Malus, which is a piece of satire but also fully functional, performs a "clean room" clone of open source software, meaning users could then sell software without crediting the original developers.

Malus, which is a piece of “satire” but also fully functional, performs a “clean room” clone of open source software, meaning users could then sell, redistribute, etc. the software without crediting the original developers. But I have a hard time with the “clean room” argument since the LLM doing the behind-the-scenes work has already ingested the entire corpus of open source software – and somehow the output of the LLMs isn’t considered a derivative work.

    • @grue@lemmy.world
      11•17 hours ago
      • The GPL requires that derivative works must also be licensed under the GPL.
      • LLMs are trained on GPL code.
      • LLM output is a derivative work of the training data (especially if it’s asked to replicate one of the works it’s trained on!).
      • Therefore, all LLM output is either also GPL, or if it’s also been trained on stuff with conflicting licensing, just straight-up copyright infringement to use at all no matter what.

      Laundering copyright is what LLMs do. It is fundamental to how they function, which means that they are a fundamentally illegal technology.