French government is desperately in need of cash, so the tech illiterate politicians ask Cat, I Farted® for help and it gives them this.

How about an advertising tax? Every company serving ads through the internet (aka platforms, particularly the exploitive ones) need to pay up. That’s Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, etc.

So you’re saying PhotoCraft is okay because it counts as a clean room reimplementation of Photoshop, yet you’re not commenting on whether LLM-generated code is tainted by the training data, and thus can never be considered “clean” for the purposes of clean rooming?

I’m not a lawyer, but my understanding of clean rooming has always been that the engineer can’t have specific knowledge of the thing he’s reimplementing. For example, those lawyers in that room can’t describe a Microsoft product to an ex-Microsoft engineer, because that engineer has seen Microsoft’s code base and may use that knowledge to inform their design. Likewise, you can’t give the engineer a copy of, say, Microsoft Office’s source code to use as a reference.

Yet an LLM trained on Microsoft Office’s code base being used to reimplement Microsoft Office counts as a clean room reimplementation? It seems to me like the benefit of the doubt in that situation should go to Microsoft, and the engineer is the one responsible for proving they didn’t use the part of the LLM trained on Microsoft code…which is impossible.

…although tbf Photoshop isn’t open source, so its not obvious how much of its code exists in Claude or ChatGPT or whatever. Maybe the code leaked in the past, or maybe Adobe engineers who use Claude inadvertently shared company code, and that ended up in the training data.

(Also, for the record, fuck Microsoft and Adobe)

AI clean rooming

The only way “AI clean rooming” is possible is if the model was trained with verifiably clean room code. Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, etc only exist because they took our work without paying or asking for permission. Anthropic has a profitable business because they’re reselling the thing they built with our work. They built X with Y, but they didn’t pay for Y. It’s as clear an example of copyright infringement as possible.

So is your article about “clean rooming” specifically, or is that just a term you’re misuing here informally to refer to LLM-powered reverse engineering in general?

Also the guy yelling slop has some weird shit going on with his thumb

Why would I use this AI slop over Flathub?

The only ending on our current course is monopolization of all intellectual labor into the hands of a few billionaires, and everyone else is forced to work building data centers or mining resources needed for construction (and of course police/military to suppress rebellion)

It is the ultimate billionaire power fantasy.

Personally, I think any output from these models must be for noncommercial use only, as its impossible to track down exactly whose rights are being violated for any given output, yet guaranteed that’s its a non-zero number every single time.

They want it to worm its way into every corner of our lives as quickly as possible so that when a non-criminal administration and congress come into power, they’ll be hesitant to prosecute something that touches the entire economy.

Don’t let them win.

On the bright side, AI companies and vibe coders are going to ignore the GPL anyways, so those MIT licenses are at least on par with it nowadays.