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0 pointsinfamouscow19d ago0 comments

It's only fraud if a person signed their name stating such.

Their name being attached to the commit is itself, irrelevant, as their is no way to submit a patch otherwise. You could use a fake name, but you're just moving this fraud problem around.

You're going to have a hard time convincing anyone that using a tool constitutes fraud. Frankly, it's silly, if not genuinely stupid.

Film photographers in the early 2000s routinely called digital "not real photography" and Photoshop "cheating" because you could delete bad shots and fix everything later. Traditional musicians and critics dismissed drum machines, synthesizers, and autotune as soulless tools.

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eschaton19d ago· 2 in thread

Intent and custom both matter quite a bit in law. It is customary to treat the name attached to a commit as the copyright holder of any changes represented by that commit, just as it was for the sender of an email containing a patch back when that was how such work was done.

Often this is also spelled out in a project’s contribution guidelines, and some projects have even had more explicit copyright assignment policies they required contributors to agree to, but the lack of such guidelines or assignment policies does not mean the custom as normally observed in the field is irrelevant.

kelnos18d ago

> Intent and custom both matter quite a bit in law.

Indeed, and I'm not aware of any (Western, at least) legal system that would consider it fraud to not disclose that an LLM had generated some code.

I'd like to gently point out that your insistence of fraud here is hurting your overall argument, and is causing people to focus on the language you're using, instead of the substance of what you're trying to say. I do agree with you that people should disclose LLM generation when writing commits. But the way you're going about arguing this "fraud" thing is an unproductive dead end.

eschaton18d ago

The fraud isn’t (directly) in hiding that the LLM generated some code. The fraud is in the (implicit) misrepresentation of ownership of and/or rights to the code.

When you send a patch or pull request to a project, you’re saying (implicitly) that you have the necessary rights to contribute the intellectual property it contains. If you used an LLM to “generate” some of it, that is not necessarily the case.

A similar situation would occur if you agreed to pay someone else to create a patch, and then submitted it under your own name without paying them. Because it’s a work for hire, it’s not yours until they’re paid for it, so you’re fraudulently misrepresenting your rights to that patch to the project. If you did pay the creator, you don’t have to attribute them unless it’s in the contract between you and the creator, or unless the project requires such attribution.

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