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how can you tell if it’s AI generated? you can’t
That’s not even remotely true…
windows engineers have probably been copying snippets from stackoverflow for decades, which may have been copied from the kernel or some other copyleft product
Stallman: “Oh man, not like this.”
I think, to punish Micro$lop for its collaboration with fascists and its monopolistic behavior, the whole Windows codebase should be made public domain.
does the public really want more garbage than they already has?
We don’t have to use it for anything other than compatibility.
Personally I’d very much like for ACPI to be un-fucked
Do you not want all the hardware support Linux is missing to suddenly become available?
The kernel and NTFS seem decent from what i heard. Or at least was (the kernel, no guess what they vibecoded into it now).
About NTFS: it was actually pretty good for it’s time (90s), but the tooling makes no use of some of it’s better features and abuses some others close to breaking point. Literally pearls for the sows.
As much as I wish this was true, I don’t really think it is.
The US copyright office confirms this. https://www.copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-Intelligence-Part-2-Copyrightability-Report.pdf
The use of AI tools to assist rather than stand in for human creativity does not affect the availability of copyright protection for the output. Copyright protects the original expression in a work created by a human author, even if the work also includes AI-generated material.
I’m not sure where you get that from, I’m pretty sure vibe coding still complies with these indications
Did you even read your own report? It says that AI works are copyrightable in certain circumstances, not that they make a whole project public:
Copyright law has long adapted to new technology and can enable case-by- case determinations as to whether AI-generated outputs reflect sufficient human contribution to warrant copyright protection. As described above, in many circumstances these outputs will be copyrightable in whole or in part—where AI is used as a tool, and where a human has been able to determine the expressive elements they contain. Prompts alone, however, at this stage are unlikely to satisfy those requirements.
It’s just unsettled law, and the link is basically an opinion piece. But guess who wins major legal battles like this - yep, the big corps. There’s only one way this is going to go for AI generated code
Worst case is that its the owner of the agent that recieves the copyright, so all vibe coded stuff outside local ai will be claimed by the big corpos
I actually think that’s the best case because it would kill enterprise adoption of AI overnight. All the corps with in-house AI keep using and pushing it, but every small to medium business that isn’t running AI locally will throw it out like yesterday’s trash. OpenAI’s stock price will soar and then plummet.
The big AI companies would just come out with a business subscription that explicitly gives you copyright.
Damn
It is true that AI work (and anything derived from it that isn’t significantly transformative) is public domain. That said, the copyright of code that is a mix of AI and human is much more legally grey.
In other work, where it can be more separated, individual elements may have different copyright. For example, a comic was made using AI generated images. It was ruled that all the images were thus public domain. Despite that, the text and the layout of the comic was human-made and so the copyright to that was owned by the author. Code, obviously can’t be so easily divided up, and it will be much harder to define what is transformative or not. As such, its a legal grey area that will probably depend on a case-by-case basis.
So, you’re telling me I can copypaste 100% some of the ai slop books on amazon and resell it as mine? Brb, gonna make a shit site an absolute diarrhea
Yeah, it’s like products that include FOSS in them, only have to release the FOSS stuff, not their proprietary. (Was kind of cute to find the whole GNU license buried in the menus of my old TiVo…)
If the AI generated code is recognisably close to the code the AI has been trained with, the copyright belongs to the creator of that code.
I may be wrong but I think current legal understanding doesn’t support this
Under U.S. law, to prove that an AI output infringes a copyright, a plaintiff must show the copyrighted work was “actually copied”, meaning that the AI generates output which is “substantially similar” to their work, and that the AI had access to their work.[4]
I’ve found a similar formulation in a official German document before posting my above comment. Essentially, it doesn’t matter if you’ve
“stolen”copied somebody else’s code yourself and used it in your work or did so by using an AI.
Even if it were, it would be for you or I, but not for Microsoft, apple, Google, or Amazon.
The part that is untrue is the “public domain” part. If you generate code then you don’t own it because the actual human work that went into creating it was done by the owner of the AI Model and whatever they trained on.
Iirc it’s even funnier: the relevant case law comes from Naruto v Slater. A case about a monkey taking a selfie and a photographer failing to acquire copyright of it (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_dispute).
The copyright belonged to whoever shot the selfie, but because it was the monkey and animals aren’t juristic entities, they can not hold copyright. Therefore, as it stands and as new case law outlines, AIs are compared to monkeys, in that the copyright would fall onto them but it’s not a juristic entities either, and therefore copyright just vanishes and no one can claim it.
The wikipedia page suggests current cases on generative AI directly build on this.
