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AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

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728 points freetonik | 2 comments | 21 Aug 25 18:49 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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neilv ◴[21 Aug 25 19:26 UTC] No.44976959[source]▶
There is also IP taint when using "AI". We're just pretending that there's not.

If someone came to you and said "good news: I memorized the code of all the open source projects in this space, and can regurgitate it on command", you would be smart to ban them from working on code at your company.

But with "AI", we make up a bunch of rationalizations. ("I'm doing AI agentic generative AI workflow boilerplate 10x gettin it done AI did I say AI yet!")

And we pretend the person never said that they're just loosely laundering GPL and other code in a way that rightly would be existentially toxic to an IP-based company.

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ineedasername ◴[21 Aug 25 19:57 UTC] No.44977317[source]▶
Courts (at least in the US) have already ruled that use of ingested data for training is transformative. There’s lots of details to figure, but the genie is out of the bottle.

Sure it’s a big hill to climb in rethinking IP laws to align with a societal desire that generating IP continue to be a viable economic work product, but that is what’s necessary.

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bsder ◴[21 Aug 25 21:39 UTC] No.44978412[source]▶
> Courts (at least in the US) have already ruled that use of ingested data for training is transformative.

If you have code that happens to be identical to some else's code or implements someone's proprietary algorithm, you're going to lose in court even if you claim an "AI" gave it to you.

AI is training on private Github repos and coughing them up. I've had it regurgitate a very well written piece of code to do a particular computational geometry algorithm. It presented perfect, idiomatic Python with perfect tests that caught all the degenerate cases. That was obviously proprietary code--no amount of searching came up with anything even remotely close (it's why I asked the AI, after all).

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Filligree ◴[21 Aug 25 22:43 UTC] No.44979022[source]▶
How is that obviously proprietary? Aren't you implicitly assuming that the AI couldn't have written it on its own?
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1. inferiorhuman ◴[22 Aug 25 03:15 UTC] No.44980688[source]▶
The idea that something that can't handle simple algorithms (e.g. counting the number of times a letter occurs in a word) could magically churn out far more advanced algorithms complete with tests is… well it's a bit of a stretch.
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2. Filligree ◴[22 Aug 25 14:28 UTC] No.44985117[source]▶
It's terrible at executing algorithms. This, it turns out, is completely disjoint from writing algorithms.