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#code#llm#gcc#human#generated#llms#copyright#more#significant#project
Discussion (126 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
This is the one silver lining of the AI-slop wave, it's very easy to get (prompt inject) LLMs to refuse to do things. Just put a little note in your README and be done with it.
> We welcome all contributors to the community even if they have not yet followed our policies; we should guide such contributors on how to do so.
Kudos to the GNU project for their attitude.
You weren’t kidding, huh.
> "The true purpose of AI is to allow wealth to access skill without allowing skill to access wealth."
It COULD be used for good (that's why its proponents use tone-deaf analogies comparing AI to seats on a rocket)... but we know that --- for the most part --- it WON'T be used for good... (It's already being used to spread more disinformation and to fan the flames of fascism).
Technically, you could argue that shell corporations could protect journalists, but you don't see journalists destabilizing democracies by fueling dark money to alt-right groups here and there.
For 99.999% of people, it is literally kthxbye on all code they execute on all their devices.
1) Courts reverse their previous decisions and declare LLM generated code as belonging to LLM labs.
2) LLM labs decide to assert their copyright and sue open source projects.
3) They are able to prove that the code was generated by an LLM and not just any LLM but their LLM.
The concern instead is that LLMs and all of their outputs may be found to be derivative works of their entire training set, and thus rendered unusable (as the training set is not distirbutable under any license).
I think this ship has long sailed and no court is going to dare give such a decision given the money involved, for better or for worse. But it's a much more realistic scenario, in principle, than LLM labs going mad and attacking their own customers.
Edit to add: there is another, completely different, copyright risk associated with LLMs - and one that is much more realistic. It is the fact that code generated by LLMs may not, in fact, be copyrightable at all. Which would mean that it can't be subject to the GPL. As long as it remains a minority of GCC code, this wouldn't matter much, but it could in time lead to significant portions of GCC becoming public domain, and thus cooyable, modifiable, and redistrubutable without providing the four freedoms.
1) Someone re-licenses GCC under a non-GPL license.
2) EFF sues them, to stop the behaviour
3) Court tells EFF that they have no standing to sue because LLM generated content has no copyright
Obviously this happening would be in the future after someone translated GCC to Rust with LLMs or something.
Off the cuff, I would be surprised if the GNU project embraced AI, so I'm confused that people think so strongly otherwise.
For me I’m a late adopter. I’ve seen more things go than stay. I’ll wait until the industry has stabilised or evaporated before making a decision. It’ll save me time and money.
> Denying it is denying human nature, Mr. Bond, and the gods tend to punish the hubris of denying nature.
So the real question is: what's LLVM policy?
This is such a fire quote
nothing is said about you the user holding copyright over result of tool use
"Given this framework, it follows that purely AI-generated outputs—those created automatically by an AI system without substantial human intervention—are not eligible for copyright protection in the EU. Such outputs are considered to fall into the public domain, making them freely available for anyone to use, reproduce, or adapt without seeking permission or providing attribution. The legal and commercial implications of this are significant. For creators and companies investing in AI systems that generate music, art, or text, there is no proprietary right over the final output unless a human has contributed in a way that meets the “intellectual creation” standard."
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/STUD/2025/7740...
The courts are AFAICT still undecided in the US regarding this.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput...
"...prompts alone do not provide sufficient human control to make users of an AI system the authors of the output." [https://www.congress.gov/crs_external_products/LSB/PDF/LSB10...]
If code generated by LLMs turns out to be effectively public domain, that could seriously water down the legal standing of copyleft licenses. Fortunately there is still enough human-authored code that long-standing projects as a whole are not at risk of losing all copyright control, but as more LLM-generated code is incorporated, and human authored code is deleted, the copyright slowly gets washed away.
Having said that, I suspect the big AI companies have enough lobbying power to influence the legal system and lawmaking in the future.
Jokes aside, there's a difference to understanding the code and understanding the reasoning that is behind the code, I feel that LLMs still struggle enormously with the later. They start writing, and sometimes realise halfway through that they can't backtrack and just keep writing rubbish. You can argue about spinning loops and iterative processes, as long as they are actually able to converge.
Obviously.
Chatgpt: Write a bubble sort in java.
Now ask questions about what you don't understand.
The problem is comparing trivial examples to complex multi-agent hands-off workflows. Scale until you are at the edge of your comfort zone.
Pretending that all LLM codes is dangerous because you cant understand a solution to a problem you offloaded to a black box, is disingenuous.
