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Unfortunately for the people mad about this, I predict the only thing they will accomplish by pressuring the rsync maintainers, is to discourage everyone else f
by thorum 3mo ago
Unfortunately for the people mad about this, I predict the only thing they will accomplish by pressuring the rsync maintainers, is to discourage everyone else from responsibly disclosing their use of AI. You’re just going to make people disable Claude attribution on their commits to avoid drama.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- potsandpans 3mo ago[flagged]
- matheusmoreira 3mo agoIt makes no sense at all to do that. The only thing that matters is whether the code is good.
- potsandpans 3mo ago[flagged]
- eschaton 3mo agoThat’s not the only thing that matters. The provenance of the code also matters enormously, specifically whether the person contributing it actually has the right to do so. If I contributed code to an Open Source project behind my old employer’s back, that would have been bad, because that code was owned by them and not me, even if I wrote it on my own time using my own equipment, because of the contract I signed with them. If I copied code out of an AGPLv3-licensed codebase and contributed it to a BSD-licensed codebase without telling anyone, that would have been bad, because I did not have the right to change the license on that code to BSD (or change the license on the codebase to which I was contributing to AGPLv3). If you use an LLM to produce code, you may well be doing the latter since an LLM is actually just regurgitating portions of its inputs. This is not a hypothetical scenario; I’ve personally encountered a case of someone using an LLM attempt to contribute code I recognized from a specific Open Source project under one license to another project under a different license, while claiming they “wrote it themselves.” Any project that accepts contributions needs to take liability seriously and manage their risk appropriately.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- matheusmoreira 3mo ago"LLM produced licensed code and person contributed it" is indistinguishable from "person contributed licensed code". The LLM is irrelevant. Result is the same as if they had copy pasted it.
- eschaton 3mo agoYes, exactly. Unfortunately, a large number of people are being told—and here, you can see many who believe it—that the output of an LLM either carries no copyright or is copyright by the one prompting it. In other words, even right here on Hacker News it’s widely believed that LLMs “launder” copyright.
- matheusmoreira 3mo agoIrrelevant either way. It's your name on the commit, and the code either infringes or it does not. Whether an LLM was used is immaterial.
- eschaton 3mo agoNot irrelevant. A large number of people who would not copy and paste code from one project to the another will attempt to contribute the copyright-infringing output of an LLM and not think twice.
- potsandpans 3mo ago[flagged]
- eschaton 3mo agoThe Fortune 10 company that I spent decades at and retired from just a couple years ago noticed this issue immediately and issued a blanket ban on the use of these tools for the company’s own code that to my knowledge has not been rescinded. (They also started developing their own coding-specific LLM, training solely on code they owned, around the same time.) You might consider that there is a very large incentive by the large and public players in this market to promote the idea that this is not true, that they consider themselves large and powerful enough to actually flout the law, and that they plan to use the argument that enforcement will be too damaging to the economy to make their view the “new normal.” This playbook has been run before, by Uber and Lyft, by AirBnB, by Tesla with “FSD,” and so on. It’s very clearly the approach being taken.
- automatic6131 3mo ago"let's go the opposite way" Do you have any popular open source projects? Or are you just an Internet gremlin?
- potsandpans 3mo ago[flagged]
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- elnatro 3mo ago[flagged]
- trwired 3mo agoIs that a bad thing? I mean from the perspective of Anthropic's marketing department sure, but if agents are just another type of tool in developer's tool belt - as I see people recently like to claim - attribution feels kinda weird. In the end it is the developer who is responsible for their commits.
- eli 3mo agoYeah I think it's a bad thing. It's context about how open source code was written that is lost. And I guess maybe there's no such thing as bad press but at least in this cases it doesn't seem like effective marketing for Anthropic.
- matheusmoreira 3mo ago> You’re just going to make people disable Claude attribution on their commits to avoid drama. People should be doing this regardless of drama. No reason to provide free advertising for trillion dollar corporations. Generated-by trailers are only relevant when contributing to third party projects, in that case disclosure is polite.
- julianeon 3mo agoIf Claude is actually good enough to commit to rsync, of course I'm going to look at that and think "it's good enough for my side project too." And (benefit to companies aside) that is info it is useful to know, if it's true.
- amiga386 3mo agoYeah, this is why it's obnoxious and this is why scummy marketers do it. If you don't aggressively turn it off, they leech an implicit endorsement out of you. - Sent from my iPhone
- AlienRobot 3mo agoIndeed. The best endorsement is done explicitly by obnoxious users. I use Linux, btw.
- AnotherGoodName 3mo agoAlto hug the iphone sigoff is hilaripus sonce fhe meyboard is so bad it always comes across asa an ask doe forgivebeds — Sent from my iPhone
- redsocksfan45 3mo ago[dead]
- Aurornis 3mo agoThe value of the Claude attribution is that you can tell at a glance who used AI. I don't care about the advertising angle. We all know Claude by now. I want some indicator that AI was used.
