There would a lot of problems with the feasibility and enforceability of such a project, but putting that aside…
Something like this would be interesting because it would make the other models seem even less ethical.
It would no longer have the problem of being based on stolen works, but it would still have all of its other problems, such as frequent hallucinations and logical errors, higher energy costs than software built for purpose, and the really big one, evident cognitive decline in frequent users.
Barring environmental concerns, no, I don’t think so.
It would still make junior developers stupid.
Didn’t people say StackOverflow did this to junior devs (perhaps to a lesser extent)?
Would eliminating one item from a long list of problems delete all the other problems from the list?
the problems with AI can be easily mitigated, they just aren’t for various reasons.
You can have an AI trained on public domain content, running on electricity from renewable sources and locally hosted. What’s the problem then?
Even if the electricity was renewable sources, there’s the opportunity cost. You spent that electricity on AI instead of something more useful and immediate.
I assure you that electricity was going to be wasted on some dumb fuck thing anyway.
“Various reasons” being the intractability and absolute dominance of capitalism. People are in a race to dominate the world, as such they can’t be bothered with writing public domain software, or waiting for renewable energy to come online. They can’t even wait for hardware to be built before buying it!
I mean, it’s kind of like asking a herd of zebras, “would lions be so bad if they just ate grass instead?” Like, sure, but the reality is that lions will always eat meat just as inevitably as AI will always be horrible under capitalism.
yeah, it would be a large use of resources for not much gain
I think what the current LLM clusterfuck is showing is that our little world or copy left and copy right we duct taped together since the printing press is all a bit silly.
“I put millions of lines of code in a blender and kept re-rolling the output until I got something that kind of does what I want it to” will always be less efficient and more error-prone than a competent dev or team building with specific intent.
People who can’t tell the difference approve bloated code with myriad vulnerabilities. Often, AI output doesn’t actually do what it pretends to do.
If you’ve worked in any IT project, you will remember the most common issues: unclear requirements, scope creep, silos or misaligned incentives.
For AI projects, you can add to the list: “We’re not even sure this thing works the same way every time” and you’ve got a perfect storm for failure.
https://towardsdatascience.com/why-ai-projects-fail/
An annoying trend I’ve noticed in articles like this is that they still insist the AI is not to blame. Phrases like “devs love the technology,” fuck no I don’t. Or “95% of AI projects fail, but yours will totally succeed if you do it right”. It feels exactly like how the lottery exploits people’s hopes.
The steps required to make AI function are too costly to make AI worthwhile in almost every case. It was a stupid scam that too many companies fell for.
There is a class of devs that do love the technology. It’s the same class of devs that also loved blockchain and crypto. The class of devs that fail another startup every other year.
Breaking News: High failure rates reported in early stage Oldowan startups make millennials reconsider tool use.
This just seems like anti-computer evangelism from the 1950’s and 1960’s, and anti internet stuff in the 90’s, being repurposed.
I’m working with anti-Manichean attacks repurposing old anti-Marcionite attacks at the moment, same stuff.
Bronze tooling is more than fine to get stuff done.
“AI” is more of a scam than a tool.
We do not yet have artificial intelligence. At all. They only call it that to scam idiots.
It’s been an academic discipline since the 1950’s and a work in progress since at least Ada Lovelace.
Calling AI a scam for idiots is fair enough: but please include writing, machines and computers there too.
World class moron Linus Torvadls on the matter 14 July 2026:
"AI is a tool, just like other tools we use. And it’s clearly a useful one.
It may not have been that “clearly” even just a year ago, but it’s no longer in question today."***
We have writing. We have machines. We have computers.
We do not have AI.
We don’t have AI?
What year are you posting from?
We have LLMs. We do not have artificial intelligence. They call it that, but it’s all marketing. It’s not remotely humanlike.
I keep thinking that we would be in a much better place if datasets were curated and models trained by respectable institutions like universities and foundations, I would “hate AI” a lot less and just use the LLMs that themselves have done nothing wrong. (Not anthropomorphizing, meaning “they’re just a bunch of quite cool math”)
When the tech was new I was really hopeful for something that could act as an interactive research and literature library. Conceptually a machine that generates responses based on an overview of a field of science or history that it’s specialized for could have been pretty useful to people.
