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I hope this is tested in court and found to be correct
This whole post has a strong ‘Sovereign Citizen’ vibe.
The Windows FOSS part, sure, but unenforceable copyright seems quite possible, but probably not court-tested. I mean, AI basically ignored copyright to train in the first place, and there is precedent for animals not getting copyright for taking pictures.
If it’s not court tested, I’m guessing we can assume a legal theory that breaks all software licensing will not hold up.
Like, maybe the code snippets that are AI-made themselves can be stolen, but not different parts of the project.
That seems a more likely outcome.
I do not give Facebook or any entities associated with Facebook permission to use my pictures, information, messages, or posts, both past and future.
This reminds me of that scene in Breaking Bad where the two morons were talking about how if you ask an undercover cop if they’re cop they legally have to tell you the truth
That’s not even remotely true…
The law is very clear that non-human generated content cannot hold copyright.
That monkey that took a picture of itself is a famous example.
But yes, the OP is missing some context. If a human was involved, say in editing the code, then that edited code can be subject to copyright. The unedited code likely cannot.
Human written code cannot be stripped of copyright protection regardless of how much AI garbage you shove in.
Still, all of this is meaningless until a few court cases happen.
So wait, if my start up does a human written “Hello World” and the rest is piled on AI slop it can’t be stripped of copyright? Or is “Hello World” too generic to hold a copyright at all?
Granted, as you said this all has to be defined and tested in court, I’m just trying to understand where the line as you see it is.
https://www.reinhartlaw.com/news-insights/only-humans-can-be-authors-of-copyrightable-works
https://www.copyright.gov/comp3/chap300/ch300-copyrightable-authorship.pdf
A human must be involved in the creation. A human can combine non-human created things to make something new, but the human must be involved, and the non-human created elements likely lack protection themselves.
“Hello World” is prior art.
Just add it after ai writes everything else then.
deleted by creator
People will believe anything if the icon on the tweet looks authoritative and the grammar is sound.
That sounds like complete bullshit to me. Even if the logic is sound, which I seriously doubt, if you use someone’s code and you claim their license isn’t valid because some part of the codebase is AI generated, I’m pretty sure you’ll have to prove that. Good luck.
I work for a large enterprise firm, our corporate lawyer has told be about this exact scenario so I’m inclined to believe it’s real.
That being said, for established projects it won’t be that hard to prove the non-AI bit because you have a long commit history that predates the tooling.
Even if you were to assume that all commits after a certain date were AI generated, the OP is slightly off in their attestation that any AI code suddenly makes the whole thing public domain, it would only be if a majority of the codebase was AI coded (and provably so).
So yes all the vibe coded shite is a lost cause, but stuff like Windows isn’t in any danger.
I’ll stay sceptical until there is court cases supporting this logic as a precedent.
I think that’s actually quite sensible, our lawyer wasn’t flagging some clear cut legal certainty, he was flagging risk.
Risk can be mitigated, even if the chance of it panning out is slim.
A bit besides the point, but it is pretty crazy to me that we’re moving towards a world where if you create by yourself, you’re outcompeted, but if you use AI like everyone else, you own nothing.
There was a case in which a monkey took a picture and the owner of the camera wanted to publish the photo. Peta sued and lost because an animal can’t hold any copyright as an human author is required for copyright.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_dispute
As you also find in the wikipedia article, this case is used to argue that ai generated content is not by an human author and consequently not copyrightable.
I’d argue that this is a different scenario, as AI is a tool, not a being. At least at this point.
A complex tool, but really just a tool. Without the human input, it can’t do shit.
There’s already rulings on this holding that the prompt for all LLM or image generator isn’t enough to count the result as the human’s expression, thus no copyright (both in USA and other places)
You need both human expression and creative height to get copyright protection
I’d argue that it is wildly different to vide coding.
Exactly. If I use online Photoshop or whatever, and I use the red eye removal tool, I have copyright on that picture. Same if I create a picture from scratch. Just because someone like OpenAI hosts a more complex generator doesn’t mean a whole new class of rules applies.
