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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∃ **so many** cases pending! It seems to me we can't guess the outcome at this point with reliability beyond like a 1-to-100 (or more) chance against the field.
Also, keep in mind the way most software developers use LLM-gen-AI now is to modify a work in front of them: `git clone` something, then work with the #LLMGenAI to modify it. I don't see how a fair use defense will allow those changes to dodge license requirements.
Also, FOSS licenses are contracts, too.
Cc: @cwebber
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).
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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).
produce code that's far from slop
i would say perhaps code that doesn't look like slop or doesn't look sloppy, but if it is generated by an LLM, it is slop, and i think it is really important not to cede that point regardless of how impressive the output appears and even regardless of whether it happens to be good or correct in a particular instance. i will say more if you want, but my interpretation is based on what i've heard and read from linguistics professor emily bender (who is here on fedi too)
(in terms of the world looking different here than outside, i am probably proving your point and you might unfortunately be right though, but i also know that the media is pushing false and inflated narratives including about the prevalence of use, capabilities, and sentiments of users. it's not all false and many of us know people who are either true believers or deep down the pit, but i suspect it's not as widespread as we're being made to believe or to extrapolate based on a handful of personal anecdotes.)
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produce code that's far from slop
i would say perhaps code that doesn't look like slop or doesn't look sloppy, but if it is generated by an LLM, it is slop, and i think it is really important not to cede that point regardless of how impressive the output appears and even regardless of whether it happens to be good or correct in a particular instance. i will say more if you want, but my interpretation is based on what i've heard and read from linguistics professor emily bender (who is here on fedi too)
(in terms of the world looking different here than outside, i am probably proving your point and you might unfortunately be right though, but i also know that the media is pushing false and inflated narratives including about the prevalence of use, capabilities, and sentiments of users. it's not all false and many of us know people who are either true believers or deep down the pit, but i suspect it's not as widespread as we're being made to believe or to extrapolate based on a handful of personal anecdotes.)
@tmw it’s always seemed to me that “slop” was a judgment about the quality of output. If it’s simply a value judgment about the source, i.e. code produced by an LLM is bad and “slop” and code produced by a human being is “not slop,” then I guess I’m not very interested in that conversation.
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The legislative environment will *never* be equitable for #FOSS under capitalism (& as such, it's never *been* equitable).
IMO, the advent of LLM-gen-AI is “just another day at the office” b/c I've spent ≈30yrs trying to get Big Tech to follow #copyleft requirements. They refuse at their whim.
Those refusals increased steadily (& occasionally exponentially, like now) since #GPLv2's release.
Meet the new infringer — same as the old infringer.
Cc: @copiesofcopies
@bkuhn @copiesofcopies Of course the legislative environment has *always* been tailored to proprietary software. Without copyright (and related intellectual restrictions laws), we wouldn't have proprietary software!
What I mean is that Microsoft stepped in and set the tone with assumptions of "oh well it's okay to step all over and ignore the terms of the commons when we ingest them into the model, we would be upset if this happened to our stuff though"... for Microsoft, semi theoretical, but Disney and the record industries have actually done this: they're using AI for some projects, but also suing that their copyrights have been violated.
Copyright for me but not for thee type stuff.
(Which I know we agree about as a concern in this landscape.)
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@tmw it’s always seemed to me that “slop” was a judgment about the quality of output. If it’s simply a value judgment about the source, i.e. code produced by an LLM is bad and “slop” and code produced by a human being is “not slop,” then I guess I’m not very interested in that conversation.
@copiesofcopies no, it is not a value judgment, but it is similar to a debate over whether generative AI art is art. it's about the relationship between an underlying meaning/perspective and a produced output; LLMs simply do not have it. "slop" also encodes the types of issues and discrepancies that simply don't happen from sloppy human-produced code and art and that are, by design, tricky for humans to detect.
if an individual output at face value is all that matters, then no, this is not interesting. "slop" is associated with a context. the myth is that serious people can pretend there is no context and have an eye for the best outputs in a vaccuum. this is anything but serious.
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Yes, I do think copyleft is still going to be a tool that helps us to good outcomes in the age of LLM-gen-AI. I'm working on it.
Re: #Apache [sic] Software License: another reason to avoid it is that it's appropriated the name of North American native peoples.
Why anyone wants to use the #FOSS license equivalent of the “Washington Redskins” in 2026 is beyond me, especially when so many other licensing options abound.
Cc: @cwebber @trashheap
@bkuhn @joeyh @cwebber @trashheap
The web server was not written in one go as a whole.
It was put together patch by patch
It was therefore A Patchy Server.Being conscious of assorted things does not entirely rule out occasional flashes of humour, accretions of language, and mnemonic conveniences.
I hope.
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@bkuhn @joeyh @cwebber @trashheap
The web server was not written in one go as a whole.
It was put together patch by patch
It was therefore A Patchy Server.Being conscious of assorted things does not entirely rule out occasional flashes of humour, accretions of language, and mnemonic conveniences.
I hope.
@bkuhn @joeyh @cwebber @trashheap
(I'm told)
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Yes, I do think copyleft is still going to be a tool that helps us to good outcomes in the age of LLM-gen-AI. I'm working on it.
Re: #Apache [sic] Software License: another reason to avoid it is that it's appropriated the name of North American native peoples.
