alt Hacker NewsIsn't there also a concern that an LLM may reproduce copyrighted code verbatim (or close enough), and the original author asserts their copyright?
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+1, I also thought this was the actual concern.
Not just when it reproduces code. Since fair use doesn't exist like that in a lot of countries the question is if the training itself is a violation. Are there e.g. EU or Japanese rulings on that?
I had early chatGPT spit my own erlang code back at me WITH my comments.
To my knowledge there is not a single known case where this happened.
News back then were about intentionally prompting to output known copyrighted material.
The parent comment still stands in my opinion:
When, despite millions of developers using agentic AI already, are these lawsuits supposed to manifest?
This doesn't really happen by accident, especially where it's significant enough to constitute copyright infringement. And to my knowledge, there hasn't been a single lawsuit over this in the entire history of LLM-assisted coding.
There is concern, but the more I think about it, the less convinced I am. LLMs might produce a snippet, but copyright requires more than that. Last I checked (I'm not a lawyer, this was far enough back that the law has had major changes, and different countries have different laws! - read this with plenty of salt) if you start with copyright work and replace all but 10% that final amount just disappears since there isn't enough original to claim copyright anymore. You can never claim copyright over 'printf("Hello World");' - it is too generic. Most of what I've seen an LLM produce is likewise generic enough that even if it is a copy, it wouldn't be a copyrightable snippet.
That would be an example of, “overfitting.” It is something the AI labs are concerned about. They tweak parameters to try and avoid it.
It’s a hard balancing act to do. Give in too much randomness and you get non-sensical outputs that are difficult to align. Fit too closely to the training data and the model regurgitates the training data.
And oh, what’s that copyrighted material we never made any agreement to use doing in there?
Not to mention the moral concern.
IP law (like a lot of other things) has been skewed toward the interests of business, even when that conflicts with fairness or societal good. For all its flaws (IMO), the free software movement tends to be principled. Just because something is legal doesn’t mean it’s right.