> Generative AI for source code learns from developers - who mostly publish their source with licenses that allow this.

As far as I'm concerned, not at all. FOSS code that I have written is not intended to enrich LLM companies and make developers of closed source competition more effective. The legal situation is not clear yet.

I'm not sure how valid it is to view artwork differently than source code for this purpose.

1. There is tons of public domain or similarly licensed artwork to learn from, so there's no reason a generative AI for art needs to have been trained on disallowed content anymore than a code generating one.

2. I have no doubt that there exist both source code AIs that have been trained on code that had licenses disallowing such use and art AIs have that been trained only on art that allows such use. So, it feels flawed to just assume that AI code generation is in the clear and AI art is in the wrong.

> rightfully criticised because it steals from artists. Generative AI for source code learns from developers

The double standard here is too much. Notice how one is stealing while the other is learning from? How are diffusion models not "learning from all the previous art"? It's literally the same concept. The art generated is not a 1-1 copy in any way.

"Mostly" is doing some heavy lifting there. Even if you don't see a problem with reams of copyleft code being ingested, you're not seeing the connection? Trusting the companies that happily pirated as many books as they could pull from Anna's Archive and as much art as they could slurp from DeviantArt, pixiv, and imageboards? The GP had the insight that this doesn't get called out when it's hidden, but that's the whole point. Laundering of other people's work at such a scale that it feels inevitable or impossible to stop is the tacit goal of the AI industry. We don't need to trip over ourselves glorifying the 'business model' of rampant illegality in the name of monopoly before regulations can catch up.

> The quality suffers in both cases

According to your omnivision?

I really don't agree with this argument because copying and learning are so distinct. If I write in a famous author's style style and try to pass my work off as theirs, everyone agrees that's unethical. But if I just read a lot of their work and get a sense of what works and doesn't in fiction, then use that learning to write fiction in the same genre, everyone agrees that my learning from a better author is fair game. Pretty sure that's the case even if my work cuts into their sales despite being inferior.

The argument seems to be that it's different when the learner is a machine rather than a human, and I can sort of see the 'if everyone did it' argument for making that distinction. But even if we take for granted that a human should be allowed to learn from prior art and a machine shouldn't, this just guarantees an arms race for machines better impersonating humans, and that also ends in a terrible place if everyone does it.

If there's an aspect I haven't considered here I'd certainly welcome some food for thought. I am getting seriously exasperated at the ratio of pathos to logos and ethos on this subject and would really welcome seeing some appeals to logic or ethics, even if they disagree with my position.

Is there a OSS licence that excludes LLM?

> Generative AI for source code learns from developers - who mostly publish their source with licenses that allow this.

I always believed GPL allowed LLM training, but only if the counterparty fulfills its conditions: attribution (even if not for every output, at least as part of the training set) and virality (the resulting weights and inference/training code should be released freely under GPL, or maybe even the outputs). I have not seen any AI company take any steps to fulfill these conditions to legally use my work.

The profiteering alone would be a sufficient harm, but it's the replacement rhetoric that adds insult to injury.

> The use of generative AI for art is being rightfully criticised because it steals from artists. Generative AI for source code learns from developers - who mostly publish their source with licenses that allow this.

This reasoning is invalid. If AI is doing nothing but simply "learning from" like a human, then there is no "stealing from artists" either. A person is allowed to learn from copyright content and create works that draw from that learning. So if the AI is also just learning from things, then it is not stealing from artists.

On the other hand if you claim that it is not just learning but creating derivative works based on the art (thereby "stealing" from them), then you can't say that it is not creating derivative works of the code it ingests either. And many open source licenses do not allow distribution of derivative works without condition.

Most OS licenses requires attribution, so AI for code generation violates licenses the same way AI for image generation does. If one is illegal or unethical, then the other would be too.

No, the only difference is that image generators are a much fuller replacement for "artists" than for programmers currently. The use of quotation marks was not meant to be derogatory, I sure many of them are good artists, but what they were mostly commissioned for was not art - it was backgrounds for websites, headers for TOS updates, illustrations for ads... There was a lot more money in this type of work the same way as there is a lot more money in writing react sites, or scripts to integrate active directory logins in to some ancient inventory management system than in developing new elegant algorithms.

