We now note that that we do not waive our attribution requirements for Spritely Goblins, which are present in Apache v2 (and for that matter, CC BY, CC BY-SA, and most FOSS licenses) https://codeberg.org/spritely/goblins/pulls/998/files
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I expect the world looks very different from where you’re sitting than from where I am. Every time I look at my (FOSS-heavy) fedi feed, I’m struck by the contrast between the AI pessimism & skepticism here versus everywhere else I look.
LLMs have become part of everyday life for vast swaths of ordinary people. Skilled software developers routinely use them to produce code that’s far from slop. And probably most importantly, the AI industry is widely viewed as the most significant driver of U.S. economic growth and competitive advantage going right now.
All of those things surely sound negative to you, but they’re descriptively true. And against that backdrop, I see very little possibility that US courts will cut OpenAI et al off at the knees, even though we’ll surely see adverse rulings in cases of obvious misappropriation (Anthropic’s trove of pirated books, Sora reproducing entire songs from its training data).
With genuine respect to @copiesofcopies (and also to @bkuhn
please consider the statement "vape pens have become part of everyday life for vast swaths of ordinary people."The Overton Window is an observation of an aggregate social phenomenon. IT WAS NOT PROSCRIBED AS A SOCIAL VALUE. (Moreover it is trivially weaponized by authoritarians, not-coincidentally aligned with the technologies you defend here.)
I genuinely believe that Jeffrey Dahmer deserved a vigorous criminal defense. But I hope you see that arguments like the ones you just proposed make non-lawyers think of lawyers as amoral.
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@bkuhn @copiesofcopies
I think we should be pushing back on these things. I'm worried and dissappointed that FOSS leadership isn't. I'm really worried we might never recover from the damage that's already been done.@cwebber amen
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With genuine respect to @copiesofcopies (and also to @bkuhn
please consider the statement "vape pens have become part of everyday life for vast swaths of ordinary people."The Overton Window is an observation of an aggregate social phenomenon. IT WAS NOT PROSCRIBED AS A SOCIAL VALUE. (Moreover it is trivially weaponized by authoritarians, not-coincidentally aligned with the technologies you defend here.)
I genuinely believe that Jeffrey Dahmer deserved a vigorous criminal defense. But I hope you see that arguments like the ones you just proposed make non-lawyers think of lawyers as amoral.
Think what you like about lawyers. My point was simply that courts tend to avoid interpreting the law in a way that destroys industries or massively unsettles the development of useful technology, when they have another option. They’ll probably do that here, not least because the caselaw (IMO) generally supports fair use.
As for whether LLMs are a net social harm, judges will generally take the view that that’s for congress to decide and legislate upon, rather than a matter for courts to decide.
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@bkuhn @copiesofcopies
I think we should be pushing back on these things. I'm worried and dissappointed that FOSS leadership isn't. I'm really worried we might never recover from the damage that's already been done.@cwebber @bkuhn @copiesofcopies I agree but believe that using #LLM tech for X is not acceptable almost whatever X is (certainly for finding problems is not excusable as a category).
Using them at the very least means normalising their use, first for yourself, then others and makes it much harder to say what is and isn't ok.
Anything that helps this tech is helping those behind it, techno fascism (ultimately genocide) climate Armageddon (also genocide) and numerous other widespread harms.
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We are more in agreement than you realize:
I guess now is a good as time as any to “come out”: I'm using #Anthropic's #Claude on a regular basis to help me figure out what types of policies we should set for reasonable & ethical use of #LLMGenAI in #FOSS, & also to actually improve FOSS codebases.
I believe it is reasonable to use proprietary technologies as long as our eyes remain on the prize of defeating those technologies.
@cwebber, I suspect, doesn't agree.
@bkuhn @copiesofcopies @cwebber it's ok, we can get by without you
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Think what you like about lawyers. My point was simply that courts tend to avoid interpreting the law in a way that destroys industries or massively unsettles the development of useful technology, when they have another option. They’ll probably do that here, not least because the caselaw (IMO) generally supports fair use.
As for whether LLMs are a net social harm, judges will generally take the view that that’s for congress to decide and legislate upon, rather than a matter for courts to decide.
@copiesofcopies You have amplified your assertion that courts defend the profitable status quo without regard to social cost.
Which was the critique I made, which I consider morally damning to the entire system.
(Also, since we are lawyering, read what I wrote closely. I was not pouring scorn on lawyers, I was pouring scorn on your argument.)
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@bkuhn @copiesofcopies
I think we should be pushing back on these things. I'm worried and dissappointed that FOSS leadership isn't. I'm really worried we might never recover from the damage that's already been done.@cwebber Is this whole free software endeavor about producing more and faster, or is it about empowering people and fostering collectives?
