You can, in fact, be pursued both civilly and criminally for fraud.
Your admissions here are enough that if you tried to contribute to any of my own Open Source projects, I would reject your contributions, and if I had accepted any prior ones I would pursue legal remedies.
I’d really like to know the specific legal remedies you’d pursue, assuming that I had contributed to one of your projects, based on this hacker news thread.
Can you stop LARPing and walk me through it? Please?
You stated that you will fraudulently misrepresent the origin of contributions you make to projects if you feel like it, and that nobody has any recourse. That’s you LARPing, by thinking there’s no recourse for fraud.
First of all, I don’t take anonymous or pseudonymous contributions to any of my projects, so if you had made any contributions I would have your real-world identity. That should tell you right away that recourse is possible.
Then, if I learned or had reasonable suspicion that your real-world identity mapped to Hacker News user “orf,” I would instruct my attorney to send a formal contributor agreement to you to sign within a certain period of time that certifies that you are indeed the sole author of all of the content you submitted to the project, and that you did not copy it from another codebase without proper attribution or license, or use an LLM to write it.
If you refused to sign such an agreement, or signed it and were discovered to be lying, I would file a lawsuit for the cost of having having to remove your contributions for possible fraudulent misrepresentation of their origin, for the cost of having to hire one or more developers to recreate any any important downstream work that depended upon your contributions using clean-room techniques, and for punitive damages to ensure you were dissuaded from making fraudulent misrepresentations in the future.
That’s not LARPing, that’s what any business will do in the event of a possible breach of contract. Just because many open source projects don’t have someone like me involved with the financial resources to pursue such a suit as far as necessary doesn’t mean that none do.
You’d send me a contributor agreement, after I’ve contributed, to retroactively ask if I used a LLM to write the code, and if I refused you’d then sue me for nebulous ill-defined damages and for breaching a non-existent contract?
So in your head, I could contribute a change that introduces a bug and as a result you could sue me for the time it took you to fix it?
…
Are you OK?
I was hoping for something with a “I’m a big strong serious tough guy” vibe but that’s a bit much. However I guess you can file a civil case for practically anything in some countries, and if you’re retired/unemployed maybe writing this kind of internet police fan-fiction is considered fun?
Do another one, this time where it’s not thrown out as a clearly frivolous suit with no legal basis.
You broke the site guidelines repeatedly in this thread, including by crossing into all sorts of personal attacks. I realize that you were provoked, but you were also provoking.
We've actually been asking you not to do this for years. This is bad:
I'm not going to ban you for this episode because everyone goes on tilt sometimes. But if you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and do what it takes to recalibrate so that you're using the site as intended going forward, we'd be grateful.
No, you’re still either being intentionally obtuse or unintentionally clueless.
A condition of making a contribution to one of my projects is that you haven’t used an LLM to create that contribution. By making a contribution, you are agreeing to this restriction, even without having any formal document signed.
If I then found out that you may have defrauded the project by lying about the origin of your contribution—say because you said openly and publicly “I would just lie about using an LLM”—then I would first give you a chance to declare that no, really, you didn’t commit fraud in these cases because even though you publicly said you would just lie, I’m betting that you wouldn’t lie in signing a multipage contract with specific penalties for breach.
If you wouldn’t sign that contract, then I would sue you to address the damage your fraud caused the project, which would include removing all of your contributions and anything depending upon them from not just the present codebase but the project history, as well as documenting and hiring someone from outside the project to clean-room recreate anything I deem important that did depend upon them.
These damages are not nebulous or ill-defined: Because of the untrustworthy provenance of your contributions, they *must* be removed, and they also taint anything dependent upon them.
In all of your replies on this topic you really sound like a teenager who hasn’t quite understood that your actions really can have consequences.
If you look into why it was historically very difficult to find GNU emacs code for older versions, it’s because of a situationexactly like this: Stallman just copied some code from Unipress (Gosling) emacs into GNU emacs, presumably thinking he could get away with the copyright violation. (He evidently hadn’t learned from getting smacked down for directly copying Symbolics code into the LMI codebase.) The end result is that FSF and mirrors had to stop distributing the versions of GNU emacs containing the Unipress-originated code.
This is not a LARP, this is stuff that actually happens in the software industry including in Open Source, and anyone involved in the industry needs to actually take it seriously because to do otherwise is to invite substantial liability.
You broke the site guidelines repeatedly in this thread, including by crossing into quite vicious personal attack. I realize that you were provoked, but you were also provoking.
I'm not going to ban you for this episode because everyone goes on tilt sometimes. But if you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and do what it takes to recalibrate so that you're using the site as intended going forward, we'd be grateful.
Surely you know that you can't do this on HN. "sociopathic piece of shit [...] Do the world a favor and remove yourself" isn't just bannable, it's 100x what we'd ban an account for.
