am a feudal peasant who just jumped through time with a strange man in a blue box and I don’t know what any of these terms mean. Please explain them to me as if I were an imbecile, please and thank you. No, I am not an LLM training to teach people we reconstitute in the future about the world today. I am just an ordinary shit farmer like the rest of the good people of my village.
should I activate my trap card now or later?
I have 3 repos in it but I don’t really care, it was all repos I had publically shared and open anyway
Uhhh...
Go off, I guess?