- zzyzxd 3mo agoI never care about AI usage disclosure, because I don't believe that human produced code is necessarily better than AI produced code, unless it's someone I personally know. People need to be responsible for code they commit and push anyways. This has never changed. Whether the code is written by hand, by their cat walking over keyboard, or by AI, is not my concern. A project's code quality can decline for all kinds of reasons. I don't think it's productive to laser-focus on whether it's produced by AI or not. That's a distraction. If a person just want to find excuse to criticize AI, and another person wants to fight back and defend AI, sure, go for it. But that's not how you would want to assess a project's code quality.
- calvinmorrison 3mo agosomething as simple as requiring sign-offs like the DCO maybe relevant to people who care. I do think the driveby stuff may get smaller. People dont need to get stuff upstream. I have lots of patches I am keeping downmstrea and instead have a trigger system when new packages updates drop into debian and i rebuild the package with my patches on top using quill. Other systems like gentoo basically always supported this flow. So - why bother forking or going upstream? maybe its selfish. I think publishing the patches are cool but I feel less of a need to force other people into doing what I want or even writing every possible configuration or solution. I just hack it for me
- delusional 3mo ago> People need to be responsible for code they commit and push anyways. Well the GPL (which rsync is licensed under) says: "This program comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY" so actually nobody is responsible for anything.
- overgard 3mo agoI mean, I don't think commits are the place for tool attributions. I want to know what the change was, I'm not really interested in your tool selection (put that in the PR if it's relevant). It'd be just as irrelevant to see "written on my macbook in neovim"
- mohamedkoubaa 3mo agoI'd be willing to be that an undisclosed LLM disclosure will follow a developer around for the rest of their career
- eschaton 3mo agoThat kind of fraud absolutely should. (I suspect you mean “undisclosed LLM use.”)
- mohamedkoubaa 3mo agoThank you, that's what I meant
- Daishiman 3mo agoI'm willing to be that in two years that's going to be completely irrelevant because the amount of code written by hand will drop to less than 10%.
- eschaton 3mo ago“Don’t get mad at people for doing something unethical or immoral, or they’ll do something unethical or immoral!” Disabling attribution of LLM-generated code is fraud, because you’re saying you wrote the code. Of course that fits right in with the use of an LLM to generate code in the first place, since what it’s actually doing is regurgitating its inputs stripped of any license and copyright notice.
- UebVar 3mo agoI'm very certain that this is not fraud, across multiple legal systems, both roman and common law. In both cases fraud requires a person is deprived of a material good. Neither the defrauded person or their material loss is present in this case. Maybe there is a oddball legal system somewhere in the world where fraud is something entirely different, but i doubt it. "Fraud", just like "Decorator Pattern" is a well established concept and pretty simple concept, even if there are edge cases. This does not fit at all. In academia this is miss-attribution, outside of academia this does not exist. This is clearly not not copyright infringement either as LLMs do not claim copyright, nor could they. Just like the photograph taken by the monkey, or pictures drawn by crows. LLM output is not a creative work either. If this is unethical or immoral is a totaly different question. I really dont think so and I dont think you argue that position well.
- eschaton 3mo agoIt is misrepresentation for gain, that gain does not need to be monetary to be material. For example, it can be reputational. It also is copyright infringement, because what the LLM “generates” are actually portions of its training set, which were covered by copyright. Just passing through an LLM does not remove that copyright from that work.
- UebVar 3mo agoNo, you are wrong. In German and French (roman) legal systems this is a "Vermögensdelikt", and explicitly about material damage and gain. Yes, common law can be more broad (in canada it isn't really, it just also includes service, btw.), and yet it clearly does not meet the definition, as there is a damaged/defraued party and fraudulent/gaining party. We are not talking about somebody usurping somebody else reputation, after all. You misuse a technical term that is well established since antiquity. You do not know what this word means. If you want to argue about semantics, look up the definition. This works especially well for legal terms as laws define them. (That said, IANAL and there are very many different legal systems and I am not ruling out there exists one that is competently different - laws can be changed a will, after all.) It is also obviously not copyright infringement, because this is simply not how copyright works, at all. I cannot and will explain of all copyright here. Instead I will point this out: Every code produced by a human who read copyrighted code would fall under your definition.
- Unit327 3mo agoThis argument gets trotted out every time but it doesn't convince me of anything. Yes, calling things out creates an incentive for people to hide them, but so what? Setting aside the whole AI = bad argument, let's do a metaphor. Tax evasion is bad and unethical and you should call it out where you see it. But wait, that creates an incentive for people to hide it! So I'd better not call it out, it's best to just keep my mouth shut.