Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite • Hacker News Board

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#131

Post by amelius » Thu, Mar 05, 2026, 11:13 AM UTC

shevy-java wrote: post #97

kshri24 wrote: post #17

> The ownership void: If the code is truly a “new” work created by a machine, it might technically be in the public domain the moment it’s generated, rendering the MIT license moot. How would that work? We still have no legal conclusion on whether AI model generated code, that is trained on all publicly available source (irrespective of type of license), is legal or not. IANAL but IMHO it is totally illegal as no per…

"We still have no legal conclusion on whether AI model generated code, that is trained on all publicly available source (irrespective of type of license), is legal or not." I think it will depend on the way HOW the AI arrived to the new code. If it was using the original source code then it probably is guilty-by-association. But in theory an AI model could also generate a rewrite if being fed intermediary data not ba…

You should just look at it as a giant computation graph. If some of the inputs in this graph are tainted by copyright and an output depends on these inputs (changing them can change the output) then the output is tainted too.

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#132

Post by orthoxerox » Thu, Mar 05, 2026, 11:13 AM UTC

shevy-java wrote: post #105

soulofmischief wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seeing the source for a project doesn't prevent me from ever creating a similar project, just because I've seen the code. The devil is in the details.

Agreed, but the courts can conclude that all LLMs who are not open about their decision, have stolen things. So LLMs would auto-lose in court.

Or they can conclude otherwise.

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#133

Post by stuaxo » Thu, Mar 05, 2026, 11:15 AM UTC

I don't see how (with current LLMs that have been trained on mixed licensed data) you can use the LLM to rewrite to a less restrictive license.

You could probably use it to output code that is GPL'd though.

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#134

Post by danlitt » Thu, Mar 05, 2026, 11:15 AM UTC

I am pretty sure this article is predicated on a misunderstanding of what a "clean room" implementation means. It does not mean "as long as you never read the original code, whatever you write is yours". If you had a hermetically sealed code base that just happened to coincide line for line with the codebase for GCC, it would still be a copy. Traditionally, a human-driven clean room implementation would have a vanishingly small probability of matching the original codebase enough to be considered a copy. With LLMs, the probability is much higher (since in truth they are very much not a "clean room" at all).

The actual meaning of a "clean room implementation" is that it is derived from an API and not from an implementation (I am simplifying slightly). Whether the reimplementation is actually a "new implementation" is a subjective but empirical question that basically hinges on how similar the new codebase is to the old one. If it's too similar, it's a copy.

What the chardet maintainers have done here is legally very irresponsible. There is no easy way to guarantee that their code is actually MIT and not LGPL without auditing the entire codebase. Any downstream user of the library is at risk of the license switching from underneath them. Ideally, this would burn their reputation as responsible maintainers, and result in someone else taking over the project. In reality, probably it will remain MIT for a couple of years and then suddenly there will be a "supply chain issue" like there was for mimemagic a few years ago.

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#135

Post by b65e8bee43c2ed0 » Thu, Mar 05, 2026, 11:20 AM UTC

at this point, every corporation in the world has AI slop in their software. any attempt to outlaw it would attract enough funding from the oligarchs for the opposition to dethrone any party. no attempts will be made in the next three years, obviously, and then it will be even more late than it is now.

and while particularly diehard believers in democracy may insist that if they kvetch hard enough they can get things they don't like regulated out of existence, they pointedly ignore the elephant in the room. they could succeed beyond their wildest dreams - get the West to implement a moratorium on AI, dismantle every FAGMAN, Mossad every researcher, send Yudkowskyjugend death squads to knock down doors to seize fully semiautomatic assault GPUs, and none of it will make any fucking difference, because China doesn't give a fuck.

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#136

Post by duskdozer » Thu, Mar 05, 2026, 11:21 AM UTC

kouteiheika wrote: post #93

kshri24 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with your assessment. Which is why I was proposing a middle-ground where an agreement is setup between the model training company and the collective of developers/artists et all and come up with a license agreement where they are rewarded for their original work for perpetuity. A tiny % of the profits can be shared, which would be a form of UBI. This is fair not only because companies are using AI generated o…

> Which is why I was proposing a middle-ground where an agreement is setup between the model training company and the collective of developers/artists et all and come up with a license agreement where they are rewarded for their original work for perpetuity. A tiny % of the profits can be shared, which would be a form of UBI. This is fair That wouldn't be fair because these models are not only trained on code. A huge…

>under a permissive license

well, assuming all data that is itself not permissively licensed is excluded

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#137

Post by dathinab » Thu, Mar 05, 2026, 11:23 AM UTC

IMHO/IMHU AI can't claim authorship and as such can't copyright their work.