You've been a good user generally* so I'm going to put this down to the unfortunate circumstances of this thread, but please don't do it again.
What about IBM i and z/OS, and Stratus VOS, and Burroughs MCP, and Tandem GUARDIAN, and VxWorks and OS-9 and… These all not only still exist but run huge transaction volume (for the mainframe and minicomputer systems) and run a huge amount of embedded systems (for the embedded OSes).
If you’re going to lie and say there was no LLM involved, what else are you going to lie about? Copying code from another codebase with incompatible license terms, perhaps?
I would say people should be wary of any contributions whatsoever from a filthy fucking liar.
Nothing? Everything? Does it fucking matter? Assigning trust across a boundary like this is stupid, and that’s my point.
Oh, would you just accept my blatantly, verbatim copied-from-another-codebase-and-relicensed PR just because I said “I solemnly swear this is not blatantly, verbatim copied from another codebase and relicensed”?
That’s on you for stupidly assigning any trust to the author of the change. It’s the internet: nobody knows you’re a dog.
> Oh, would you just accept my blatantly, verbatim copied-from-another-codebase-and-relicensed PR just because I said “I solemnly swear this is not blatantly, verbatim copied from another codebase and relicensed”?
At that point you've proven intention, meaning you'll get the chance to argue your viewpoint in front of a judge.
Many major projects now require a signed DCO with a real name. That can be a nickname if you have a reasonable online presence under that name, but generally it has to identify you as an individual.
So you wouldn't sign it as "xXImADogOnTheInternet86Xx", but as "Tom Forbes (orf)".
And even if there won't be direct legal consequences, it'd certainly affect your ability to contribute to this or other projects in the future.
I'm really struggling to understand why you would burn down a decade+ old reputation over this particular issue. Is this really the hill you wanted to die on?
It’s an abstract argument with one pretty clear point that you can’t seem to grasp: people lie, on the internet, all the time. Any system, policy or discussion that pretends this isn’t the case is worthless.
This is not an abstract argument, you are showing a willingness to do the wrong thing in spite of being told not to, repeatedly, by many other participants here. I see only two things here:
(1) you would lie
(2) you fundamentally don't understand the concept of consent
> "I’ll make a change any way I choose, upright, sideways, using AI. My choice. Not theirs."
The fact that other people would lie is besides the point: those other people would get the exact same treatment if found out. Whether or not they would be found out is moot, it is the act of lying and ignoring consent that makes this what it is: asshole behavior. By extension anybody that practices this behavior is an asshole as well and by extension of that tying your own rep to people that would behave like that makes you an asshole and I highly doubt that that was your intention.
So now you've - over endless comments - shown that you fundamentally don't get this very important concept. Yes, people lie. But there are mechanisms for dealing with liars. Misrepresentation and fraud are serious things. Lawsuits, fines and in an extreme case jail, but on a more immediate level ostracizing. It makes you as a person into an undesirable. It also makes the world as a whole a worse place to live in, which is why such behavior is strongly discouraged, even if it is possible.
That's why we don't structurally go around clubbing old ladies over the head as a revenue model, not because we can't do it or because it would be acted upon by the law (that's for the few who don't get it) but because it is simply a bad thing to do. It is a matter of ethics. That's why if an open source project has a 'No AI' policy you either abide by the policy or you can expect massive backlash.
To think that you could do this and even should do this to make the point is as stupid as walking out and grabbing some old lady's hand bag to prove that it can be done: you are hurting an innocent to prove your point and it will cause a reaction that is at a minimum proportional to what you did and worst case you will be made an example of. This can be the proverbial career ending move. If you are Elon level rich and your inner asshole seeks a way out then yes, you could probably do it. But for normal folks such behavior is highly discouraged. Actions usually have consequences.
Finally: open source is a massive gift to society. The whole reason you can use AI in the first place is because that gift got abused in a way that open source contributors did not anticipate. If you're going around to pollute open source with AI contributions to effectively karma farm you have to wonder why you are so intent on doing that. Is it your purpose to destroy open source? Or is it just because you enjoy destroying stuff in general? I don't see any other options, this is a pathology and it would do you good to introspect on this for a bit instead of to respond with yet another ill conceived reply digging yourself in further. You've gone from 'mildly annoying' to 'wouldn't work with this person for any amount of money because they are a massive liability' in the space of 15 comments. I hope it was worth it to you.
This is a lot of words and I’m honestly not sure it’s worth reading. At a skim it seems naive at best, at worst a pretty stupid, pearl-clutching interpretation of the discussion.
> If you're going around to pollute open source with AI contributions to effectively karma farm you have to wonder why you are so intent on doing that? Is it your purpose to destroy open source? Or is it just because you enjoy destroying stuff in general? I don't see any other options, this is a pathology and it would do you good to introspect on this for a bit instead of to respond with yet another ill conceived reply digging yourself in further
Just in case you misunderstood things (it’s easy when you get so upset about trivial arguments on the internet!), I don’t use AI when contributing to open source projects.
