Comment by menaerus
3 days ago
Sorry, this is just ridicilous and shows how people fragile really are. This whole topic and whole MR as well.
I am routinely looking into the folly implementation, sometimes into the libstdc++, sometimes into libc++, sometimes into boost or abseil etc. to find inspiration for problems that I tackle in other codebases. By the same standards, this should also be plagiarism, no? I manufacture new ideas by compiling existing knowledge from elsewhere. Literally every engineer in the world does the same. Why is AI any different?
Perhaps because the AI assigned copyright in the files to the author of the library it copied from and the person prompting it told it to look at that library. Without even getting into the comedy AI generated apologia to go with it which makes it look worse rather than better.
From a pragmatic viewpoint as an engineer you assign the IP you create over to the company you work for so plagarism has real world potential to lose you your job at best. There's a difference between taking inspiration from something unrelated "oh this is a neat algorithmic approach to solving this class of problems" to "I need to implement this specific feature and it exists in this library so I'll lift it nearly verbatim".
Can you give an example what exactly was copied? I ask because I took a look into MR and original repo, and the conclusion is that the tool only copy-pasted the copyright header but not the code. So I am still wondering - what's wrong with that (it's a silly mistake even a human can make), and where is the copyright infringement everyone is talking about?
> copy-past[ing] the copyright header but not the code [is] a silly mistake even a human can make
Do you mind showing me some examples of that? That seems so implausible to me
Just for reference, here's another example of AI adding phantom contributors and the human just ignoring it or not even noticing: https://github.com/auth0/nextjs-auth0/issues/2432
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None of that matters. The header is there, in writing, and discussed in the PR. It is acknowledged by both parties and the author gives a clumsy response for its existence. The PR is simply tainted by this alone, not to mention other pain points.
You may not consider this problematic. But maintainers of this project sure do, given this was one of the immediate concerns of theirs.
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Yes?
That is why some people are forbidden to contribute to projects if their eyes have read projects with incompatible licenses, in case people go to copyright court.
Yes what? Both oxcaml and ocaml have compatible LGPL licenses so I didn't get your argument.
But even if that hadn't been the case, what exactly would be the problem? Are you saying that I cannot learn from a copyrighted book written by some respected and known author, and then apply that knowledge elsewhere because I would be risking to be sued for copyright infringement?
The wider point is that copyright headers are a very important detail and that a) the AI got it wrong b) you did not notice c) you have not taken on board the fact that it is important despite being told several times and have dismissed the issue as unimportant
Which raises the question how many other important incorrect details are buried in the 13k lines of code that you are unaware of and unable to recognise the significance of? And how much mantainer time would you waste being dismissive of the issues?
People have taken the copyright header as indicative of wider problems in the code.
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"Yes what? Both oxcaml and ocaml have compatible LGPL licenses so I didn't get your argument."
LGPL is a license for distribution, the copyright of the original authors is retained (unless signed away in a contribution agreement, usually to an organization).
"Are you saying that I cannot learn from a copyrighted book written by some respected and known author, and then apply that knowledge elsewhere because I would be risking to be sued for copyright infringement?"
This was not the case here, so not sure how that is related in any way?
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Depends on the license of the original material, which is why they tend to have a list of allowed use cases for copying content.
Naturally there are very flexible ones, very draconian ones, and those in the middle.
Most people get away with them, because it isn't like everyone is taking others to copyright court sessions every single day, unless there are millions at play.