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points by semiquaver 1 day ago | 0 comments
Yeah, it does matter. This:

  > I think technically such a model should abide by the licence of the inputs
is vibes baloney.
[–] whizzter 15 hours ago
Maybe maybe not, something interesting popped up reading the currently top-of-HN article on the GHC policy is that OpenJDK currently forbids AI contributions.

From the page, https://openjdk.org/legal/ai

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What are the intellectual-property risks of using generative AI tools?

The Oracle Contributor Agreement (OCA) requires that a contributor own the intellectual property rights in each contribution and be able to grant those rights to Oracle, without restriction. Most generative AI tools, however, are trained on copyrighted and licensed content, and their output can include content that infringes those copyrights and licenses, so contributing such content would violate the OCA. Whether a user of a generative AI tool has IP rights in content generated by the tool is the subject of active litigation.

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But they're just Oracle lawyers so it's baloney right?

[–] semiquaver 12 hours ago
You’re confusing two very different things. One is Oracle being careful with the provenance of IP that they let allow into their copyrighted codebase. That’s prudent in the face of real legal uncertainty over the issue. The other is

  > technically such a model should abide by the licence of the inputs, hence all models would probably be GPL
so whether a the weights file of a machine learning model itself can “be” GPL as a result of including GPL content in its training corpus.

That question is a category error because machine learning weights are not copyrightable at all, being mere lists of numbers and facts, the result of a statistical process and not a human creative hand, very much ineligible for copyright protection. They would be protected by trade secret law only, like the coke recipe.

So the GPL, which operates entirely within the domain of copyright law, cannot possibly virally spread from a licensed source code file to a machine learning model which trained on it. That would be a cross species jump. Certainly there could be other legal consequences but in no universe is someone going to jump out and yell gotcha and force OpenAI to personally hand deliver the newly GPLed weights for their frontier model to RMS.

[–] whizzter 2 hours ago
Right, I can agree to a certaint extent that the model itself can be equated to storage.

I think you misjudged my intent with that initial comment, it was mostly that I'd be feeling easier about AI usage if I knew the models WEREN'T trained on GPL'ed code, people producing GPL'ed software has historically been quite profilic in certain areas and the odds of copyrightable parts of GPL'ed code not showing up in AI code managing certain fileformats is definetly nonzero.

Ie, I'd be happier using Claude Code-nogpl, I'd be fine with adding BSD,etc copyright notices if given provenance information from the model, being in the GPL minefield because they don't really seem to track inputs is another.