Mastodon has a new human-over-AI contribution policy.

[coolcalmcollected@mastodon.social]

@neil

holding people accountable for dumb decisions? well that's a breath of fresh air

[csolisr@hub.azkware.net]

@larsmb @neil Unless it uses 1. a codebase trained solely on your own content, or 2. a codebase trained on a corpus known to be completely under a free and open-source license, and where each token can be mapped to the corresponding author. 1 is pretty much worthless unless you're a heavy code producer, and 2 is barely a thing despite of being the obvious legal procedure to build such a LLM, cf. huggingface.co/datasets/common…

[starkrg@myside-yourside.net]

@requiem @AVincentInSpace @neil Yeah, you'd have to train it solely on code you know you have the rights to. I'm not sure whether or not you'd need to make sure it doesn't look like anything you don't have the rights to, but you probably should unless you have the funds to argue your case in court.

Certainly anything that's produced by an LLM trained on GPL code would have to be GPL licensed.

[cygnathreadbare@retro.pizza]

@neil This sounds like "ai is explicitly allowed, just try not to be super lazy about it pls"

[bcasiello@floss.social]

@cygnathreadbare @neil The ‘provenance and legal safety’ guarantees might be a poison pill. I think the legal safety might be satisfied if the training corpus was entirely code released under the same license as Mastodon, but if the provenance part means (as someone unthread stated) that each token has to be traceable to a specific author and not just “it came from one of these 20,000 GPL’ed projects”, that might not be possible.

[amberage@eldritch.cafe]

@neil weak as usual milquetoast nonsense from Masto. A better software would have banned slop code outright.

[kinou@lgbtqia.space]

@tragivictoria
@neil

I think clause 4." Copyright & Legal"
Nails the coffin on LLM generated code?

I read this as threading the needle: How to allow people who use IDEs where you can't remove the LLM integration to contribute but make it clear that if using that LLM for more than auto completion, it likely breaches clause 4.

[tragivictoria@mastodon.catgirl.cloud]

@kinou@lgbtqia.space @neil@mastodon.neilzone.co.uk But that's more speculation here, since it wasn't actually written there. Policy that leaves many things up for speculation is not very good.

[falken@qoto.org]

@amberage @neil if they'd banned it, you just get people submitting slop without saying it wasn't their own work, and the project would have more risk

[andypiper@macaw.social]

@k @neil @bert_hubert just to clarify, the AI Contribution Policy applies across any form of contribution to the project and our repositories.