Please remove it if unallowed
I see alot of people in here who get mad at AI generated code and I am wondering why. I wrote a couple of bash scripts with the help of chatGPT and if anything, I think its great.
Now, I obviously didnt tell it to write the entire code by itself. That would be a horrible idea, instead, I would ask it questions along the way and test its output before putting it in my scripts.
I am fairly competent in writing programs. I know how and when to use arrays, loops, functions, conditionals, etc. I just dont know anything about bash’s syntax. Now, I could have used any other languages I knew but chose bash because it made the most sense, that bash is shipped with most linux distros out of the box and one does not have to install another interpreter/compiler for another language. I dont like Bash because of its, dare I say weird syntax but it made the most sense for my purpose so I chose it. Also I have not written anything of this complexity before in Bash, just a bunch of commands in multiple seperate lines so that I dont have to type those one after another. But this one required many rather advanced features. I was not motivated to learn Bash, I just wanted to put my idea into action.
I did start with internet search. But guides I found were lacking. I could not find how to pass values into the function and return from a function easily, or removing trailing slash from directory path or how to loop over array or how to catch errors that occured in previous command or how to seperate letter and number from a string, etc.
That is where chatGPT helped greatly. I would ask chatGPT to write these pieces of code whenever I encountered them, then test its code with various input to see if it works as expected. If not, I would ask it again with what case failed and it would revise the code before I put it in my scripts.
Thanks to chatGPT, someone who has 0 knowledge about bash can write bash easily and quickly that is fairly advanced. I dont think it would take this quick to write what I wrote if I had to do it the old fashioned way, I would eventually write it but it would take far too long. Thanks to chatGPT I can just write all this quickly and forget about it. If I want to learn Bash and am motivated, I would certainly take time to learn it in a nice way.
What do you think? What negative experience do you have with AI chatbots that made you hate them?
Yeah. I’m thinking more along the lines of research and open models than anything to do with OpenAI. Fair use, above all else, generally requires that the derivative work not threaten the economic viability of the original and that’s categorically untrue of ChatGPT/Copilot which are marketed and sold as products meant to replace human workers.
The clean room development analogy is definitely an analogy I can get behind, but raises further questions since LLMs are multi stage. Technically, only the tokenization stage will “see” the source code, which is a bit like a “clean room” from the perspective of subsequent stages. When does something stop being just a list of technical requirements and veer into infringement? I’m not sure that line is so clear.
I don’t think the generative copyright thing is so straightforward since the model requires a human agent to generate the input even if the output is deterministic. I know, for example, Microsoft’s Image Generator says that the images fall under creative Commons, which is distinct from public domain given that some rights are withheld. Maybe that won’t hold up in court forever, but Microsoft’s lawyers seem to think it’s a bit more nuanced than “this output can’t be copyrighted”. If it’s not subject to copyright, then what product are they selling? Maybe the court agrees that LLMs and monkeys are the same, but I’m skeptical that that will happen considering how much money these tech companies have poured into it and how much the United States seems to bend over backwards to accommodate tech monopolies and their human rights violations.
Again, I think it’s clear that commerical entities using their market position to eliminate the need for artists and writers is clearly against the spirit of copyright and intellectual property, but I also think there are genuinely interesting questions when it comes to models that are themselves open source or non-commercial.
The human brain is compartmentised: you can damage a part and lose the ability to recognizes faces, or name tools. Presumably it can be seen as multi-stage too but would that be a defense? All we can do is look for evidence of copyright infringement in the output, or circumstantial evidence in the input.
I’m not sure the creativity of writing a prompt means you were creative for creating the output. Even if it appears your position is legal you can still lose in court. I think Microsoft is hedging their bets that there will be president to validate their claim of copyright.
There are a few Creative Commons licenses but most actually don’t prevent commercial use (the ShareAlike is like the copyleft in GPL for code). Even if the media output was public domain and others are free to copy/redistribute that doesn’t prevent an author selling public domain works (just harder). Code that is public domain isn’t easily copied as the software is usually shared without it as a binary file.