Thanks for the imaginary psychoanalysis though I guess.
You not only broke the site guidelines badly with this comment, you actually escalated how bad the thread was by quite a margin. Please don't do that.
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it. Note this one: "Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead."
Lying that you didn’t use an LLM when told that contributions made using LLMs are banned does indeed make you a sociopath. Whether you have also commit sexual assault is an independent axis, but when someone shows such blatant disregard for boundaries and consent, it does raise questions.
Real people in the real world understand that rules don’t simply cease to exist because there’s no technical means of guaranteeing their obedience. You simply ask people to follow them, and to affirm that they’re following them whether explicitly or implicitly, and then mete out severe social consequences for being a filthy fucking liar.
There’s this thing called “honor” where if you tell someone that they need to affirm their contribution is their own work and not created with an LLM, most people most of the time will tell the truth—especially if the “no LLMs” requirement is clearly stated up front.
You’re basically saying that a “no-LLMs” rule doesn’t matter, because dishonorable people exist. That’s not how most people work, and that’s not how rules work.
When we encounter a sociopath or liar, we point them out and run them out of our communities before they can do more damage, we don’t just give up and tolerate or even welcome them.
The simplest refutation of your point of view is, who or what is responsible if the work submission is wrong?
It will always be the person’s, never the computer’s. Conveniently, AI always acts as if it has no skin in the game… because it literally and figuratively doesn’t… so for people to treat it like it does, should be penalized
You sound like someone who has literally zero understanding as to why that is a ridiculous comparison.
There are a thousand and one ways that I participate when building something with LLM assistance. Everything from ORIGINATING AN IDEA TO BEGIN WITH, to working on a thorough spec for it, to ensuring tests are actually valid, to asking for specific designs like hexagonal design, to specific things like benchmarks... literally ALL OF THE INITIATIVE IS MINE, AND ALL OF THE SUCCESS/FAILURE CONSEQUENCES ARE MINE, AND THAT IS ULTIMATELY ALL THAT MATTERS
Please head towards a different career if you now have a stupid and contrived excuse not to continue working with the machines, because you sound like a whining child
And you're not answering the question, because you know it would end your point: WHO OR WHAT IS RESPONSIBLE IF THE CODE SUCCEEDS OR FAILS?
I started working in the industry when you were able to buy a Lisp Machine new and have been studying AI even longer, and I’ve been very successful in it. I not only know what I’m talking about, I have the experience to back it up.
You sound like someone who’s deeply in denial about exactly how the LLM plagiarism machines work. You really do sound like a student defending themselves against a plagiarism charge by asserting that since they did the work of choosing the text to put into their essay and massaging the grammar so it fit, nobody should care where it came from.
By that definition, every single human who wrote a paper after reading a source document is a “plagiarism machine”
and I’m 53 and well remember Symbolics from freshman year at Cornell, in fact my application essay to it was about fuzzy logic (AI-tangential) and probably got me in, so I too am quite familiar
i’m also quite good at debate. the flaw in your logic is that plagiarism requires accountability and no machine can be accountable, only the human that used it, ergo, it is still the work of the human, because the human values, the human vets, the human initiates, and the human gains or loses based on the combined output, end of story; accelerated thought is still thought, and anyway, if a machine can replicate thought, then it wasn’t particularly original to begin with
Tell me, how have laws “caught up with” “the [RIAA…] throwing threats around sharing MP3s?” So far as I know that’s still considered copyright infringement and the person doing it, if caught, can be liable for very substantial statutory damages.
It sounds like you really can’t handle being told “no, you can’t use an LLM for this” by someone else, even if they have every right to do so. You should probably talk to your therapist about that.
“Taint” has been a term of art in Open Source for decades. That you don’t know this reveals your ignorance, not any sort of cleverness.
LLMs regurgitate their training data. If they’re generating code, they’re not modeling the syntax of a language to solve a problem, they’re reproducing code they ingested, code that is covered by copyright. Just regurgitating that code via an LLM rather than directly from your editor’s clipboard does not somehow remove that copyright.
It’s clear you think you should be allowed to use LLMs to do whatever you want. Fortunately there are smarter people than you out there who recognize that there are situations where their use is not advised.
You've unfortunately been breaking the site guidelines quite a lot already, and not only in this thread. Would you mind reviewing them and using HN as intended? We'd be grateful:
Indeed, you have to prove that the LLM is generating code from a specification. Right now they don’t do that; what they do is regurgitate portions of their training data based on correlations with input tokens.
Put the programmer’s reference for the Digital Equipment DEQNA QBus Ethernet adapter in your favorite slop tool and tell it to make a C or C++ implementation for an emulator, and you know what you get? Code from SIMH. That’s not “generating,” that’s “copying.”
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