Whomever uses a tool, regardless of the complexity, is both responsible and benificiary of the result.
Not quite how copyright law works. Photoshop and similar gives you copyright because it captures your expression.
An LLM is more like work-for-hire but unlike a human artist it doesn’t qualify for copyright protection and therefore neither does you
Well, not how USA copyright works, but point well taken. It seems I was too naïve in my understanding of copyright.
If there was an actual civil suit you’d probably be able to subpoena people for that information, and the standard is only more likely than not. I have no idea if the general idea is bullshit, though.
IANAL
You forgot the heart
I ♥️ ANAL
Would that be North African Lawyer, or North American Lawyer?
In any case, we’re splitting the cheque. /s
Are you suggesting that lawyers migrate?
Hmm, it would require a pro hac vice admission.
According to this guy…
Aren’t you all forgetting the core meaning of open source? The source code is not openly accessible, thus it can’t be FOSS or even OSS
This just means microslop can’t enforce their licenses, making it legal to pirate that shit
It’s just the code that’s not under copyright, so if someone leaked it you could legally copy and distribute any parts which are AI generated but it wouldn’t invalidate copyright on the official binaries.
If all the code were AI generated (or enough of it to be able to fill in the blanks), you might be able to make a case that it’s legal to build and distribute binaries, but why would you bother distributing that slop?
Even if it were leaked, it would still likely be very difficult to prove that any one component was machine generated from a system trained on publicly accessible code.
Counterpoint: how do you even prove that any part of the code was AI generated.
Also, i made a script years ago that algorithmically generates python code from user input. Is it now considered AI-generated too?
i made a script years ago that algorithmically generates python code from user input. Is it now considered AI-generated too?
No, because you created the generation algorithm. Any code it generates is yours.
I believe you’re claiming that compiler authors own the software their compiler compiles which is clearly not true.
No way does op own the algorithmically created program based on user input
Not how I understand it, but I’m not a lawyer. The user that uses the script to generate the code can copyright the output and oop can copyright their script (and the output they themself generate). If it worked like you said, it would be trivial to write a script that generates all possible code by enumerating possible programs, then because the script will eventually generate your code, it’s already copyrighted. This appear absurd to me.
If the script copies chunks of code under the copyright of the original script writer, I typically see for those parts that the original owner keeps copyright of those chunks and usually license it in some way to the user. But the code from the user input part is still copyrightable by the user. And that’s that last part that is most interesting for the copyright of AI works. I’m curious how the law will settle on that.
I’m open to counterarguments.
This is a really good point, and it’s making me rethink my own idea about the subject.
While nobody created neural nets and back propagation
Computer output cannot be copyrighted, don’t focus on it being “AI”. It’s not quite so simple, there’s some nuance about how much human input is required. We’ll likely see something about that at some point in court. The frustrating thing is that a lot of this boils down to just speculation until it goes to court.
OP is obviously ignorant of how much tooling has already helped write boiler plate code.
Besides AI code is actually one of the things that’s harder to detect, compared to prose.
And all that said, AI is doing an amazing job writing a lot of the boilerplate TDD tests etc. To pretend otherwise is to ignore facts.
AI can actually write great code, but it needs an incredibly amount of tests wrapped around and a strict architecture that it’s forced to stick to. Yes, it’s far too happy sprinkling magic constants and repeat code, so it needs a considerable amount of support to clean that up … but it’s still vastly faster to write good code with an AI held on a short leash than it is to write good code by hand.
Guess you can’t really prove that, unless you leave comments like “generated by Claude” in it with timestamp and whatnot 😁 Or one can prove that you are unable to get to that result yourself.
So nonsense, yes.
Or one can prove that you are unable to get to that result yourself.
Oh shit… I’ve got terabytes of code I’ve written over the years that I’d be hard-pressed to even begin to understand today. The other day I discovered a folder full of old C++ libraries I wrote 20+ years ago, and I honestly don’t remember ever coding in C++.
There is absolutely no way you wrote terabytes of code lmao.
True enough, and I expected to get checked on that.