This doesn't prevent any form of automatic copyrighting by production of derivative code or similar. It just prevent anyone from claiming ownership of any parts unique to the derived work.

Like think about it if a natural disaster changes (e.g. water damages) a picture you did draw then a) you can't claim ownership of the natural produced changes but b) still have ownership of the original picture contained in the changed/derived work.

AI shouldn't change that.

Which brings us to another 2 aspects:

1. if you give an AI a project access to the code to rewrite it anew it _is_ a copyright violation as it's basically a side-by-side rewrite

2. but if you go the clean room approach but powered by AI then it likely isn't a copyright violation, but also now part of the public domain, i.e. not yours

So yes, doing clean room rewrites has become incredible cheap.

But no just because it's AI it doesn't make code go away.

And lets be realistic one of the most relevant parts of many open source project is it being openly/shared maintained. You don't get this with clean room rewrites no matter if AI or not.

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#138

Post by kshri24 » Thu, Mar 05, 2026, 11:29 AM UTC

LadyCailin wrote: post #130

kshri24 wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> let's just tax the hell out of AI companies and redistribute. That's not what I favor because you are inserting a middleman, the Government, into the mix. The Government ALWAYS wants to maximize tax collections AND fully utilize its budget. There is no concept of "savings" in any Government anywhere in the World. And Government spending is ALWAYS wasteful. Tenders floated by Government will ALWAYS go to companies t…

Uh, no? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Pension_Fund_of_Nor... Just because you have a failure of imagination for how government should work, doesn’t mean it can’t work. And stifling innovation is exactly what I want, when that innovation is “steal from everyone so we can invent the torment nexus” or whatever’s going on these days.

Pension fund is an example of what exactly? All countries have pension funds. This has nothing to do with Governments wasting money. Please go beyond tiny European countries that have very few verticals and are largely dependent on outside support for protecting their sovereignty. They are not representative of most of the World.

> As its name suggests, the Government Pension Fund Global is invested in international financial markets, so the risk is independent from the Norwegian economy. The fund is invested in 8,763 companies in 71 countries (as of 2024).

Basically what I said above. You give your tax dollars to Government and it will invest it into top 500 companies. In the Norway Pension Fund case it is 8,763 companies in 71 countries. None of them are startups/small businesses/creators.

> And stifling innovation is exactly what I want, when that innovation is “steal from everyone so we can invent the torment nexus” or whatever’s going on these days.

You are confusing current lack of laws regulating this space with innovation being evil. Innovation is not evil. The technology per se is not evil. Every innovation brings with it a set of challenges which requires us to think of new legislation. This has ALWAYS been the case for thousands of years of human innovation.

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#139

Post by dathinab » Thu, Mar 05, 2026, 11:32 AM UTC

danlitt wrote: post #134

I am pretty sure this article is predicated on a misunderstanding of what a "clean room" implementation means. It does not mean "as long as you never read the original code, whatever you write is yours". If you had a hermetically sealed code base that just happened to coincide line for line with the codebase for GCC, it would still be a copy. Traditionally, a human-driven clean room implementation would have a vanish…

the author speaks about code which is syntactically completely different but semantically does the same

i.e. a re-implementation

which can either

- be still derived work, i.e. seen as you just obfuscating a copyright violation

- be a new work doing the same

nothing prevents an AI from producing a spec based on a API, API documentation and API usage/fuzzing and then resetting the AI and using that spec to produce a rewrite

I mean "doing the same" is NOT copyright protection, you need patent law for that. Except even with patent law you need to innovations/concepts not the exact implementation details. Which means that even if there are software patents (theoretically,1) most things done in software wouldn't be patentable (as they are just implementation details, not inventions)

(1): I say theoretically because there is a very long track record of a lot of patents being granted which really should never be granted. This combined with the high cost of invalidating patents has caused a ton of economical damages.

Re: Relicensing with AI-Assisted Rewrite

#140

Post by Joel_Mckay » Thu, Mar 05, 2026, 11:34 AM UTC

dathinab wrote: post #137

IMHO/IMHU AI can't claim authorship and as such can't copyright their work. This doesn't prevent any form of automatic copyrighting by production of derivative code or similar. It just prevent anyone from claiming ownership of any parts unique to the derived work. Like think about it if a natural disaster changes (e.g. water damages) a picture you did draw then a) you can't claim ownership of the natural produced cha…

LLM are isomorphic plagiarism machines, and like all ectoparasites must steal from real people to exist. Note this includes its users. =3