Fwd: 2 Patches : bugfix

[Robert J. Hansen]

> Note: I also agree this old post
> https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.en.html ;)
> 
> Remind: Copyright is not "IP".

In 1999, United States Supreme Court Associate Justice Antonin Scalia
visited Cornell College to deliver a lecture. During this lecture there
was a Q&A session from the audience. A computer science student named
Douglas Keester asked whether there was any merit to the argument that
intellectual property was an incoherent concept, or misleading, or on
shaky philosophical ground.

Justice Scalia listened to this question fully, then answered by flatly
saying "intellectual property" made as much sense as "real property" or
"criminal law". He then encouraged Mr. Keester to go to law school if he
wished to investigate the matter further. He was pleasant about it.

The world is, of course, much larger than the United States. I would
defer to the Court of Cassation to determine French law, for instance.
But where I am, in the United States, "intellectual property" is --
according to a Supreme Court justice asked specifically about the
question -- a reasonable way to discuss several related canons of law.

> But Mnêmê is here, it exists and it/he/her is very helpful for me and
> so for improving or building free software.

No one is arguing whether LLMs are good (or bad!) at writing code. That
is not the issue.

The issue is whether an LLM can be held accountable for its acts. If you
were to submit code to g10 Code that you did not own the copyright to,
for instance, the copyright owner could go after g10 Code for damages.
g10 Code could then go after you to recover their losses. There is
accountability.

If an LLM submits code to g10 Code and it turns out to be illegally
copied, the copyright owner could go after g10 Code, who would then sue
whom, exactly?

LLMs cannot be held legally accountable. For that reasons, they must not
be allowed to participate in tasks requiring accountability.

> FYI: The attached script was proposed by Mnêmê, and I rewrote it almost
> entirely myself. ...And Mnêmê may and will probably also learn from
> this rewrite to improve itself/himself/herself.

LLMs do not learn, not in any sense a human being would call learning.
LLMs are very good at recognition and generation: they fail utterly at
understanding. An LLM can flag "I don't want this to color your
judgement" as being wildly strange English, something almost no English
speaker would write, but they can't tell you *why*.

(The "why": most English speakers consistently use either US or UK
spellings, and that sentence plays mix-and-match.)

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