Vibe-Coded Ext4 for OpenBSD

The copyright office is pretty clear on this if you read: https://www.copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-Intell....

There is case law surrounding the fact that just because you commission a work to another entity doesn't give you co-authorship, the entity doing the work and making creative decisions is the entity that gets copyright.

In order for you to have co-authorship of the commissioned work you have to be involved and pretty much giving instruction level detail to the real author. The opinion shows many cases that its not the case with how LLM prompts work.

The monkey selfie case is relevant also because since it also solidifies that non-persons cannot claim copyright, that means the LLM cannot claim copyright, and therefore it does not have copyright that can be passed onto the LLM operator.

The law is whatever it needs to be to satisfy monied interests with the degree of acceptable of adaptation being a function of the unity of those interests and the political ascendancy of those in favor.

Overwhelmingly this is in favor of treating ai as a tool like Photoshop.

Even those against AI disagree on different matters and will overwhelmingly want a cut not a different interpretation.

This all relies, as the article points out, on everyone looking directly at code that both looks like and works like the only extant codebase for EXT4 and nonetheless concluding that in fact the computer conjured it from the aether. If I wrote a program that zipped up the Linux kernel source, unzipped it, and grepped -v for comments it would not then be magically transformed into unattributable public domain software.

> Who is the copyright holder in this case? It clearly draws heavily from an existing work, and it's clear the human offering the patch didn't do it. It's not the AI, because only persons can own copyright. Is it the set of people whose work was represented in the training corpus? Was the it the set of people who wrote ext4 and whose work was in the training corpus? The company who own the AI who wrote the code? Someone else?

I don't love this take. Specifically:

> it's clear the human offering the patch didn't do it

I find it hard to believe that there wasn't a good bit of "blood, sweat, and tears" invested by a human directing the LLM to make this happen. Yes, LLMs can spit out full projects in 1 prompt but that's not what happened here. From his blog the work on this spanned 5 months at least. And while he probably wasn't working on it exclusively during that time, I find it hard to believe it was him sending "continue" periodically to an LLM.

Anyone who has built something large or complicated with LLM assistance knows that it takes more than just asking the LLM to accomplish your end goal, saying "it's clear the human offering the patch didn't do it" is insulting.

I've done a number of things with the help of LLMs, in all but the most contrived of cases it required knowledge, input from me, and careful guidance to accomplish. Multiple plans, multiple rollbacks, the knowledge of when we needed to step back and when to push forward. The LLM didn't bring that to the table. It brought the ability to crank out code to test a theory, to implement a plan only after we had gone 10+ rounds, or to function as grep++ or google++.

LLMs are tools, they aren't a magic "Make me ext4 for OpenBSD"-button (or at least they sure as hell aren't that today, or 5 months ago when this was started).

Binaries are copyrightable in both the US and the EU, and they are not technically produced by a human either, they're produced by a computer program. I honestly don't understand why this isn't extended to AI-generated code. Isn't it the same thing? One could argue that compilers merely transform source code into binaries "as is," while AI models have some "knowledge" baked in that they extract and paste as code. But there are compilers that also generate binaries by selecting ready-to-use binary patches authored by compiler developers and combining them into a program. One could also argue that, in the case of compilers, at least the input source code is authored by a human. But why can't we treat prompts as "source code in natural language" too? Where is the line between authorship and non-authorship, and how is the line defined? "Your prompt was too basic to constitute authorship" doesn't sound like an objectibe criterion.

Maybe for lawyers, AI is some kind of magical thing on its own. But having successfully created a working inference engine for Qwen3, and seeing how the core loop is just ~50 lines of very simple matrix multiplication code, I can't see LLMs as anything more than pretty simple interpreters that process "neural network bytecode," which can output code from pre-existing templates just like some compilers. And I'm not sure how this is different from transpilers or autogenerated code (like server generators based on an OpenAPI schema)

Sure, if an LLM was trained on GPL code, it's possible it may output GPL-licensed code verbatim, but that's a different matter from the question of whether AI-generated code is copyrightable in principle.

Interestingly, I found an opinion here [0] that binaries technically shouldn't be copyrightable, and currently they are because:

  the copyright office listened to software publishers, and they wanted binaries protected by copyright so they could sell them that way

[0] https://freesoftwaremagazine.com/articles/what_if_copyright_...