Comment by lolinder
6 days ago
> Meanwhile, software developers spot code fragments seemingly lifted from public repositories on Github and lose their shit. What about the licensing? If you’re a lawyer, I defer. But if you’re a software developer playing this card? Cut me a little slack as I ask you to shove this concern up your ass. No profession has demonstrated more contempt for intellectual property.
This kind of guilt-by-association play might be the most common fallacy in internet discourse. None of us are allowed to express outrage at the bulk export of GitHub repos with zero regard for their copyleft status because some members of the software engineering community are large-scale pirates? How is that a reasonable argument to make?
The most obvious problem with this is it's a faulty generalization. Many of us aren't building large-scale piracy sites of any sort. Many of us aren't bulk downloading media of any kind. The author has no clue whether the individual humans making the IP argument against AI are engaged in piracy, so this is an extremely weak way to reject that line of argument.
The second huge problem with this argument is that it assumes that support for IP rights is a blanket yes/no question, which it's obviously not. I can believe fervently that SciHub is a public good and Elsevier is evil and at the same time believe that copyleft licenses placed by a collective of developers on their work should be respected and GitHub was evil to steal their code. Indeed, these two ideas will probably occur together more often than not because they're both founded in the idea that IP law should be used to protect individuals from corporations rather than the other way around.
The author has some valid points, but dismissing this entire class of arguments so flippantly is intellectually lazy.
> The author has some valid points, but dismissing this entire class of arguments so flippantly is intellectually lazy.
Agree 100%. And generally programmers have a poor understanding of the law, especially common law as it applies in America (the country whose legal system most software licenses have been written to integrate with, especially copyleft principles).
American Common Law is an institution and continuity of practice dating back centuries. Everything written by jurists within that tradition, while highly technical, is nonetheless targeted at human readers who are expected to apply common sense and good faith in reading. Where programmers declare something in law insufficiently specified or technically a loophole, the answer is largely: this was written for humans to interpret using human reason, not for computers to compile using limited, literal algorithms.
Codes of law are not computer code and do not behave like computer code.
And following the latest AI boom, here is what the bust will look like:
1. Corporations and the state use AI models and tools in a collective attempt to obfuscate, diffuse, and avoid accountability. This responsibility two-step is happening now.
2. When bad things happen (e.g. a self-driving car kills someone, predictive algorithms result in discriminatory policy, vibe coding results in data leaks and/or cyberattacks), there will be litigation that follows the bad things.
3. The judges overseeing the litigation will not accept that AI has somehow magically diffused and obfuscated all liability out of existence. They will look at the parties at hand, look at relevant precedents, pick out accountable humans, and fine them or---if the bad is bad enough---throw them in cages.
4. Other companies will then look at the fines and the caged humans, and will roll back their AI tools in a panic while they re-discover the humans they need to make accountable, and in so doing fill those humans back in on all the details they pawned off on AI tools.
The AI tools will survive, but in a role that is circumscribed by human accountability. This is how common law has worked for centuries. Most of the strange technicalities of our legal system are in fact immune reactions to attempts made by humans across the centuries to avoid accountability or exploit the system. The law may not be fast, but it will grow an immune response to AI tools and life will go on.
I agreed with this comment until the second half which is just one scenario - one that is contingent on many things happening in specific ways.
In other words: this will probably all end in tears.
It's not just "guilt-by-association". It is a much worse reactionary general argument. It can be applied to any kind of moral problem to preserve the status quo.
If this was a legitimate moral argument, we'd never make any social progress.
That whole section seems so out of place. I don't know why he thinks "The median dev thinks Star Wars and Daft Punk are a public commons" either. I don't know why he thinks the entire software engineering profession is about enabling piracy. I suspect Netflix has more software engineers doing the opposite than every piracy service employs combined.
It's not just lazy, it's nonsense. The author is conflating piracy with plagiarism, even though the two are completely different issues.
Plagiarism is taking somebody else's work and claiming that you yourself created it. It is a form of deception, depriving another of credit while selling their accomplishments as your own.
Piracy on the other hand is the violation of a person's monopoly rights on distributing certain works. This may damage said person's livelihood, but the authorship remains clear.
I’m a free software developer and have been for over 25 years. I’ve worked at many of the usual places too and I enjoy and appreciate the different licenses used for software.
I’m also a filmmaker and married to a visual artist.
I don’t touch this stuff at all. It’s all AI slop to me. I don’t want to see it, I don’t want to work with it or use it.
Some people make these kinds of claims for ethical reasons, I get it. But be careful to not confuse one’s ethics with the current state of capability, which changes rapidly. Most people have a tendency to rationalize, and we have to constantly battle it.
