It's too simple to say "AI has no intent" just because it has no *feelings*.
Humans are motivated by feelings to do anything. There's no evidence that LLMs have
feelings. But in every other respect they are motivated, as in they do have goals
(programmed to get points measured in some way) *and* take actions to achieve those
goals. We can see that as intention without imagining that they have any internal
conscious experience or feelings. To the extent that it's merely extremely complicated
bunch of process applied to inputs, that much is true about humans as well, so that isn't
a distinction worth emphasizing.
The real question here is whether we grant LLMs some sort of legal status as
entities, and that's an extemely dangerous direction which we should resist.
It's already been a horrific, destabilizing, life-threatening catastrophe to
grant special legal status to corporations! We need to return to having legal
status only for living things (indeed extending to many more species than
humans though).
On 5/27/26 9:02 PM, Lars Noodén via libreplanet-discuss
<[email protected]> wrote:
On 5/27/26 21:56, Jean Louis wrote:
> LLMs are generative synthesis engines that operate on probabilistic
> reasoning, contextual understanding, and semantic compression.
No, LLMs have nothing to do with generation. They merely ingest
'tokens' and recombine sets of them into statistically plausible
combinations. Lots of people get confused about that, perhaps (to be
generous) because of wishful thinking on their part.
> Plagiarism requires intent.
Intent is not a prerequisite for plagiarism as defined in academia over
the ages.
> LLMs do not have any intent.
Agreed, LLMs have no intent. Thus LLMs just plagiarize despite being
automatons. But those who interface with LLMs can have intent. One can
question the intent of those interfacing with LLMs because most people
know, at least on some level, that the 'tokens' are slurped up verbatim
from the WWW at large without attribution.
>> But, yeah, using LLMs to strip the GPL and other software licenses
>> from code, as well as stripping copyright attribution, is a real
>> problem now.
>
> For who? Do you have specific case? You can complain. But let us not
> generalize.
In the context of code, one recent example is the use of LLMs to try to
strip the Chardet project of its license, among quite a few other
similar attacks some more public some less public. Noticeably, the
original code is in the training set so the stripped version can hardly
be described as a cleanroom implementation.
/Lars
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