Please remove it if unallowed
I see alot of people in here who get mad at AI generated code and I am wondering why. I wrote a couple of bash scripts with the help of chatGPT and if anything, I think its great.
Now, I obviously didnt tell it to write the entire code by itself. That would be a horrible idea, instead, I would ask it questions along the way and test its output before putting it in my scripts.
I am fairly competent in writing programs. I know how and when to use arrays, loops, functions, conditionals, etc. I just dont know anything about bash’s syntax. Now, I could have used any other languages I knew but chose bash because it made the most sense, that bash is shipped with most linux distros out of the box and one does not have to install another interpreter/compiler for another language. I dont like Bash because of its, dare I say weird syntax but it made the most sense for my purpose so I chose it. Also I have not written anything of this complexity before in Bash, just a bunch of commands in multiple seperate lines so that I dont have to type those one after another. But this one required many rather advanced features. I was not motivated to learn Bash, I just wanted to put my idea into action.
I did start with internet search. But guides I found were lacking. I could not find how to pass values into the function and return from a function easily, or removing trailing slash from directory path or how to loop over array or how to catch errors that occured in previous command or how to seperate letter and number from a string, etc.
That is where chatGPT helped greatly. I would ask chatGPT to write these pieces of code whenever I encountered them, then test its code with various input to see if it works as expected. If not, I would ask it again with what case failed and it would revise the code before I put it in my scripts.
Thanks to chatGPT, someone who has 0 knowledge about bash can write bash easily and quickly that is fairly advanced. I dont think it would take this quick to write what I wrote if I had to do it the old fashioned way, I would eventually write it but it would take far too long. Thanks to chatGPT I can just write all this quickly and forget about it. If I want to learn Bash and am motivated, I would certainly take time to learn it in a nice way.
What do you think? What negative experience do you have with AI chatbots that made you hate them?
For example, if I ask it to produce python code for addition, which GPL’d library is it drawing from?
I think it’s clear that the fair use doctrine no longer applies when OpenAI turns it into a commercial code assistant, but then it gets a bit trickier when used for research or education purposes, right?
I’m not trying to be obtuse-- I’m an AI researcher who is highly skeptical of AI. I just think the imperfect compression that neural networks use to “store” data is a bit less clear than copy/pasting code wholesale.
would you agree that somebody reading source code and then reimplenting it (assuming no reverse engineering or proprietary source code) would not violate the GPL?
If so, then the argument that these models infringe on right holders seems to hinge on the verbatim argument that their exact work was used without attribution/license requirements. This surely happens sometimes, but is not, in general, a thing these models are capable of since they’re using loss-y compression to “learn” the model parameters. As an additional point, it would be straightforward to then comply with DMCA requests using any number of published “forced forgetting” methods.
Then, that raises a further question.
If I as an academic researcher wanted to make a model that writes code using GPL’d training data, would I be in compliance if I listed the training data and licensed my resulting model under the GPL?
I work for a university and hate big tech as much as anyone on Lemmy. I am just not entirely sure GPL makes sense here. GPL 3 was written because GPL 2 had loopholes that Microsoft exploited and I suspect their lawyers are pretty informed on the topic.
The corresponding training data is the best bet to see what code an input might be copied from. This can apply to humans too. To avoid lawsuits reverse engineering projects use a clean room strategy: requiring contributors to have never seen the original code. This is to argue they can’t possibility be copying, even from memory (an imperfect compression too.
If it doesn’t include GPL code then that can’t violate the GPL. However, OpenAI argue they have to use copyrighted works to make specific AIs (if I recall correctly). Even if legal, that’s still a problem to me.
My understanding is AI generated media can’t be copyrighted as it wasn’t a person being creative - like the monkey selfie copyright dispute.