In various projects I see AI policies that state not only the rules, but also their (moral) justification. I think that's worse, because I can agree to the rules, but that does not mean I subscribe to your point of view.
Once the 3 big ones start using LLM to review/accept the work for speed reliability sake, who knows what is going to happen.
I have no interest reading someone else’s ai output that has not been verified.
Or to put it another way, expecting me to review code you didn't and had an LLM generate is pushing the onus onto me and that's not happening.
The moderating should focus on good user participation, and a reputation to give old users leeway. I'd be as specific as requesting new users to respond as succinctly as possible to avoid AI ranting
One of the big AI companies recently presented to our company. They sent one of the clowns. "I don't even review the code because it would slow me down. Human code also has bugs, so why bother?" These people scare me, but they're also the first type of coder who will be unemployed by AI, so at least we won't have to put up with them for much longer.
Software is a big umbrella. There are people who vomit out code because they can just push another update later in the day and will keep doing that until the bug reports stop. They are often gleefully ignorant that much of software is not designed that way, and that the reason any of their code works is that it is built on software very much not designed that way.
Of course as people understand how to use these tools their quality of output may increase. But what will also improve is our own processes around handling AI work.
That said, I think the gains will mostly be in boring, enterprise software; they are often a lot more code that, if the application is designed well, is mostly configuration and boring wiring. Boring code is good for LLMs to write.
But the underlying tools like GCC are not boring. They will have boring aspects to it, but for the most part they are not boring.
Meanwhile, I don't know who quotemstr is, but they don't sound sane in any of the exchanges in this thread.
But I don't think generated code in itself was ever the issue. It's who takes responsibility for it. And I think in this case, can the submitter guarantee it's not code that is copyrighted elsewhere.
The starting point of GNU was that Unix was expensive and costly for research labs, so they set out to build a free alternative that users could control from the ground up.
So if LLMs are useful, shouldn't we be building a free LLM ecosystem where users can run, study, and modify them, rather than letting a few companies control access to models, execution, environments, and data processing?
Of course, it's natural for organizations to drift from their original mission as they get older.
But judging by GNU's early history, the logic that:
1.LLMs themselves are bad because companies control them,
2.Writing code with AI isn't real programming,
3.Only human-written code is truly free.
This logic seems a bit flawed. After all, compilers, debuggers, and automated builds all automated tasks that humans used to do manually. And the GNU project itself created tools like Make and GDB so that programmers could work at a higher level.
If LLMs can reduce repetitive coding, documentation browsing, translation, test generation, and understanding legacy code, then that seems perfectly aligned with the next goals of free software. Making knowledge accessible to more people rather than keeping it locked up as tacit knowledge held by a few experts.
I guess when organizations grow large, they inevitably attract people who don't fully align with the original purpose
Their way of putting it is funny. I like this person's opinion, but I disagree with it. It's just their own framework, but I think it could also serve as a foundation for building other things.
Speaking of PRs, honestly, I've done the same thing before—it was just a one-line fix, but I asked the LLM to add 30 lines of tests just to look more professional
Fork it into Rust or something.
at some point, what's stopping people from lying or make the code like human writing one ????
So, in your view, banning vibecoded slop contributions is "succumbing to the slopmonster?"
> critical mass of hard to detect bugs accumulate in the project
Their announcement explicitly said LLMs are allowed for bug detection.
They also allow ruining test cases by slop contributions:
> accept legally significant test cases that are generated by an LLM.
From the page itself, linking to https://www.gnu.org/prep/maintain/maintain.html#Legally-Sign....
>> It uses the definition of "legally significant" from the GNU Project maintainer guidelines, which holds that the threshold is ""around 15 lines of code and/or text"" to qualify as significant for copyright purposes. GCC maintainers may, however, choose to accept legally significant test cases that are generated by an LLM.
Does anyone read more than the headline before jumping to the comments anymore?
And not to play the blind card, but you should try zooming in your screen (if you have the capability) and try to read where you can only see at most a line at a time and a few characters and see if you miss things too! Being blind isn't fun!
It uses the definition of "legally significant" from the GNU Project maintainer guidelines, which holds that the threshold is "around 15 lines of code and/or text" to qualify as significant for copyright purposes.
(Extra fun if the AI generated compiler is under BSD licence.)
Ultimately though, anyone can choose what to use. If an LLM generated compiler is better than GCC and people prefer it, so be it.
Ofc, it's less fun to accept that many of them are probably bots, but whatever.