• boonhet@sopuli.xyz
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    11 days ago

    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.

    • jj4211@lemmy.world
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      11 days ago

      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.

      The practical difference is that the third-parties were likely to sue, but the corpus of trained data is pretty much open source projects that may have a right to sue but in practice everyone knows they aren’t going to be able to chase down violations due to lack of resource.

      • boonhet@sopuli.xyz
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        11 days ago

        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

    • Guttural@jlai.lu
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      10 days ago

      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.