This is the question those LLMs companies have forced us to answer, thereby breaking the alignment that existed so far between industry & “open source” on one hand, and people focusing and user freedom and autonomy.
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But FOSS' success up until this point has shown the exact opposite.
FOSS was bootstrapped by using proprietary software every single day for more than a decade, at least.
Most FOSS developers regularly used proprietary technologies daily for their work for the entirety of FOSS' history.
Plus, what @copiesofcopies said:
https://fedi.copyleft.org/@copiesofcopies@social.coop/117457049015278425Cc: @cwebber
#LLMGenAI #LLM #AI #FOSS #SoftwareFreedom #OpenSource #FreeSoftware
And we shed them as soon as it became practical to do so.
You will never find it practical to shed Claude, because:
1. you will never be able to afford the necessary hardware to do so (Moore's law is dead),
2. you will never obtain an adequate corpus of training data (because you, lacking billions of dollars, are actually subject to copyright), and
3. you will be prohibited by law to do so (because compliance with AI regulations costs billions).
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And we shed them as soon as it became practical to do so.
You will never find it practical to shed Claude, because:
1. you will never be able to afford the necessary hardware to do so (Moore's law is dead),
2. you will never obtain an adequate corpus of training data (because you, lacking billions of dollars, are actually subject to copyright), and
3. you will be prohibited by law to do so (because compliance with AI regulations costs billions).
As for FOSS' success, this wave of LLM infiltration has made it abundantly clear that much of FOSS' success is thanks to corporate sponsorship, in exchange for influence, and now they've decided to exercise that influence by enticing and/or coercing FOSS maintainers into destroying their own projects.
I am no longer confident in FOSS' survival.
And here you are, cheering its demise.
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@wwahammy wrote:
> “If that was the end of it, AI would be relatively popular.”*That* part is not new. Every technology invented in our lifetimes has been overhyped, overdeployed, & overused to its illogical conclusion. While that's happening ∃ (fortunately) some folks along the way who will say the Emperor is only half-dressed.
It's years later that people just quietly pretend they weren't taken in by the foolishness of the new and shiny.
Think “blockchain”!
@bkuhn while we have seen hype cycles, the AI bubble is something fundamentally different. The pessimism and anger is based on a lot more than that it gets shoved into everything.
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@bkuhn @copiesofcopies While I appreciate being forthcoming, you are correct, I don't agree with feeding the torment nexus to defeat the torment nexus. I think using Claude is just helping them build more torment nexus, while normalize a situation that puts us in a legally dubious situation where we were previously relatively legally strong, and eroding community trust and shared understanding in the process.
@cwebber @bkuhn @copiesofcopies
IMO even local models are currently unacceptable when they have been trained on unknown data, by untrustworthy people, using far more resource than any community will ever have access to, with a special privilege to ignore all IP considerations when it comes to accessing and storing their training set and using all web data that no one ever agreed to be used in such a way.
Training anything that way should still be regarded as "the largest ongoing intellectual property and labor theft" and ethically regarded as if in biology someone wanted to clone a human, but if someone creates a local model that fits on world-accessible consumer hardware (not just affordable to first world countries), trained on known data explicitly licensed for reuse (or public domain) maybe it will be time to look at the implications on society (in learning, community building, work for a start...) and collectively and democratically decide if it is worth putting resources in…
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We are more in agreement than you realize:
I guess now is a good as time as any to “come out”: I'm using #Anthropic's #Claude on a regular basis to help me figure out what types of policies we should set for reasonable & ethical use of #LLMGenAI in #FOSS, & also to actually improve FOSS codebases.
I believe it is reasonable to use proprietary technologies as long as our eyes remain on the prize of defeating those technologies.
@cwebber, I suspect, doesn't agree.
@bkuhn@fedi.copyleft.org @copiesofcopies@social.coop @cwebber@social.coop coming out of the closet as brain capacity losing LMAOO
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And we shed them as soon as it became practical to do so.
You will never find it practical to shed Claude, because:
1. you will never be able to afford the necessary hardware to do so (Moore's law is dead),
2. you will never obtain an adequate corpus of training data (because you, lacking billions of dollars, are actually subject to copyright), and
3. you will be prohibited by law to do so (because compliance with AI regulations costs billions).
@argv_minus_one @bkuhn @twipped @cwebber @copiesofcopies
“You will never be able to afford the hardware to do so” I know people running a model equivalent to top end Claude from ~6 months ago on €3.5k hardware. Not cheap, not awful.
2/3 I would almost certainly start from someone else’s model release
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@argv_minus_one @bkuhn @twipped @cwebber @copiesofcopies
“You will never be able to afford the hardware to do so” I know people running a model equivalent to top end Claude from ~6 months ago on €3.5k hardware. Not cheap, not awful.
