Comment by TZubiri
5 months ago
Ok sure, in the alternative, here's the argument:
The AI was trained with the code, so the complete rewrite is tainted and not a clean room. I can't believe this would need spelling out.
5 months ago
Ok sure, in the alternative, here's the argument:
The AI was trained with the code, so the complete rewrite is tainted and not a clean room. I can't believe this would need spelling out.
"Tainted rewrite" isn't a legal concept either. You have to prove (on balance of probabilities - more likely than not) that the defendant made an unauthorized copy, made an unauthorized derivative work, etc. Clean-room rewriting is a defense strategy, because if the programmer never saw the original work, they couldn't possibly have made a derivative. But even without that, you still have to prove they did. It's not an offence to just not be able to prove you didn't break the law.
If you wanted to do the clean-room approach for something like chardet in a less controversial way, instead of having the AI do all the work couldn’t the AI generate the spec and then a human (with no exposure to the original code) do an initial implementation based on the spec?
As other pointed out, the notion of "clean room" rewrites is to make a particularly strong case of non-infringement. It doesn't mean that anything other than a clean room implementation is an infringement.
This is interesting and I'm not sure what to make of it. Devil's advocate: the person operating the AI also was "trained with the code," is that materially different from them writing it by hand vs. assisted by an LLM? Honestly asking, I hadn't considered this angle before.
If you worked at Microsoft and had access to the Windows source code you probably should not be contributing to WINE or similar projects as there would be legal risk.
So for this case, not much different legally. Of course there is the practical difference just like there is between me seeing you with my own eyes and me taking a picture of you.
"Training" an LLM ist not the same as training a human being. It a metaphor. Its confusing the save icon with an actual floppy disk.
I can say I "trained" my printer to print copyrighted material by feeding it bits but that that would be pure sophism.
Problem is that law hasn't really caught up the our brave new AI future yet so lots of decisions are up in the air. Plus governments incentivized to look the other way regarding copyright abuses when it comes to AI as they think that having competitive AI is of strategic importance.
> "Training" an LLM ist not the same as training a human being. It a metaphor. Its confusing the save icon with an actual floppy disk.
Maybe? But the design of the floppy disk is for data storage and retrieval per se. It can't give you your bits in a novel order like an LLM does (by design). From what I can tell in this case, the output is significantly differentiated from the source code.
Reread the parent: clean room is not required.
Oh, got it.
Parent was making a claim about clean room not being required, without making claims about whether LLM coding is or isn't clean room.