Why anyone wants to use the #FOSS license equivalent of the “Washington Redskins” in 2026 is beyond me, especially when so many other licensing options abound.
Cc: @cwebber @trashheap
@bkuhn @joeyh @trashheap The name bothers me immensely. I'm using AFLv2 for our projects mainly because it's the most studied license of its approximate properties. But at one point I registered patchable.org because I was planning on making a fork of the license calling it the Patchable Public License, mostly just being a rename, to force the issue. However I was told that the Apache Foundation would be changing the name any day now and so I didn't continue with that effort. Years later, they still haven't.
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Btw I have heard at least one prominent FOSS person (I'm choosing to not fill their notifications here by identifying them) that nobody cares about attribution requirements (and particularly not enforcing them). But to me, attribution is what I care about MORE than any other licensing requirements, more than copyleft "share-alike" style provisions, etc.
If you feel similarly, it would be good to hear on this thread. Perhaps even copying a similar notice into your project is a good idea.
@cwebber @LunaDragofelis it annoys me that ppl would consider a lack of enforcement to be a lack of interest;
i dont want to enforce them because the normal means to do so is via state violence and i might like attribution but im not about to hurt someone over it.
i would however say, leave an issue or message the guy or things like that, about not attributing, generally tell everyone "hey they didnt make that" which ideally? would get out everywhere and no one would really beleive then saying "i made this"
from a certain perspective i dont subscribe too; this could be considered a kind of "enforcement" i suppose,
tbh alot of instances of it are also a mistake somewhat, like not clicking fork or whatever so then it just doesnt include where it came from ..
anyway its not a copyright thing; its just basic courtesy really -- like pirates usually dont even claim they made the thing.
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@cwebber What if the attribution is then done to every piece of training data? That's not impossible if the training data is known, but will it be acceptable?
.. no the collection of training data is a problem because of the massive amount of strain it places on infrastructure set for the commons that makes it impossible for anyone else to access, and becuase its appropriating the commons then selling it back to you,
which still has nothing to do w copyright.
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@cwebber i'm an artist/academic/educator and i consider making foss to be a part of my practice. any kind of attribution helps me to make the case that my work has "impact" which in turn helps me to keep my job. a lot of foss projects that are related to academia in some way will request that papers resulting from research that makes use of the project include an actual bibliographical citation—i assume for similar reasons. tbh i think this prominent foss person is full of it
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.. no the collection of training data is a problem because of the massive amount of strain it places on infrastructure set for the commons that makes it impossible for anyone else to access, and becuase its appropriating the commons then selling it back to you,
which still has nothing to do w copyright.
@Li @cwebber Not all the training data is putting strain. There are training datasets that were crawled respecting robots.txt.
I am most interested in the scenario when there is a training dataset (crawled once without hitting servers repeatedly), and used for open weight model.
Open data+weight still does not address attribution. That's why my question.
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@cwebber @LunaDragofelis it annoys me that ppl would consider a lack of enforcement to be a lack of interest;
i dont want to enforce them because the normal means to do so is via state violence and i might like attribution but im not about to hurt someone over it.
i would however say, leave an issue or message the guy or things like that, about not attributing, generally tell everyone "hey they didnt make that" which ideally? would get out everywhere and no one would really beleive then saying "i made this"
from a certain perspective i dont subscribe too; this could be considered a kind of "enforcement" i suppose,
tbh alot of instances of it are also a mistake somewhat, like not clicking fork or whatever so then it just doesnt include where it came from ..
anyway its not a copyright thing; its just basic courtesy really -- like pirates usually dont even claim they made the thing.
@Li @cwebber @LunaDragofelis the contrast to piracy is apt. I've seen anti-AI libs compare LLMs to piracy, and I've seen AI shills go "well, if you support piracy, how can you hate AI?" But one of the big differences is attribution. I don't mind people ""stealing"" my work to consume it. Art is made to be shared. I *do* mind people pretending they--or a statistical averages machine--made something that I poured my heart and labor into. Attribution matters, IP laws are still capitalist bullshit
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@Li @cwebber @LunaDragofelis the contrast to piracy is apt. I've seen anti-AI libs compare LLMs to piracy, and I've seen AI shills go "well, if you support piracy, how can you hate AI?" But one of the big differences is attribution. I don't mind people ""stealing"" my work to consume it. Art is made to be shared. I *do* mind people pretending they--or a statistical averages machine--made something that I poured my heart and labor into. Attribution matters, IP laws are still capitalist bullshit
@raphaelmorgan @cwebber @LunaDragofelis another part of this is that it treats a corporation doing something the same as a individual doing it, which has different dynamics at play; but your not allowed to point it out
alot mention an idea of it being for-profit, but thats not really the whole of the issue there and i think not a very good look at things.
another issue is that AI is not piracy its taking the thing and trying to make some product their trying to sell .. piracy is just the thing distributed by someone else .. whos not approved
.. and maybe modded to bypass DRM. but to be honest i tend to avoid; copyright related reasons for saying AI bad for this reason; its not like thats all you have, its also used for mass survailence, the military are training it to murder people, its good at generating propaganda, it encourages reliance on it giving whoever made it lots of power and; also generally training is very intensive on infrastructure, but yeah.
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