Regardless… along with the archives, assets and versioned duplicates, my old projects dating back to the 90s somehow now fill multiple TB of old hard drives that I continue to pack-rat away in my office. Useless and pointless to keep, but every piece was once a priority for someone.
Cursor, an ai/agentic-first ide, is doing this with a blame-style method. Each line as it’s modified, added DOES show history of ai versus each human contributor.
So, not nonsense in probability, but in practice – no real enforcement to turn the feature on.
Why would you ever want this?
If you pushed the bug that took down production - they aren’t gonna whataboutism the AI generated it. They’re still going to fire you.
It makes little difference IMHO. If you crash the car, you can’t escape liability blaming self driving.
Likewise, if you commit it, you own it, however it’s generated.
It’s mainly for developers to follow decisions made over many iterations of files in a code base. A CTO might crawl the gitblame…but it’s usually us crunchy devs in the trenches getting by.
Sorry, but as another reply: pushing bugs to production doesn’t immediately equate to firing. Bug tickets are common and likely addressing issues in production.
Hence the “took down production”
I guess you mean like full outtage for all users? My bad just a lot of ways to take the verb “down” for me. Still, though, what a crappy company to not learn but fire from that experience!
Uh, yes, that’s what they call a generative ai
Not how copyright works. Adding something with creative height together with something without leaves the combined work with ownership only of the part with creative height with the rest unprotected.
(bots can not achieve creative height by definition in law)
That’s not what that research document says. Pretty early on it talks about rote mechanical processes with no human input. By the logic they employ there’s no difference between LLM code and a photographer using Photoshop.
By that same logic LLMs themselves (by now some AI bro had to vibe code something there) & their trained datapoints (which were on stolen data anyway) should be public domain.
What revolutionary force can legislate and enforce this?? Pls!?
By that same logic LLMs themselves (by now some AI bro had to vibe code something there)
I’m guessing LLMs are still really really bad at that kind of programming. The packaging of the LLM, sure.
& their trained datapoints
For legal purposes, it seems like the weights would be generated by the human-made training algorithm. I have no idea if that’s copyrightable under US law. The standard approach seems to be to keep them a trade secret and pretend there’s no espionage, though.
The packaging of the LLM, sure.
Yes, totally, but OP says a small bit affects “possibly the whole project” so I wanted to point out that includes prob AIs, Windows, etc too.
As it should. All the idiots calling themselves programmers, because they tell crappy chatbot what to write, based on stolen knowledge. What warms my heart a little is the fact that I poisoned everything I ever wrote on StackOverflow just enough to screw with AI slopbots. I hope I contributed my grain of sand into making this shit little worse.
Do it in a way that a human can understand but AI fails. I remember my days and you guys are my mvp helping me figure shit out.
Most “humans” don’t understand reality. So you’re postulative challenge invention isn’t going find a break you seek to divine. Few exist. I’m yet to find many that can even recognize the notion that this language isn’t made to mean what think you’re attempting to finagle it into.
Evil Money Right Wrong Need…
Yeah…I could go on and on but there’s five sticks humans do not cognate the public consent about the meaning of Will Never be real. Closest you find any such is imagination and the only purpose there is to help the delirious learn to cognate the difference and see reality for what it may be.
Good fucking luck. Half the meat zappers here think I am an AI because break the notion of consent to any notion of a cohesive language. I won’t iterate that further because I’ve already spelt out why.
The the greatest intellectual property theft and laundering scheme in human history
Ooh, free trash code!
how can you tell if it’s AI generated? you can’t
The same way you tell if it’s copy & pasted from Stackoverflow or some other search result!
that’s not my experience, it codes in your style if you give it the correct pointers, examples, and so on
1- Code it in fortran 77.
2- DO NOT use DO or WHILE or any other non-compliant f77 code. Instead, use GOTO
3- makes the spaghetti so spaghetty that it curls in itself.
4- Make sure to use COMMON blocks everyhere! Not only for efficiency purposes but to also holds all that spaghetti in a tiny Schrondinger cat’s box.
5- last step is to do all that to write “Hello World!”