It was an especially interesting case because there was a question of whether the photographer lied about who actually took the picture. So he could either claim the monkey took it an lose the copyright or claim he took it and have it lose all value.
See that’s kind of what I’m talking about. The monkeys who pressed the buttons to make the AI Generate the code isn’t the computer, it isn’t the user, it’s the employees at the AI company. My advice is that until laws are properly in place that we shouldn’t use AI for any generative industry.
The AI company didn’t do shit. They stole apples from someone elses tree and threw it in a blender. They didn’t make the apples, nor did they buy them, so they don’t legally own the juice.
While I agree with the general idea, please don’t call piracy “stealing”. It’s not stealing, whether you do it or some giant corpo.
While I agree², their use of “steal” makes sense in the analogy because the apple doesn’t belong to the “thief”; besides, you can’t pirate an apple
If the AI produces verbatim the licensed works of others then the others own it.
If the AI took individual unlicensed elements and pieced them together then the AI Company owns it.
In any and every case, neither the User nor the Public Domain owns it. Moral of the story is: never use AI for anything.
The AI company stole other people’s code, threw it into a blender, and is selling the output. They didn’t do any real work, and they don’t own the materials. They have no legal claim over the result. You do not own a car you made from stolen parts, no matter how many cars you stole from.
Stop trying to imply your buddies at AI companies have value.
We appear to be talking in circles.
I’m literally sitting here telling people it isn’t safe to use AI Code, you’re doing the opposite, and you’re accusing me of being buddies with the Slop Companies?
You’re just making shit up. The US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit has affirmed that AI-generated work is in the public domain. Put up or shut up.
Edit: Additionally, the US Copyright Office writes:
As the agency overseeing the copyright registration system, the [Copyright] Office has extensive experience in evaluating works submitted for registration that contain human authorship combined with uncopyrightable material, including material generated by or with the assistance of technology.
How does this work in practice? Someone would have to prove that it’s AI generated, which isn’t straight forward.
Also, I’m not clear this protects the release of code centered a trade secret or under NDA.
So while the court ruled it’s public domain. Could it still be prevented from release? Like a Microsoft employee couldn’t just dump sections of the AI code to the internet I imagine.
https://www.upcounsel.com/patents-trademarks-copyrights-and-trade-secrets
Competitive advantage: Trade secrets can cover information that would not qualify for patents or copyright but still has economic value.
I would imagine dumping Microsoft code to the internet would be sued under NDA
The answer is that it’s messy and that I’m not qualified to say where the line is (nor, I think, is anyone yet). The generated parts are not copyrightable, but you can still have a valid copyright by bringing together things that aren’t individually copyrightable. For example, if I make a manga where Snow White fights Steamboat Willie, I’ve taken two public domain elements and used them to create a copyrightable work.
So it’s not like the usage of AI inherently makes a project uncopyrightable unless the entire thing or most of it was just spat out of a machine. Where’s the line on this? Nobody (definitely not me, but probably nobody) really knows.
As for courts ever finding out, how this affects trade secret policy… Dunno? I’m sure a Microsoft employee couldn’t release it publicly, because as you said, it’d probably violate an NDA. If there were some civil case, the source may come out during discovery and could maybe be analysed programmatically or by an expert. You would probably subpoena the employee(s) who wrote the software and ask them to testify. This is just spitballing, though, over something that’s probably inconsequential, because the end product is prooooobably still copyrightable.
This kind of reminds me of the blurry line we have in FOSS, where everyone retains the copyright to their individual work. But if push comes to shove, how much does there need to be for it to be copyrightable? Where does it stop being a boilerplate
forloop and start being creative expression?
Technology is an extremely vague word in this context. If the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit has affirmed that then I haven’t heard of it, it’s not posted here, and most importantly: such rules are not currently enshrined in law.
Technology is an extremely vague word in this context.
Dude, just shut the fuck up and own up to what you were doing. You’re acting like a snivelly little child. I’ve seen you around a couple times before, and it’s like all you exist to do on Lemmy is make up and spread misinformation.
The fact that you’re this upset about my warning about the use of AI really shows which side you’re on, techbro.
No it’s that you’re trying to walk back a provably false claim and then deflect the claims by pretending the people calling you out are doing so because they like AI instead of, you know, valuing the truth.
I walk back no claims. The AI Companies have more claim on ownership of the output than the public. Don’t use Slop Code, it’s not safe.
Anything built by AI/LLMs should be FOSS by law. Oh I dream of the day.
Your wish is granted.
But you can only view the source code through an LLM
a finger on the monkey paw curls
What a vibe
Hitachi Vibe!
