On 19/05/2025 15:01, Konstantin Kharlamov wrote:
On Mon, 2025-05-19 at 14:53 +0930, Justin Zobel wrote:
On 19/05/2025 14:35, Konstantin Kharlamov wrote:
On Mon, 2025-05-19 at 10:03 +0930, Justin Zobel wrote:
On 18/05/2025 16:41, Albert Vaca Cintora wrote:
On Sun, 18 May 2025, 08:59 Justin Zobel, <jus...@1707.io> wrote:
If the contributor cannot tell you the license(s) of the code
that was used to generate the code, then it's literally gambling
that this code wasn't taken from another project by Gemini and
used without their permission or used in a way that violates the
license and opens up the KDE e.V. to litigation.
I'm no lawyer but I would expect that training AI will fall under
fair use of copyrighted code. If that's not the case already, it
will probably be soon. The benefits of AI to society are too large
to autoimpose such a roadblock.
Albert
From my understanding (what others have told me), AI generally does
not produce good quality code though. So how is that a benefit to
society?
I wrote some lengthy answer here, but then I scratched that because
I realized your question can really generate tons of lengthy replies
that no one will read 😅 I will say you that: AI is useful for
simple and tedious tasks. In general, you don't expect that AI will
complete correctly whatever you asked it to do. Instead you expect
it to give you some useful base, which you can change/correct/modify
to fit whatever you actually need.
Like, I dunno, do you have a friend in a foreign country who you
want to write a recent story, but the story is in english? You ask
AI to translate it, which will be don "almost good", so what you do
then is you go over the text and correct everything to match your
style. This is faster than translating everything manually. In fact,
it well matches what people-translators were doing for decades: they
typically translate texts in two phases, one is sort of writing a
scratch, and the other one is polishing, like adding suitable
idioms, etc.
The problem is we're not talking about text here, we're talking about
code and code has licenses, on which language models don't care
about. I'm all for AI that helps humanity, but stealing code or using
code that is incompatible with KDE's license set is not it.
I want AI to solve world hunger, prevent disease and help me do the
housework :)
Well, you asked how "low quality AI code" benefits society. I have
many different examples, I came up with one related to translation
because it was the simplest one to describe (all others resulted in
too much text) and its morally equivalent, because you similarly get
poor low-quality base and you improve upon it.
If you want code examples specifically: another simple one that comes
to my mind is I have in my Emacs config a code that allows to quit
emacsclient with vim-command `xb` and upon doing so it converts
Markdown code to bbcode. And there's also similar one for textile. The
"conversion code" is a terrible O(n²) algorithm written by AI, which
didn't even work when AI wrote it. But I fixed it (as in, made it
work), and use it just fine at work to write Markdown text and then
insert into to either Redmine or Bitrix at their native markup. Don't
care much for O(n²), because for amounts of texts I write it is
instantaneous.
Another example is I had to rewrite some project from one language to
another at work. This is tedious task, so I similarly used AI to
create a scratch, and then I went over that code refactoring it and
fixing.
Translations are not code.
