Re: Proposal -- Interpretation of DFSG on Artificial Intelligence (AI) Models

Hi,

On Tue, 2025-04-22 at 17:16 +0000, Holger Levsen wrote:
> On Sat, Apr 19, 2025 at 01:56:17PM -0400, M. Zhou wrote:
> > We acknowledge that releasing useful AI models under permissive licenses like
> > MIT/Expat and Apache-2.0 is a generous act from the original authors due to
> > huge costs, and it is a great contribution to the software ecosystem and the
> > society. We sincerely respect the respective authors' work. 
> 
> i'm not sure i can subscribe to this. after all, most if not all "AI" models
> exist because of stealing other peoples work...

So just like Linux only exists by stealing other people's operating
system design? :-)

But the practical effects of passing the GR is probably (among other
things):

a) Removal of OCR software (like tesseract[1])
b) Removal of image recognition software (like opencv[2])
c) Possibly removal of text-to-speech software (like festival[3] or
flite[4])

I'm not sure what it means for other software with weights or similar
data of uncertain origin (say S-boxes in cryptographic algorithms,
possibly pre-set tuning parameters in drivers, who knows) or what
happens if someone manages to use the DFSG document as weights for an
AI model: it would certainly miss training data ;-)

Ansgar

  [1]: https://sources.debian.org/src/tesseract-lang/1%3A4.1.0-2/
  [2]: https://sources.debian.org/src/opencv/4.10.0%2Bdfsg-5/data/haarcascades/haarcascade_fullbody.xml/
  [3]: https://sources.debian.org/src/festival-hi/0.1-11/hindi_NSK_diphone/festvox/hindi_NSK_ene.scm/#L3
  [4]: https://sources.debian.org/src/flite/2.2-7/lang/cmu_us_kal/