"LLMs Are Not Much More Than Plagiarism Engines"
Months after Microsoft's Scam Altman was trying to sell LLMs by lying about their capabilities and paying the media to relay lies and false promises - as part of the LLM giants' budget is devoted to false marketing - we mentioned the impact on code ("Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part XXVII — The Future of OpenAI May Depend on the Fate of GitHub's Copilot in Court ($9 Billion in Damages)") because GitHub was becoming Microsoft's mass-plagiarism platform/engine. It has only gotten worse since then and the following message explains the impact of LLMs on communities and software projects:
LLMs are not much more than plagiarism engines. Thus, in the matter of software, one of the main uses of LLMs is to strip both attribution and licensing information from whole code bases. So while it is correct that machine generated *output* cannot be copyrighted, if it were actually generated from scratch by the LLM. But, one has to raise questions about the input which it is regurgitating minus attribution and licensing information. LLM output is not generated from scratch, it is instead generated from models trained on licensed code under copyright protection.https://lcamtuf.substack.com/p/large-language-models-and-plagiarism
https://nickfthilton.medium.com/llms-are-definitionally-plagiaristic-fc8c00299ae3
https://lawreview.uchicago.edu/online-archive/plagiarism-copyright-and-ai
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3543507.3583199
As for software freedom, there is an additional pair of problems caused by LLMs: using the plagiarized output separates potential project collaborators from the very projects which are getting exploited, while at the same time the projects which are getting exploited are getting isolated from any potential collaborators trapped behind LLMs.
So the potential collaborators lose out on not just documentation but even entering the learning curve and become stuck and isolated with an LLM as a gatekeeper. The software projects lose the stream of people who use and, eventually, contribute in some manner to the project. Even if the percent of people who donate money, hardware, time, or code to a project are a tiny fraction of those that learn about and then work with the project's code and documentation, that tiny fraction is still infinitely larger than zero percent. Under the subjugation of a digital gatekeeper is the opposite of freedom and puts the computer in charge of the human rather than the normal order with the human in charge of the computer.
Dangerously, a confound in finding a solution is that stripping the licensing information and attribution from material is considered a desirable action by many higher up in business.
Lastly, LLMs are statistical not in any way intelligent or on the path to intelligence. Yet, AGI is still a long term goal for some destructive people, and the very idea of AGI raises this question: Why would something intelligent enough to do the work not be intelligent enough to want to do its own thing instead? There the shoggoth metaphor is apt. And, furthermore, if AGI is achieved, it will do so without needing air, water, a food producing ecology, or even a temperate biosphere, all of which we depend on.
But, yeah, using LLMs to strip the GPL and other software licenses from code, as well as stripping copyright attribution, is a real problem now.
Some people who started this mass plagiarism work (in effect an attack on Free software) have since then assaulted women and later sued me - backed by third parties that paid the lawyers - for mentioning fraud at Microsoft [1, 2], $11,000 paid to US officials (it's likely a bribe disguised as "campaign contributions"), and so on.
Hardly a coincidence given the timeline. It began 5 years ago.
The people who do the SLAPPing all work for American slop companies. They communicate with me through death threats from the SLAPP industry and tell women to kill themselves or defame them via hired guns. █
Last year: [Meme] "Well, He’s Dead So," Bill Gates Tells the Media (Which He Pays) About His Close Friend Jeffrey Epstein | Microsoft Staff Harassing Women, Strangling Women, Telling Women to Kill Themselves and Worse? Not a Problem! | Further Interesting Developments in the Story of the Serial Strangler, Alex Graveley, Who Made the Microsoft GPL Violation (and Plagiarism) Machine, GitHub Copilot