Doesn’t uv just use PyPI for its packages (i.e. it’s not talking to any servers owned by them)? There’s the possibility of hijinks on the client side, of course, but it would be hard to do without anyone noticing and causing a huge stink about it.
I’d say the more worrying aspects of uv is the use of AI in its development even before OpenAI bought them out and what’s going to happen to it after OpenAI eventually goes under.
Does this do anything that pressing Ctrl+I, then opening the Media tab doesn’t?
Yes, in principle the same would apply to the MIT license, but in practice it’s pretty much impossible to violate the terms of that license, so it would never get tested. LGPL on the other hand, could lead to real, practical problems. As for why they would insist on MIT, there’s more MIT-licensed code used in production than public domain code. They’re already cosplaying as programmers by producing this slop, who knows what else they’ll do for the sake of appearances?
Is it possible that the license change was the goal and the use of AI was the means to achieve it? Of course. Should I have expressed that what I proposed was only a possible reason? Yeah, probably. But putting it as something like “the devs claim yada yada…” would have been incorrect. While the way the original question was asked meant that obviously, any answers would be from the hypothetical perspective of the maintainers (which is why the fact that the new version of chardet violates the license of the original code is irrelevant, because they wouldn’t think so), I worded my comment as an assertion because it was an assertion. By me. Because it’s the only possibility that is consistent with current legal precedent. And whether or not that was the or a reason for the license change, it’s something that would have been a real issue had they kept the license.
Now, you accuse me of insulting people’s intelligence, but when two people respond to my comment in the same way, obviously the problem lies with me. But you have been very unclear in conveying what exactly that problem is. You went form pointing out that the generated code is still in violation of the original license, which while true, is again, irrelevant in this context (and I still don’t really understand why you would think that it was) to not liking how assertively I worded the consequences for the enforceability of the LGPL license when it comes to code than cannot have copyright, I guess?
I’m really having trouble understanding what’s failing to convey here.
Let’s assume for a moment that chardet is a completely new library that from the start consisted mostly of AI-generated code. Let’s also forget that in order to generate that code, the LLM had to absorb a lot of existing code, and its usage may very well itself be many license violations. In this hypothetical situation would there be any point in licensing that code under the LGPL? No, there wouldn’t be, because it wouldn’t be possible to be enforced. This is not a claim anyone is making, this is just the logical conclusion from it not being possible to copyright AI-generated works.
Of course in reality, chardet has been around for a long time and previously consisted of human-authored code, and this new version cannot be considered a product of clean room reverse engineering, both because the maintainers had access to the original code and because LLMs are the very opposite of a clean room, so they don’t have to right to change that license because it would be in violation of the license of the original code. But the maintainers clearly don’t see it that way, otherwise they wouldn’t have done it. So from their perspective, the fact that it’s pointless for AI-generated code to be licensed under the LGPL, could be a reason why they felt the need to change the license.
Was this really not obvious from the context set by the comment I was responding to? I swear, every time I decide to be not so damn wordy, I learn to regret it.
You’re the second person to bring this up in response to my comment. Was my writing really that ambiguous? I was merely answering a question about why the maintainers felt they needed to change the license with a possible reason. Whether they’re actually allowed to do that is completely besides the point in the context of this particular sub-thread.
You’re not wrong, but I don’t see how it’s relevant to what I’m trying to say. Whether or not they’re legally allowed to change the license has nothing to do with why they might want to change the license.
There has already been a ruling in the US that AI-generated art cannot be copyrighted because it lacks human authorship, so it stands to reason that the same is true for code. Even copyleft is ultimately dependent on copyright to be legally enforceable.
And even if all of the rest of the world were to decide otherwise about whether AI-generated works can be copyrighted (which I very much doubt would happen), given how much software development happens in the US, it would still make the license pretty toothless.
LGPL is unenforceable with AI-generated code. LGPL puts certain constraints on how the code can be used, but if someone were to use AI-generated code in a way that violates its LGPL license, all that person has to say is that it’s AI-generated code, so it’s in the public domain and they’re free to do with it whatever they want, and they would legally be right.
That sounds more like tinkering around the edges to me. Whipping companies like Twitter into behaving, while it absolutely needs to happen, won’t fundamentally change anything about the dependency of Europe to those companies and the pressure the US can exert through that dependency.
Here’s a thought: instead of fighting this, make it a requirement to publish the prompts before making a speech. Speeches by politicians being low in information density is nothing new, and the usage of LLMs will undoubtedly make that worse, but it also means that they had to have written a terse description of the information they want to convey. If that were public, people could just read that and not waste time listening to speeches.
It would be ironic if the first use-case for LLMs that creates positive value for society involves ignoring its output, though.
The outliers are the exception that prove the rule though. The very fact that intersex people exist at all shows that the physical process of inducing the development of sexual characteristics is complicated and messy, and not a simple switch. It’s just that evolution has fine-tuned the process enough that in the majority of cases it leads to people who are within ranges that can be considered “wholly male” or “wholly female”. So the sexual binary model isn’t useless, but it’s important to be aware that it is just a model and not reality.