I’m genuinely surprised to see this not discussed more by the FOSS community. There are so many ways to blow past the GPL now:
1. File by file rewrite by AI (“change functions and vars a bit”)
2. One LLM writes a diff language (or pseudo code) version of each function that a diff LLM translates back into code and tests for input/output parity
The real danger is that this becomes increasingly undetectable in closed source code and can continue to sync with progress in the GPLed repo.
I don’t think any current license has a plausible defense against this sort of attack.
I’ve never delved fully into IP law, but wouldn’t these be considered derivative works? They’re basically just reimplementing exactly the same functionality with slightly different names?
This would be different from the “API reimplementation” (see Google vs Oracle) because in that case, they’re not reusing implementation details, just the external contract.
"change functions and bars a bit" isn't a rewrite. Anything where the LLM had access to the original code isn't a rewrite. This would just be a derivative work.
However most of the industry willfully violates the GPL without even trying such tricks anyway so there are certainly issues
(1) sounds like a derivative work, but (2) is an interesting AI-simulacrum of a clean room implementation IF the first LLM writes a specification and not a translation.
#1 is already possible and always has been. I never heard of a case of anyone actually trying it. #2 is too nitpicky and unnecessarily costly for LLMs. It would be better to just ask it to generate a spec and tests based on the original, them create a separate implementation based on that. A person can do that today free and clear. If LLMs will be able to do this, we will just need to cope. Perhaps the future is in validating software instead of writing it.
1. File by file rewrite by AI (“change functions and vars a bit”)
2. One LLM writes a diff language (or pseudo code) version of each function that a diff LLM translates back into code and tests for input/output parity
The real danger is that this becomes increasingly undetectable in closed source code and can continue to sync with progress in the GPLed repo.
I don’t think any current license has a plausible defense against this sort of attack.