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I hope this is tested in court and found to be correct
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 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…
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!
So, if I wrote an AI preface to somebody else’s book, they lose their copyright?
Seems very unlikely. Can you cite any case law for this?
I think it would depend on if there’s a way to differentiate what parts are ai generated or not (the preface could be part of public domain but not the rest of the book)
Stick to the GPL licensencing of your code whenever possible and the garbage EEE can’t subdue you. (Embrace extend exthinguish.)
If they plagiarize it they kinda ow you the honor.
Hower, plagiarism is still plagiarism, so you better actually write some of your code by hand.
Sure they can. Because what are you going to do financially ruin yourself in a lawsuit you’re going to lose against Microsoft or some other mega Corp who doesn’t give a shit about GPL licencing?
If it’s not enforced with teeth then it doesn’t matter anymore.
some other mega Corp who doesn’t give a shit about GPL licensing?
The GPL was written using the very same law language and methods that the mega Corps are now days trying to enforce against us.
It’s kind of ironic.
Is Windows FOSS now?
Ew, no, thank you, I don’t want it.
Didn’t sources leak multiple times
Yeah, and it was ghastly.
And they weren’t even infested with slop yet, just spaghetti…
I guess some lawyers have that nailed shut. But a guy can dream, right?
I had a similar thought. If LLMs and image models do not violate copyright, they could be used to copyright-wash everything.
Just train a model on source code of the company you work for or the copyright protected material you have access to, release that model publicly and then let a friend use it to reproduce the secret, copyright protected work.
btw this is happening actuallt AI trained on copyrighted material and it’s repeating similar or sometimes verbatim copies but license-free :D
This is giving me illegal number vibes. Like, if an arbitrary calculation returns an illegal number that you store, are you holding illegal information?
(The parallel to this case is that if a statistical word prediction machine generates copyrighted text, does that make distribution of that text copyright violation?)
I don’t know the answer to either question, btw, but I thought it was interesting.
In case of illegal numbers, intention matters. Because any number could be converted to different numbers, for instance through ‘xor encryption’ different ‘encoding’ or other mathematical operations, which would equally be illegal if used with the intention to copy copyright protected material.
This was the case previously. You cannot simply reencode a video, a big number on your disk, with a different codec into another number in order to circumvent copyright.
However, if big business now argues that copyright protected work encoded in neuronal network models is not violating copyright and generated work has no protection, then this previous rule isn’t true anymore. And we can strip copyright from everything using that ‘hack’.
