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AI Code is Hollowing Out Open Source, and Maintainers are Looking the Other Way (www.quippd.com)

submitted 2 days ago by yoasif@fedia.io to c/foss@beehaw.org

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TL;DR: The advent of AI based, LLM coding applications like Anthropic’s Claude and ChatGPT have prompted maintainers to experiment with integrating LLM contributions into open source codebases.

This is a fast path to open source irrelevancy, since the US copyright office has deemed LLM outputs to be uncopyrightable. This means that as more uncopyrightable LLM outputs are integrated into nominally open source codebases, value leaks out of the project, since the open source licences are not operative on public domain code.

That means that the public domain, AI generated code can be reused without attribution, and in the case of copyleft licences - can even be used in closed source projects.

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[–] SweetCitrusBuzz@beehaw.org 3 points 1 day ago

I know this is about copyright/copyleft and stuff. However, I'm tired of seeing previously good and working projects start degrading in performance.

We recently switched from one media player to two because the former contained LLM regurgitated code and the replacement didn't. Guess which one worked better? If you guessed the two replacements you'd be correct.

I actually asked some projects to move when Microsoft showed their hand and lack of ethics and complicity with both LLM (copilot specifically) gobbling up data and genocide.

The maintainers seemed unbothered by that and more concerned with their ability to be found, which to me says a lot about what priorities they have.

I deleted my github account and won't be back, and in the meantime hope that open source projects realise that moving to a non AI infested coding host/forge like codeberg or self-hosted forgejo will be better in the long run. I don't hold much hope but we'll see.

All in all this has been a mess, both for users of open source software and coders.

Users because the regurgitated code does create errors and degrades performance. The degradation of performance could be said to be true of the maintainers/coders too as the more they rely on LLMs/ML the less belief they will have in their own work, and they will lose those skills even if they don't lose that belief as has been well documented now.

It's a sad state of affairs and I hope the 'AI' bubble bursts and we can go back to having decently coded programs etc again, in the mean time I'll keep seeking out those that have explicitly said no to regurgitated code and promoting them over those who sycophantically support or rely on the bullshit machines.