But code is complicated, and hallucinations lead to bugs and security vulnerabilities so it's prudent to have programmers check it before submitting to production. An image is an image. It may not be as nice as a human drawn one, but for most cases it doesn't matter anyway.

The AI "stole" or "learned" in both cases. It's just that one side is feeling a lot more financial hardship as the result.

Ok great, but you don't really say much.

It's not meant to be clever. They have a rule that says, in its entirety, "Games developed using generative AI are strictly ineligible for nomination."

Do they count procedural level generation as generative AI? Am I crazy that this doesn't seem clear to me?

That's all I've found as well, but, personally, I find that a bit unclear, for a couple of reasons. First, are they saying that the game itself can use generative AI, but it can't be used in the development of the game? So that would mean that if the game itself generates random levels using a generative AI approach, that's allowed, but, if I were to use that same code to pre-generate and manually modify the levels, that wouldn't be allowed because I'm now using generative AI as part of the development process? I.e., I can create a game that itself is a generative AI, but I can't use that AI I've built as part of the development of a downstream game?

And, second, what counts as generative AI? A lot of people wouldn't include procedural generative techniques in that definition, but, AFAIK, there's no consensus on whether traditional procedural approaches should be described as "generative AI".

And a third thing is, if I use an IDE that has generative AI, even for something as simple as code completion, does that run afoul of the rule? So, if I used Visual Studio with its default IntelliCode settings, that's not allowed because it has a generative AI-based autocomplete?

You get why people hate AI when AI boosters talk like this, right?

> It's a double standard because people don't think of code as creative.

It's more like the code is the scaffolding and support, the art and experience is the core product. When you're watching a play you don't generally give a thought to the technical expertise that went into building the stage and the hall and its logistics, you are only there to appreciate the performance itself - even if said performance would have been impossible to deliver without the aforementioned factors.

Go outside, speak to people, speak to an artist, touch grass, it will help you dramatically.

Also pretty sure some programmers like Jonathan Blow avoid AI generated code like the plague.

Please, LLM code assistants are ubiquitous enough nowadays with inline code suggestions in vscode on by default. It's an extremely safe claim.

Only when it comes to graphics/art. When it comes to LLMs for code, many people do some amazing mental gymnastics to make it seem like the two are totally different, and one is good while the other is bad.

Are you sure? A survey by the YouTuber Games And AI found that the vast majority of indie game developers are either using, or considering using AI. Like around 90%.

Wow you do mentally group things efficiently, that much I can say.

Just like feminism when it was starting, back then millions of women believed it was silly for them to vote, and those who believed otherwise had to get loud to get more on their side, and that's one example, similar things have happened with hundreds other things that we now take for granted, so it's value as judgment measure it's very low by itself alone.

Just as they were told to like them in the first place. A lot of this is driven that way because most of the public only has a surface-level understanding of the issues.

I think this comparison makes little sense, as in the case of AI there is some actual impactful substance backing the hype.

NFTs have way less downsides than LLMs and GenAI, since the main downside was just wasting electricity. I didn't have to worry about someone cloning my voice and begging my mom on the phone for money.

I agree, even though I'm not in favour of gen ai. It was a terrible mistake letting placeholder assets get out in the final release, but it shouldn't actually count as shipping AI-generated content in your product.

The problem of allowing "placeholder AI assets" is that any shipped asset found to be AI is going to be explained away as being "just a placeholder". How are we supposed to confirm that they never meant to ship the game like this? All we know is that they shipped the game with AI assets.

I don't find it that surprising. The creatives that are against generative AI aren't against it only because it produces slop. They are against it because it uses past human creative labor, without permission or compensation, to generate profit for the companies building the models which they do not redistribute to the authors of that creative labor. They are also against it due to environmental impact.

In that view, it doesn't matter whether you use it for placeholder or final assets. You paying your ChatGPT membership makes you complicit with the exploitation of that human creative output, and use of resources.

Generating a brick wall texture using an AI should be acceptable as well, even when it's not a placeholder.

You think many are built without any assistance for coding? My impression was that people were mostly concerned about game assets like graphics and music

Exactly like "AI"!