TL;DR: The advent of AI based, LLM coding applications like Anthropic’s Claude and ChatGPT have prompted maintainers to experiment with integrating LLM contributions into open source codebases.
This is a fast path to open source irrelevancy, since the US copyright office has deemed LLM outputs to be uncopyrightable. This means that as more uncopyrightable LLM outputs are integrated into nominally open source codebases, value leaks out of the project, since the open source licences are not operative on public domain code.
That means that the public domain, AI generated code can be reused without attribution, and in the case of copyleft licences - can even be used in closed source projects.
Then a lot of proprietary code cannot be copyrighted 🤷 Honestly, if AI destroys copyright, it’s the best thing it can do.
And we have already seen how it can be uses against proprietary software: write specs, implement code that fulfills specs, 🎉, closed source is now opensource . Amazing.
Honestly, if AI destroys copyright, it’s the best thing it can do.
I have seen this being said, but I really don’t understand it. Just because copyright can be abused doesn’t mean (to me) that we ought to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
If copyright no longer exists, what incentive do people have to share copyleft code at all? It clearly would no longer exist, so can you help me understand how both copyright can be dead and open source exist? Or are you simply accepting that rather than copyright, we are using trade secrets (like the KFC chicken recipe) to protect works?
Copyright is a mistake. It shouldn’t exist.
I have seen this sentiment, but I don’t know what the world looks like without copyright protections for creative works.
Does open source exist in your vision? How?
My imagination for this topic may not be as expansive as yours, but my interpretation is that if people contribute code to the commons, it will immediately available for any use - including for use by massive corporations.
So it ends up looking like people working for big companies for free.
This argument fundamentally misunderstands AI and copyright.
Straight dumps of AI output can’t be copyrighted, but as soon as it’s modified by a human in nontrivial ways, it’s copyrightable again. If open source projects are using straight dumps of AI output without modifications, then the project will be irrelevant before copyright matters, lol.
as soon as it’s modified by a human in nontrivial ways
is doing a lot of heavy lifting here.
We know that people are using coding LLMs as slot machines - pull the handle and see if it solves your problem. Where is the human modifying anything? That is a “straight dump” of AI output without modifications.
