This is only worth arguing about because software has value. Putting this in context of a world where the cost of writing code is trending to 0, there are two obvious futures:
1. The cost continues to trend to 0, and _all_ software loses value and becomes immediately replaceable. In this world, proprietary, copyleft and permissive licenses do not matter, as I can simply have my AI reimplement whatever I want and not distribute it at all.
2. The coding cost reduction is all some temporary mirage, to be ended soon by drying VC money/rising inference costs, regulatory barriers, etc. In that world we should be reimplementing everything we can as copyleft while the inferencing is good.
There’s an other option. The cost of copying existing software trends to 0, but the cost of writing new software stays far enough above 0 that it is still relatively expensive.
There will always be cost though. Even if perfect code is getting one-shotted out, that is constantly maintained and adapted to changing conditions and technology, it simply can't stay at 0 forever because one day the power is surely going to go out!
More and more I am drawn to these kinds of ideas lately, perhaps as a kind of ethical sidestep, but still:
It's not going to solve any general issue here, but the one thing these freaks need that can't be generated by their models is energy, tons of it. So, the one thing I can do as an individual and in my (digital) community is work to be, in a word, self-sustainable. And depending on my company I guess, if I was a CEO I would hope I was wise enough to be thinking on the same lines.
Everyone is making beautiful mountains from paper and wire. I will just be happy to make a small dollhouse of stone, I think it will be worth it. How can we see not just at least some small-level of hubris otherwise?
There was a recent ruling that LLM output is inherently public domain (presumably unless it infringes some existing copyright). In which case it's not possible to use them to "reimplement everything we can as copyleft".
it's more complicated, the ruling was that AI can't be an author and the thing in question is (de-facto) public domain because it has no author in context of the "dev" claim it was fully build by AI
but AI assisted code has an author and claiming it's AI assisted even if it is fully AI build is trivial (if you don't make it public that you didn't do anything)
also some countries have laws which treat it like a tool in the sense that the one who used it is the author by default AFIK
The article is proceeding from the premise that a reimplementation is legal (but evil). To help my understanding of your comment, do you mean:
1. An LLM recreating a piece of software violates its copyright and is illegal, in which case LLM output can never be legally used because someone somewhere probably has a copyright on some portion of any software that an LLM could write.
2. You read my example as "copying a project without distributing it", vs. "having an LLM write the same functionality just for me"
There would be no GPL if anybody could have cheaply and trivially reproduced the software for printers and Lisp machines Stallman was denied access to. There is no reason to force someone to give you the source code if takes no effort to reproduce.
Mind you, that isn't what happened here. The effort involved in getting a LLM to write software comes from three things: writing a clear unambiguous spec that also gives you a clean exported API, more clean unambiguous specs for the APIs you use, and a test suite the LLM can use to verify it has implemented the exported API correctly. Dan got them all for free, from the previous implementation which I'm sure included good documentation. That means his contribution to this new code consisted of little more than pressing the button.
Sadly, if you wrote some GPL software with excellent documentation, a thorough test suite, clean API, and implemented using well understood library the cost of creating a cleanroom reproduction has indeed gone to near zero over the past 24 months. The GPL licence is irrelevant.
Welcome to the brave new world.
PS: Sqlite keeping their test suite proprietary is looking like a prescient masterstroke.
PPS: The recent ruling that an API isn't copyrightable just took on a whole new dimension.
1. The cost continues to trend to 0, and _all_ software loses value and becomes immediately replaceable. In this world, proprietary, copyleft and permissive licenses do not matter, as I can simply have my AI reimplement whatever I want and not distribute it at all.
2. The coding cost reduction is all some temporary mirage, to be ended soon by drying VC money/rising inference costs, regulatory barriers, etc. In that world we should be reimplementing everything we can as copyleft while the inferencing is good.