It already is, vibe coders cannot hold copyright on AI-generated code
Not to be pedantic, not holding copyright ≠ FOSS.
FOSS explicitly means that the developer has a copyright and is explicitly giving a license for people to use it with FOSS provisions.
It would be more accurate to say AI Vibe code is in the public domain.
Public domain code is a subset of FOSS code, so I don’t think that was inaccurate
In general terms, it isn’t really. Or at least it is a controversial topic still subject to discussion.
https://opensource.org/blog/public-domain-is-not-open-source
As to this specific topic, the fact that all of the code has to be open source is part of the 10 criteria https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Open_Source_Definition
As such, you can’t consider open source the public domain portions of a codebase that also has proprietary portions.
That’s not entirely true, it doesn’t make it FOSS.
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Vibe coders sign a contract when they use AI to generate stuff, which gives rights away to the company. Regardless of copyright protections from the state, a contract is in most cases legally binding.
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Copyright law requires human authorship as opposed to random generation. This doesn’t inherently exclude all generative works, algorithms that were carefully crafted and datasets curated can potentially have their results considered “authored” but the AI Company owners that made them.
In order to make it true we need to pass laws that regulate the AI companies and their slop. In the meantime, I recommend nobody uses slop code. Actually, I’d recommend that regardless of ownership rights.
I signed no contracts to download the open source local models I use for code generation, just for what it’s worth
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There’s still copyrighted code in windows, so no this is bullshit.
Code contains a lot of elements that are not copyrightable (elementary maths etc), that does not prevent the overall program from being copyrighted.
Windows is not even source-available. Windows XP is source-unintentionally-available thanks to a leak but there’s no AI loophole in that.
Shouldn’t all AI generated code be GPLv3?
Maybe I need to add yet another reason to
I wish that were true but unfortunately the situation is far more dire than that…
The AI Code belongs to the AI Company more than the public, meaning they can enforce license and usage rights on the entire codebase. If only because of the contract users sign when they agree to ToS.
The opposite is also true, though, that if the AI Company generates licensed works of others due to their training data that they should be held responsible in a court of law.
This take is weird, because none of the companies that do inference claim ownership of the generated content in their contracts for one, and because anyone can download open source models and generate code without entering into any ToS, for two.
If you want a fun exercise, take the comments in this thread and replace the word AI with “Stack Overflow”
Devs getting some of their code from a website is not new, even if it’s via API
The claim being made here isn’t wild conjecture. It’s based on a legal analysis done by the congressional research service. That’s a rather authoritative source that Congress itself uses to understand the implications of many things - amongst which are the implications and impacts of the laws it codifies.
What is your supposition based on, such that it’s more authoritative than that?
Just as a sanity check: the person you’re responding to is a serial troll and what I can only describe as intellectually dishonest at best or a pathological liar at worst. They make up whatever they want and will never concede that the fucking nonsense they just dreamed up five seconds ago based on nothing is wrong in the face of conclusive proof otherwise.
You shouldn’t waste your time responding to this cretin.
I get it; I respond to these things in a cogent and incisive fashion so that other users can see a sane counterpoint, or at least a request for justification or proof that then goes unfulfilled.
Oh, sorry, I said that totally wrong: I meant that I really appreciate your first comment and that it’s not worth your time to reply to their bad-faith follow-up comment.
Windows was already copyrighted and registered with the office before ai code was introduced.
The copyright office refusing to register the version with ai code does not affect the already registered copyright.
The version with ai code is a derivative product of the registered version so M$ will get you for copyright infringement.
Not considering this obvious context makes the Twitter poster completely unreliable.
Yeah I read the link at the bottom, it doesn’t claim what the post claims at all.
My supposition is that the human element that creates the code is that of the AI Company and not the user, on the basis that the user is actually incapable of doing so.
supposition
Would you be willing to elaborate a little more to raise credibility in light of this comment?
Like, what are the links posted saying then, if not the statement in this post, by your expert analysis?
Oh yarr, heck yeah, here look at this part right here:
" "
That’s where the article doesn’t say the generative works are public domain. And furthermore this other part:
" "
Is where it doesn’t say all terms of service contracts between the user and company are magically invalidated.
Do you have any other questions I can answer by presenting quotes of the parts that are not there?
P.S. Why are you quoting Supposition, I literally used the same term as the comment above it.
Hey, so here’s the official opinion of the US copyright office on this matter.
If you look at this part right here:“When an AI technology determines the expressive elements of its output, the generated material is not the product of human authorship. As a result, that material is not protected by copyright and must be disclaimed in a registration application.”
That’s where it says that right now, generative works are ineligible for copyright.
