If you use AI-generated code, you currently cannot claim copyright on it in the US.

@stroughtonsmith Is this relevant? I honestly don’t know a ton about this but I’m curious if you have thoughts on it…

@jmcs the only trouble is that you can't use AI to produce Disney-style movies; if you could, AI would have long been dead
@jamie @Azuaron @fsinn

@Verxion I think this is probably right:

https://mastodon.social/@nicklockwood/116062400215125888

@stroughtonsmith I think that’s fair. I seriously do and so I’m not disagreeing with you.

…the sad thing though (to me anyway) is that this means an indie dev is unlikely to be able to afford to retain ownership like a large corporation can.

@jamie I am afraid you are confusing registering copyright with the existence of copyright. They are not quite the same, and the differences are important.
Current law is that any human-created work is automatically copyrighted the moment it is created.
The link and screenshots you posted aren't about whether the human-written code mixed in with AI-written code is copyrighted—it is—they're about whether the copyright can be _registered_.
(1/2)

@jamie A copyrighted work that isn't registered is still copyrighted. It's not "in the public domain."
Registration, in the U.S., allows for certain copyright enforcement actions that can't be taken for unregistered works. But whether or not a work is registered has no bearing on whether it is copyrighted vs. in the public domain.
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@ptesarik @jamie @Azuaron @fsinn is that a challenge?

@jmcs you bet!
@jamie @Azuaron @fsinn

@jamie Just waiting for someone finding derivates of their own GPL code in propritary AI generated code...

@jamie so proprietary projects that are made with llms can be leaked legally since there's no copyright for it ?

@christianschwaegerl
maybe more like, sausages are vegan because an animal ate a vegan diet and then used those plant-based calories to grow it's animal body which was then packaged into a sausage.

very vegan ; )

@jamie @Azuaron @fsinn

@Azuaron @fsinn @jamie Adding to this ambiguity, many countries like Germany have established neither Fair Use nor Public Domain as legal terms, so I wonder how “international” a rule like this would even be.

@christianschwaegerl @jamie @Azuaron @fsinn

Yes. Any "direct quoting" of copyrighted works, as text files on a disk, for example, would > only be a bunch of numbers < too. ASCI, Unicode, UTF-8, etc. are ways of encoding text into numbers, and displaying text representations (glyphs) of them later.

So LLMs hold "indirect" and maybe "abstract" (or not) numbers related to the copyrighted works. Not sure how that will or should work out, from a legal perspective.

@ptesarik @jmcs @jamie @Azuaron @fsinn

Challenge?
It's already history.

Disney has decided to license such usage, involving money, rather than fight it in court:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4nXJ0h3iU-M

@Azuaron @katrinatransfem @fsinn @jamie

I think that the careless, abusive, and harmful "gathering" practices need to be challenged as misuse of other's computing resources and the "distributed denial of service attacks" that they, in effect, are.

@Lapizistik In the US, courts have determined (for now, at least) that training an AI model on copyrighted works is considered "fair use". So it's basically legalized copyright laundering. Even code released under the GPL loses its infectiousness when laundered through an LLM.

I'd be very interested to see what other countries do around that, because it would determine which models are legal to use where.

@Lapizistik To be clear, I agree with you. It's a moral failure to make billions of dollars from other people's effort without compensating them at all.

@jik In other parts of this thread, this is being discussed. I was limited on space, so I took shortcuts. What I meant is that, in order to enforce your copyright, you need to prove you own the copyright. Registering it is the single most effective way to do that.

If you can't register your copyright, you (effectively) can't enforce it.

If you can't enforce your copyright, your copyright vs public domain is a distinction without a meaningful difference.

I couldn't fit all that in the post.

@jamie
This is not my point. Even if it _is_ “fair use”: if the llm produces a 1:1 copy (minus some renamed variables) of some relevant piece of code it is not producing something “new”. As a human I can learn from any code (copyrighted or not), but I cannot just take the code, rename some variables and publish it as my own creation. I would loose in court.¹

So technically if you use an LLM to produce code for you you need to check if any relevant piece of it is a copy of anything that exists.

Clean room implementation requires the programmer to not have seen the original code but only the requirements.

__
¹otherwise you could just take any piece of copyrighted code, rename variables and say it is yours because an LLM has produced it.

@JeffGrigg @christianschwaegerl @jamie @fsinn I think this is missing the point and the law (at least, US copyright law).

I buy a book. I then own that book. I can cut that book into individual pages. I can scan all those pages into my computer. I can have an image-to-text algorithm convert the text in the images into an ebook. I can do this to a billion books. I can run whatever algorithms I want on the text of those books. I can store the resulting text of my algorithms on my computer, in any format.

This is all legal, for both me and for any company. Copyright does not prevent use of a work after it has been sold, "use" meaning just about anything--short of distributing the work.

Because what copyright protects against is the reproduction and distribution of copyrighted works. For AI companies, that "distribution" doesn't happen until somebody puts a prompt into the AI, and receives back a result. That result is the distribution. To sue an AI company for copyright infringement, you would have to have a result that infringes on your copyright, and you would have to prove that the AI company was more than just a tool that the prompter used to infringe your copyright.

For the Disney example, if somebody prompted, "Darth Vader in a lightsaber duel with Mickey Mouse," it would be an uphill battle to prove the AI company is responsible for that instead of just the prompter. The argument that the AI company would make is that the prompter clearly used the AI as a tool to make infringing work, but just like you can't sue Adobe if someone used Photoshop to make the same image, you can't sue the AI company because someone used it as a tool to infringe copyright.

Now, I don't find that a wholly persuasive argument because of the, frankly, complicity in the creation that AI has that Photoshop doesn't, but that's definitely the argument they would make, and judges have seemed receptive to that and similar (and even worse) arguments.

As far as I'm concerned, the original point of this thread proves that the AI company should be mostly-to-wholly responsible, even if the prompter was deliberately asking for infringing works. After all, AI-generated work is not copyrightable because it is not human created, it is computer created.

If it's not human created, how can the human be responsible for the infringement?

If it is computer created, then isn't the computer's owner responsible for the infringement?

After all, if I ask a digital artist to create me "Darth Vader in a lightsaber duel with Mickey Mouse," and they do, the digital artist is on the hook for that infringement. They reproduced the work, and they distributed it. There is a "prompter" and a "creator" in both scenarios; it seems illogical that if the "creator" is a human, they're responsible, but if the "creator" is a computer, they aren't responsible.

This is, per @pluralistic, "It's not a crime, I did it with an app!" Why we let apps get away with crimes we'd never tolerate from people, I don't know. But that's where we are.