Disallow or discourage use of "AI" tools (Christoph Cullmann)

[Ingo Klöcker]

On Sonntag, 18. Mai 2025 16:52:00 Mitteleuropäische Sommerzeit Christoph 
Cullmann wrote:
> On Sunday, May 18th, 2025 at 09:12, Albert Vaca Cintora 
<albertvaka at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On Sun, 18 May 2025, 08:59 Justin Zobel, <justin at 1707.io> wrote:
> > > If the contributor cannot tell you the license(s) of the code that was
> > > used to generate the code, then it's literally gambling that this code
> > > wasn't taken from another project by Gemini and used without their
> > > permission or used in a way that violates the license and opens up the
> > > KDE e.V. to litigation.> 
> >
> > I'm no lawyer but I would expect that training AI will fall under fair use
> > of copyrighted code. If that's not the case already, it will probably be
> > soon. The benefits of AI to society are too large to autoimpose such a
> > roadblock.
>
> if that would happen, then there is just no copyright protection anymore and
> all is fair game, I highly doubt that, but yes, that is what companies that
> want to get rich with deep learning want to have.

But isn't that how knowlegde transfer works since ages especially in science?

I learned programming mostly be reading other people's code. Have I been 
violating copyright or licenses for decades because I applied the patterns I 
saw in other Free Software code to my code? And what about stuff I look(ed) up 
on stackoverflow? I don't think I have ever seen code on stackoverflow that had 
a proper license. At least in Germany this means that this code is under a 
very strict license and cannot be used without the authors explicit consent. 
(Something like Fair Use doesn't exist in Germany.) On the other hand, I don't 
think that I have ever copied code literally from stackoverflow. I have also 
never copied code literally that I developed at my former workplace, but of 
course I have applied some of the concepts I learned from writing proprietary 
code to my Free Software code.

Yes, there is the theoretical threat that an AI learned code that's under a 
less liberal license like the GPL or even under one of the "new" not-OSI-
approved licenses used by certain companies to prevent Amazon from selling 
services based on their code (or even proprietary code; for all we know, Co-
Pilot was trained with the entire source code written by Microsoft), but 
that's only a problem if the AI cites this code literally so that we could be 
sued for plagiarizing. How realistic is this threat?

Regards,
Ingo
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 228 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part.
URL: <http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-devel/attachments/20250518/297d0b58/attachment.sig>