2/3 I would almost certainly start from someone else’s model release
Did they *train* the model on that hardware? The model has to come from somewhere, and last I heard, that “somewhere” was billion-dollar data centers.
Also, how the heck did they get that kind of hardware for only €3.5k in the middle of the chipocalypse? I'd probably have to pay that much just to assemble a competent gaming PC.
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@cwebber Is this whole free software endeavor about producing more and faster, or is it about empowering people and fostering collectives?
This is the question those LLMs companies have forced us to answer, thereby breaking the alignment that existed so far between industry & “open source” on one hand, and people focusing and user freedom and autonomy.
@civodul @cwebber @copiesofcopies @bkuhn
Surely, this is one of the primary reasons genAI was released.
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@wwahammy makes a really good point, though. I think *outside of tech*, the response to LLM-gen-AI is very negative as companies inappropriately apply it to non-tech fields. At least that's what I see anecdotally with folks who don't work in tech.
The one exception I've seen is both human doctors & veterinarians — all of whom seem to be thrilled to let #LLMGenAI chart for them.
I give our vet permission to record the session but not my human doctor, FWIW.
@bkuhn @wwahammy @copiesofcopies @cwebber I appreciate this thread and everyone’s thoughts, just to let y’all know.
The mention of doctors reminds me of this piece, which I’ve been thinking about a lot this week: https://www.medpagetoday.com/opinion/second-opinions/122202
My own personal doctor may be an exception. She has sought a unique model that allows her to focus on care. I’m fairly sure she doesn’t like the robots.
I suspect many docs are enthusiastic re: robots because they think it can help free them for care.
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We are more in agreement than you realize:
I guess now is a good as time as any to “come out”: I'm using #Anthropic's #Claude on a regular basis to help me figure out what types of policies we should set for reasonable & ethical use of #LLMGenAI in #FOSS, & also to actually improve FOSS codebases.
I believe it is reasonable to use proprietary technologies as long as our eyes remain on the prize of defeating those technologies.
@cwebber, I suspect, doesn't agree.
@bkuhn
Everyone else has been nice and informative to you, so let me just add that you suck, your policies suck and you deserve the worst! Hope that helps. -
We are more in agreement than you realize:
I guess now is a good as time as any to “come out”: I'm using #Anthropic's #Claude on a regular basis to help me figure out what types of policies we should set for reasonable & ethical use of #LLMGenAI in #FOSS, & also to actually improve FOSS codebases.
I believe it is reasonable to use proprietary technologies as long as our eyes remain on the prize of defeating those technologies.
@cwebber, I suspect, doesn't agree.
@bkuhn @copiesofcopies gosh it's like you actually know you're doing something wrong, prompting you to appropriate the language of queer liberation because you need to be sneaky about TRUSTING LLM SLUDGE
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Did they *train* the model on that hardware? The model has to come from somewhere, and last I heard, that “somewhere” was billion-dollar data centers.
Also, how the heck did they get that kind of hardware for only €3.5k in the middle of the chipocalypse? I'd probably have to pay that much just to assemble a competent gaming PC.
@argv_minus_one @bkuhn @copiesofcopies @cwebber @twipped No, they didn’t train it. I personally do not currently feel a need to train something.
As for the hardware:
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We are more in agreement than you realize:
I guess now is a good as time as any to “come out”: I'm using #Anthropic's #Claude on a regular basis to help me figure out what types of policies we should set for reasonable & ethical use of #LLMGenAI in #FOSS, & also to actually improve FOSS codebases.
I believe it is reasonable to use proprietary technologies as long as our eyes remain on the prize of defeating those technologies.
@cwebber, I suspect, doesn't agree.
@bkuhn Respect for being open about it here, where it is intensely unpopular.
I don’t care about “proprietary.” What about intellectual property theft? What about damage to the environment? What about diversion of SO much resources away from things that help people and into things that help investors?
Every time someone uses it, especially as a technology leader who knows better than most, they signal that all those trade-offs are acceptable for the trivial, tepid benefit of writing bland text faster. And the benefit of firing people. And the benefit of wealth aggregation.
In my position, I have the financial means and the knowledge to fight against it. If those of us who CAN choose not to use it, instead choose to support it, how can we expect anyone else to make the pragmatic, better-for-everyone choice?
Nobody gets to hide behind “this is my personal choice and nobody should tell me otherwise.” If a person set their trash on fire in their yard in order to dispose of it, their personal preference doesn’t matter. That’s not ok. Burning fossil fuels to power the most catastrophically inefficient technology ever made is not a personal choice. Climate change affects generations to come, not just people alive today. AI today accelerates climate change. It’s super simple and absolutely directly causal.
