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Comment by Etheryte | Hacker News Reader

It's hard to give this take serious thought when just today I built a bunch of utility software I'd been putting off due to lack of time and domain specific knowledge, all by working together with an LLM. Takes some time and back and forth, but it works and does the things I need. It doesn't need to get everything right nor to get it right the first time, humans don't tick either of those boxes either. The value add is already clearly there and it's most likely going to improve over time.

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Chances are the majority of whatever you built has already been built and published as open source by someone somewhere.

This line or reasoning itself has already been stated many times, notably as Saunt Lora's Proposition.

Sure but the person you’re replying to was able to build their thing with no knowledge of that.

You could make the same quip about nearly any piece of software, yet most everyone on HN still has a business or a job. If it exists, but I can't find it or it's too cumbersome to set up or use, it's functionally as good to me as it not existing.

Another way to look at this amazing performance improvement for you in making small tools is you’re just using bits of other people’s work that were lying around on the internet, without licensing, permission, or attribution.

Are you ok with that?

Intellectual property is theft

So what's my incentive to write music(which is free to listen to) if someone can just use it commercially in a game or show with no compensation?

Why would I do character design when Disney could just take it for free and leave me SOL?

You're right, we should get rid of profit too

I mean if I can still make stuff, survive, and society doesnt collapse... sign me up

There are certainly flaws in the current system but I don’t agree all intellectual property is theft.

It’s what lets authors make money from a book without other people ripping them off, to cite one example.

In what way, functionally, is it any different than scouring through StackOverflow and blog posts until you've got whatever thing working?

It’s different because licensed code on github and other websites is different from freely given code snippets on stack overflow.

A blog post is not permission to reproduce code with small changes. Neither is posting it under an open source license which usually require attribution.

quiz question: What's the license of code snippets on stack overflow?

No idea sorry but the implied idea of the site is that people will use answers and snippets without attribution.

Absolutely not the case with other OS code posted online.

It's under CC-BY-SA, which is very incompatible with pretty much everything else.

That’s funny, I guess everyone just ignores that, but legally it means AI should not be trained on it either since it requires attribution, I wonder was it always that way?

I think AI companies are just trying to ignore IP laws entirely, perhaps they’ll get away with it but there is bound to be a case where a small tool or game is 90% identical to a source reference at some point given the way these LLMs work.

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