US courts have ruled that machine generated code cannot be copyright. Ergo, it cannot be licensed (under any license; nobody owns the copyright, thus nobody can "license" it to anyone else). You cannot (*) use LLMs to generate code that you then license, whether that license is GPL, MIT or some proprietary mumbo-jumbo. (*) unless you just lie about this part.
If you take AI image (that cannot be copyrighted) and adjust it in photo edition software of your choice then the changes are potentially copyrightable and the resulting image can be copyrighted (you need to ensure that your changes pass the low bar of creativity).
It's not clear to me how much code you would need to modify by hand to qualify for copyright this way, but that's not an impossible avenue.
> For me personally, what is more interesting is that we might not even be able to copyright these creations at all. A court still might rule that all AI-generated code is in the public domain, because there was not enough human input in it. That’s quite possible, though probably not very likely.
As I understand it, the US Supreme Court has just this week ruled exactly this. LLM output cannot be copyrighted, so the only part of any piece of software that can be copyrighted is that part that was created by a human.
If you vibe-code the entire thing, it's not copyrightable. And if it can't be copyrighted that means it is in the public domain from the instant it was created and can't be licensed.
This oversimplifies it. You can't copyright a work that is only generated by a machine: "In February 2022, the Copyright Office’s Review Board issued a final decision affirming the refusal to register a work claimed to be generated with no human involvement" But human direction of machine processes can be copyright: "A year later, the Office issued a registration for a comic book incorporating AI-generated material."…
Would writing a prompt, or few, for an LLM qualify as "the requisite level of creativity is extremely low; even a slight amount will suffice"
Read the linked report - it discusses this.
The short answer is that it's possible if the prompt has sufficient control but only the parts controlled by the human are eligible for copyright.
Using AI doesn't automatically disqualify from copyright protection though.
> For me personally, what is more interesting is that we might not even be able to copyright these creations at all. A court still might rule that all AI-generated code is in the public domain, because there was not enough human input in it. That’s quite possible, though probably not very likely. As I understand it, the US Supreme Court has just this week ruled exactly this. LLM output cannot be copyrighted, so the o…
Code is one thing, but what about writing? There is no 100% foolproof way to identify content written by LLMs, and human writing routinely gets incorrectly flagged as such. If I write a book, and a checker says that it's written by LLM, is it automatically in the public domain?
The latter will become MIT sooner or later with Ghidra plus LLM-assisted reverse engineering. https://reorchestrate.com/posts/your-binary-is-no-longer-saf... https://reorchestrate.com/posts/your-binary-is-no-longer-saf... Even SaaSS isn't safe from that type of process: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47259485
We will need ... software patents!
No, lawyers will want software patents as that's the only group that would benefit from them, apart from large litigation-happy companies that want to squash any competition.
The test suite was also licensed under the LGPL. The reimplementation can be seen as a derivative work of the test suite, and thus should fall under the LGPL. This does not even mention the fact that the coding agent, AND the user steering it, both had ample exposure to chardet's source code, making it hard to argue that the reimplementation is a new ship.
> For me personally, what is more interesting is that we might not even be able to copyright these creations at all. A court still might rule that all AI-generated code is in the public domain, because there was not enough human input in it. That’s quite possible, though probably not very likely. As I understand it, the US Supreme Court has just this week ruled exactly this. LLM output cannot be copyrighted, so the o…
> And if it can't be copyrighted that means it is in the public domain from the instant it was created and can't be licensed.
I don't think this follows? If I vibe code something and never post it anywhere public, I can still license that code to a company and ask them to pay me for using the code?
So as a corollary, the business model of providing software where you can choose either free (as in beer) and restrictive license (e.g. GPL), or pay money and get a permissive business-compatible license, will cease to exist.
I think that's a shame actually, because it has been a good way of providing software that does something useful but where large companies that earn money from the use will have to pay the software creator.
This is interesting because I've been considering a similar project. I maintain a package for a scientific simulation codebase, it's all in Fortran and C++ with too much template code, which takes ages to build and is very error prone, and frankly a pain to maintain with its monstrous CMake spaghetti build system. Furthermore the whole thing would benefit with a rewrite around GPU-based execution, and generally a better separation between the API for specifying the simulation and the execution engine. So I've been thinking of rewriting it in Jax and did an initial experiment to port a few of the main classes to Python using Gemini. It did a fairly good job. I want to continue with it, but I'm also a bit hesitant because this is software that the upstream developers have been working on for 20+ years. The idea of just saying to them "hey look I rewrote this with AI and it's way better now" is not something I would do without giving myself pause for thought. In this case it's not about the license, they already use a permissive one, but just the general principle of suggesting a "replacement" for their work.. if I was doing it by hand it might be different, I don't know, they might appreciate that more, but I have no interest in spending that much time on it. Probably what I will do is just present the PoC and ask if they think it's worth attempting to auto-convert everything, they might be open to it. But yeah, the possibilities of auto-transpiling huge amounts of software for modernization purposes is a really interesting application of AI, amazing to think of all the possibilities. But I'm happy to have read the article because I certainly didn't think about the copyright implications.