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this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2026
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Fuck AI
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A place for all those who loathe AI to discuss things, post articles, and ridicule the AI hype. Proud supporter of working people. And proud booer of SXSW 2024.
AI, in this case, refers to LLMs, GPT technology, and anything listed as "AI" meant to increase market valuations.
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So Linux is no longer open source?
Because we can't fork something that's not open source. And just 1 AI contribution means it's a copyright violation, so its no longer copyleft.
That is quite the statement. Is there any legal precedence for that? Yes, I know the technical why, but a blanket "one AI contribution and its over" is a little over the top, to put it mildly, and sounds like an extreme over generalization of a complicated problem
Nope, it hasn't been litigated yet.
But it stands to reason that AI is a derivative of copyrighted material (unless the training set was released and confirmed to only contain otherwise). And there is loads of case precedent for fucking defendants hard on that violation
Well, it has been litigated and it continues to be litigated so the legal community doesn't consider it completely settled, but so far court behavior seems inclined to agree with the AI companies.
That said, the AI company defense has broadly been "training is fair use, and even if an operator manages to get the model to produce an infringing work, the user is liable, not us". So that "user is on the hook part" should be worrying people, but no one has yet tried to test this sort of oblivious infringement. I would expect it should at least be plausible that the operator was oblivious to the copyright violation they induced the model to commit, but still demand the offending material be removed.
Currently the industry is betting that it is "too big to fail" at this point and no one would dare pull that trigger on an unsuspecting violator. Further, copyright doesn't cover "trivial" lifts from a source and the likelihood favors an accidental copy being a trivial part of a whole.
Hi, I'm a software engineer.
I've also been trained on copyrighted material, because every codebase I've worked on for money has been proprietary.
Does that mean I can't touch open source code? I could accidentally use a snippet I've written before in some other setting.
The real licensing issue of AI use shouldn't even apply to Linux because it's already GPL. GPL infects anything it touches so if you use GPL-trained AI on an MIT project and it spits out something resembling the GPL code it was trained on, that would make that MIT project a GPL project. It would also make your proprietary projects GPL projects.
You're unlikely to spit out code from your corpus verbatim, so the answer to your first question is a resounding no. If you did copy from your previous job's, you'd be liable.
So funny you should mention that, I worked at a company that dealt with Linux and third-party proprietary code. They kept the software developers highly segregated because they feared accidental copyright infringement. They thought at the time that even a human learning and accidentally reproducing something they remembered from working on proprietary code too risky.
Whole thing is a nightmare and I hate it. Luckily nothing I do for work is open source so even if my code accidentally resembles some other codebase I've worked on, nobody will find out lol