But no, I can’t make sex talk with that or use it to generate porn images of people I know so guess we’d better hook it up to social media and make it run on engagement. Nothing is economically useful unless it’s fleecing the mentally ill
I think the “copyright” shit is the biggest non-issue with LLMs. Abolish intellectual property. If you put a piece of software out there, you shouldn’t be able to stop anyone else from using it for the public good.
The issues I take with what’s being called “AI” right now is the volume of slop people have to drudge through. It particularly makes it hard to look for new software as there’s so many vibe-coded projects getting published then abandoned. It’s the aggressive and obnoxious marketing campaign that insists I pay for your shitty SaaS LLM, that I don’t get to keep or run on my own machine, that I’m supposed to use for all sorts of tasks where I don’t want a non-deterministic probabilistic machine (people use LLMs to do number-crunching?? you’re using a machine designed to do math, interfacing with the one part of it that can’t do math!). And it’s the ridiculous computing power people are using to do activities that do not require anywhere near that amount of power if they just do things the normal way. I could not care less about “copyright”. Nobody should be able to own a codebase anyway.
Agreed, the concept of copyright itself is problematic. The flip on this one boggles me. People are constantly arguing that copyright is bad every time Disney or some company use it to make money. Now they’re arguing that copyright is good and LLMs should respect it.
The concept is fine. If you create a popular character you’d be pretty pissed when an obvious copy suddenly appears and takes all your money.
The law is bad because of Disney successfully convincing law makers to extend the time range.
Would it ‘hallucinate’ any less often?
I think AI’s a pretty good candidate for the Great Filter. There’s a quote I think about often.
Each and every individual in such a species must eventually become capable of destroying their entire species at any time. Yet they must learn to control themselves to the degree that they can survive even such deadly insight. And frankly, they’re the only ones we really want to see leaving their solar systems. - Conversation with God by “Harry Stottle”
We just need to realize the profit that can be achieved by destroying entire alien species.
Given that FOSS licenses are premised on copyright, yes, the same ails would still exist: 1) AI washing of licenses (including transforming one license into another), and 2) the vagueness of whether LLM outputs can be copyright, which threatens the validity of a FOSS license upon that output.
The first ail can be seen even without LLMs: the BSD variants have gone through great pains to remove GPL-licensed code from their base repositories. This basically involves reimplementing utilities and functionality from scratch, using only the ideas that are in common with the equivalent GPL code, but never copying that code directly. This is properly considered a reimplementation, which can then be licensed permissively (eg MIT license).
If an LLM were to train on GPL code but the output were licensed with MIT, then that could be a GPL violation because GPL mandates that remixes continue to keep the GPL license.
Maybe you could avoid this fate by limiting the LLM to only train on permissively licensed code. So that it would be permissive licenses going in, and permissive licenses coming out. No GPL problems here. But that brings us to ail #2.
Some jurisdictions have rules against granting copyright for computer-generated works, in the same vein as works generated by non-humans (eg a macaque). If this LLM fell into this situation, then the output is not copyrightable. And if there is no copyright, a license like MIT or GPL simply cannot apply, because its terms couldn’t be enforced.
Well, to be clear, the copyright parts of those licenses would be unenforceable. Some parts of the license may still be enforced under a contracts claim. But in any case, the things we refer to as “FOSS licenses” cannot attach to uncopyrightable works (with the possible exception of the CC0 license, which is essentially the absence of any license whatsoever).
EDIT: you did say “consenting projects” and consent is key. If such consent came in the form of a license grant, then yes, that would be enthusiastic consent for the LLM to generate output, which solves ail #1. But for most multi-person projects, getting consent from everyone is difficult or impossible. The Linux kernel is one such example, having so many contributors that some of them are already dead. Death means they cannot consent, but their copyright grant lives on. And so practically speaking, obtaining enthusiastic consent for whole projects is a challenge, which drastically limits the prospects for such an LLM from the very beginning.
It would still be problematic, yes. You can’t copyright the output of an LLM, so you can’t actually enforce any license on it.