Without knowing the commenter above, I’ll say this: don’t assume an individual boycott is necessarily effective. If one is motivated by ethics, I think it is morally required to find effective ways to engage to shape and nudge the future. It is important to know what you’re fighting for (and against). IP protection? Human dignity through work? Agency to effect one’s life? Other aspects? All are important.
I run a music community that’s been around for 16 years and many users are asking me what they can do to avoid AI in their lives and I’m going to start building tools to help.
Many of the people pushing for a lot of AI stuff are the same people who have attached their name to a combination of NFTs, Blockchain, cryptocurrency, Web3 and other things I consider to be grifts/scams.
The term “AI” is already meaningless. So let’s be clear: Generative AI (GenAI) is what worries many people including a number of prominent artists.
This makes me feel like there’s work to be done if we want open source/art/the internet as we know it to remain and be available to us in the future.
It drives me a little crazy to see Mozilla adding AI to Firefox instead of yelling about it at every opportunity. Do we need to save them too?
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"Morally required to ... engage" with technologies that one disagrees with sounds fairly easily debunk-able to me. Everyone does what they can live with - being up close and personal, in empathy with humans who are negatively effected by a given technology, they can choose to do what they want.
Who knows, we might find out in a month that this shit we're doing is really unsafe and is a really bad idea, and doesn't even work ultimately for what we'd use it for. LLMs already lie and blackmail.
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> and at the same time believe that copyleft licenses placed by a collective of developers on their work should be respected and GitHub was evil to steal their code.
I think I missed a story? Is GitHub somehow stealing my code if I publish it there under GPL or similar? Or did they steal some specific bit of code in the past?
Copilot was trained on all public code on GitHub and in the early days it could be made to actually vomit code that was identical to its training data. They've added some safeguards to protect against the latter, but a lot of people are still sore at the idea that Copilot trained on the data in the first place.
if your code is on Github it was/is being used as training data
> None of us are allowed to express outrage at the bulk export of GitHub repos with zero regard for their copyleft status because some members of the software engineering community are large-scale pirates?
I don't think that is an accurate representation of the tech community. On the other hand, I do think TFA is making a reasonable statistical representation of the tech community (rather than a "guilt-by-association" play) which could be rephrased as:
The overriding ethos in HN and tech communities has clearly been on the "information wants to be free" side. See: the widespread support of open source and, as your comment itself mentions, copyleft. Copyleft, in particular, is famously based on a subversion of intellectual property (cf "judo throw") to achieve an "information wants to be free" philosophy.
Unsurprisingly, this has also manifested countless times as condoning media piracy. Even today a very common sentiment is, "oh there are too many streaming services, where's my pirate hat yarrrr!"
Conversely, comments opposing media piracy are a vanishingly tiny, often downvoted, minority. As such, statistically speaking, TFA's evaluation of our communities seems to be spot on.
And, now the same communities are in an uproar when their information "wants to be free". The irony is definitely rich.
First, I don't agree that what you just said is at all reflective of what TFA actually wrote. Yours makes it about statistics not individuals. Statistical groups don't have an ass to shove anything up, so TFA pretty clearly was imagining specific people who hold a conflicting belief.
And for that reason, I think your version exposes the flaw even more thoroughly: you can't reasonably merge a data set of stats on people's opinions on AI with a data set of stats on people's opinions on IP in the way that you're proposing.
To throw out random numbers as an example of the flaw: If 55% of people on HN believe that IP protection for media should not exist and 55% believe that GitHub stole code, it's entirely possible that TFA's condemnation only applies to 10% of the total HN population that holds the supposedly conflicting belief even though HN "statistically" believes both things.
And that's before we get into the question of whether there's actually a conflict (there's not) and the question of whether anyone is accurately measuring the sentiment of the median HN user by dropping into various threads populated by what are often totally disjoint sets of users.
Of course, it's not possible to strictly represent a large population with a single characteristic. But then it is also absolutely accurate to call the USA a capitalistic country even though there is a very diverse slate of political and economic beliefs represented in the population.
Now, you could say the capitalism is a function of the policies enacted by the country, which aren't a thing for online forums. But these policies are a reflection of the majority votes of the population, and votes are a thing on forums. Even a casual observation, starting from the earliest Slashdot days to modern social media, shows that the most highly upvoted and least contested opinions align with the "information wants to be free" philosophy.
To get a bit meta, you can think of this rhetoric along the lines of the following pattern which is common on social media:
Hacker News: "All software is glorified CRUD boilerplate! You are not a special snowflake! Stop cosplaying Google!"
Also Hacker News: "AI is only good for mindless boilerplate! It's absolutely useless for any novel software! AI boosters are only out to scam you!"
The sentiment is obviously not uniform and is shifting over time, even in this very thread... but it does ring true!
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