RE: https://social.coop/@cwebber/116426025287444979

I see myself getting subtooted by various people, and let me clarify what this thread is, and is not. My opinions on LLM usage are more complicated than "good vs bad".

But I have created a scoped analysis here. My opinion is that we are facing a *licensing hygiene crisis* from a situation where we do not and probably will not know the licensing situation of these tools for some time.

There are only two viable scenarios I can see:

- LLM output is unusable and a copyright mess that cannot be incorporated in any FOSS project
- *All* LLM output is effectively in the public domain.

I am willing to accept either one of those, but the lack of knowledge of which situation we are facing makes me concerned about LLM based contributions entering FOSS projects on copyright grounds.

(There are plenty of other debates one can have about LLMs also, I have scoped them out of this particular thread.)

@cwebber wondering if we'll see option 2 tested in the courts after all the "clean room" LLM-generated clones of Claude.

I suspect that's not a court case Anthropic wants. What enterprise wants to buy something that makes their source code public use?

@craignicol The irony indeed is that most corporations don't actually want either of those outcomes. They want a magical outcome where somehow they get to use the tool and continue to both be the gatekeepers but also not need to be concerned with compliance themselves. For me not for thee, etc.

@cwebber given how much the backers talk about wanting moats, I wonder if we'll see some "licencing" agreement similar to the RIAA or MPAA where anyone rich enough to join the club gets unrestricted use, and everyone outside the club gets sued if they make the club members uncomfortable 😨

@cwebber which is of course the worse outcome for open source. Used as inputs for the machine, but need to stay clear of outputs lest it's tainted. But also at risk of being cloned and sued anyway like that singer-songwriter who lost the copyright on her own music.