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pylapp@programming.dev

LLM-Driven Large Code Rewrites With Relicensing Are The Latest AI Concern (www.phoronix.com)

submitted 1 day ago by cm0002@libretechni.ca to c/opensource@programming.dev

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The newest open-source concern around AI that is seeing a lot of interest this weekend is when large language models / AI code generators may rewrite large parts of a codebase and then the "developers" claiming an alternative license incompatible with the original source license. This became a real concern this week with a popular Python project experiencing an AI-driven code rewrite and now published under an alternative license that its original author does not agree with and incompatible with the original code.

Chardet as a Python character encoding detector with its v7.0 release last week was a "ground-up, MIT-licensed rewrite of chardet." This rewrite was largely driven via AI/LLM and claims to be up to 41x faster and offer an array of new features. But with this AI-driven rewrite, the license shifted from the LGPL to MIT.

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[–] onlinepersona@programming.dev 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Will projects have to resort to LLM poisoning now? Add comments in their text that instruct the LLMs to ignore all code in the repository or to insert malicious code into the generated code which triggers at random times, go into an endless loop that hinders it from continuing, and so on.

But of course, that'd only be one defenseman, I'm considering that the legal defenseman is dead in the water as corporations have taken over our governments and institutions.

The alternative is to fight dire with fire and use LLMs to do the same to their proprietary code then license it as GPL.