Re: Proposal -- Interpretation of DFSG on Artificial Intelligence (AI) Models
On Fri, 9 May 2025 at 19:21, Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org> wrote:
>
> Matthias Urlichs <matthias@urlichs.de> writes:
>
> > The problem is that all those missing factors are destined to go
> > un-missing — and then what? We can't base our rules on biological
> > exceptionalism.
>
> Why not? The entirety of law, politics, and civilization is designed by
> humans, for humans. Free software is a movement of humans that attempts to
> provide other humans with specific freedoms and guarantees around the
> software they use. I don't work on free software because I want to make
> something easier for Google's LLM. I work on free software because I want
> to give freedom and control to human beings.
I find that thinking to be rather limited. LLM are not self-aware or
self-operating entities. There is always a human that uses an LLM.
It's their freedom that you are discounting.
Moreover - there are *far* more people that can use an LLM to benefit
from its gathered knowledge compared to the number of people that have
spent decades learning programming like we have. Hating on LLMs hurts
the freedom of a lot more people.
I can get the idea that an LLM "avoiding" copyright by learning a top
of GPL code and then generating new code that (according to LLM
proponents) no longer has to be GPL-licensed, feels unfail to the
authors of that GPL code. But this, hypothetical, damage needs to be
balanced by the other side of the equation - with the use of that LLM
_several magnitudes_ more people can create new, useful (to them)
software. These are the human beings that only get their freedom and
control from the use of such work. These are the human beings being
helped by making LLM more available (and more free).
And in addition to that, if only 1% of people using LLM to generate
code like what they see and what they get and continue learning and go
back to contributing to the source projects ... we would eventually
have a steady and massive flow of new developers contributing to open
source. Closing the loop.
Explore the HuggingFace or other resources. There are literally
thousands of all kinds of LLMs and other AI models out there. Focusing
on Google or Meta or another big player is missing the point. For each
corporate AI model there is a hundred AI models created by a hobbyist.
Maybe not as large, as expensive, as generic, but in some specific
cases just as useful.
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