Copyrightest's comments

NetBSD has a very reasonable stance:

  If you commit code that was not written by yourself, double check that the license on that code permits import into the NetBSD source repository, and permits free distribution. Check with the author(s) of the code, make sure that they were the sole author of the code and verify with them that they did not copy any other code.

  Code generated by a large language model or similar technology, such as GitHub/Microsoft's Copilot, OpenAI's ChatGPT, or Facebook/Meta's Code Llama, is presumed to be tainted code, and must not be committed without prior written approval by core.

https://www.netbsd.org/developers/commit-guidelines.html

The most salient difference is that it's impossible to tell if an LLM is plagiarizing, whereas Xeroxing something implies specific intent to copy. It makes no sense to push liability onto LLM users.

The big difference between people reading code and LLMs reading code is that people have legal liability and LLMs do not. You can't sue an LLM for copyright infringement, and it's almost impossible for users to tell when it happens.

BTW in 2023 I watched ChatGPT spit out hundreds of lines of F# verbatim from my own GitHub. A lot of people had this experience with GitHub Copilot. "98.7% unique" is still a lot of infringement.

One problem with this is that there isn't really a "current prompt" that completely describes the current source code; each source file is accompanied by a full chat log, including false starts and misunderstandings. It's sort of like reading a git history instead of the actual file.

I am a jazz guitarist and am sympathetic to this comment: the way I tune my guitar these days is hitting an E tuning fork, playing a particular E7 chord, and deciding if it sounds good:

  e —0–
  B —0–
  G —7–
  D —6–
  A —7–
  E —0–

Learned it from Jimmy Bruno. I despise digital tuners. However it is worth noting: a properly-tuned guitar will never be able to play a “barbershop seventh,” which hits the natural harmonic dominant 7th and is so flat compared to TET that it’s really almost a 6th. The chord itself sounds more bittersweet and less “funky” than a TET dominant 7th. OTOH the TET chord is an essential part of modern blues-influenced music: being “out of tune” makes the chord sharp and strong, almost like a blue cheese being “moldy.” So I’m not beaten up about the limitations, it’s just worth keeping in mind: no instrument can beat a group of human voices.

In general your ears do not hear these little arithmetical games around mismatched harmonies. They hear things like “this chord sounds warm and a little sad, this one is bright and fun.”

I think the most salient point about Factorio here is that its CPU-side native core was largely hammered out by 2018, most of the development since then has been in Lua or GPU-side. The devs could be quite confident their code didn't have any unhandled null pointers. That's not really the case for Chromium or (God help us) WebKit.

I imagine making a buggy and unmaintainable version could be done quickly, sure, if you don't mind your documents being killed by a thousand small typesetting cuts. TeX is incredibly complicated for good reasons, people should read Knuth's book.

The reason TeX is written in a 1984 dialect of Pascal is that the typesetting bugs have been solved in a completely specified language; it is much easier to write a transpiler for Pascal->C than to rewrite TeX. Asking an LLM to rewrite it in the language-du-jour is a huge cost for very little benefit.

BTW it has been so depressing in the last few months to see LLM-generated projects make claims about performance/accuracy, but there is no benchmarking code on Github and the "thousands of tests" are all useless happy paths. I am sure we will see some grifter claim that Claude rewrote TeX and I am sure dozens of credulous HN users will take it seriously. But we won't see a useful rewrite. It'll be resume-oriented slop like that dishonest Mathematica-in-Rust project we saw last week.

As another commenter points out, this sort of exists in the broader sense of "interactive fiction." There's lots of options for scaffolding an LLM into something like a storytelling toy.

But I truly believe an AI-generated equivalent of Zork or Lost Pig is decades away. The "knowing what it is talking about problem" is not even close to being solved, no matter how impressive coding agents have become. It is simply too easy to sabotage clever game design with accidentally adversarial prompting.

More generally: LLMs are still unfunny except in cases of clear plagiarism. This also extends to making fun games.

FWIW it's not just about money, it's about controlling creative work. E.g. Radiohead really does not want ICE to use their music for fascist propaganda, at any cost.

I really don't like how the discussion on HN always ignores the ways copyright protects individual expression as a fundamental right. Instead we're STEM dorks, focusing on how getting rid of copyright protection lets us increase content volume at the entertainment factory.