Ownership of AI-Generated Code Hotly Disputed

Code cannot be owned. A creative expression may be copyrighted. Purely functional expressions may not be copyrighted. The output of a trained AI is insufficiently creative to be copyrighted. Only humans can hold a copyright.

Now with all that, there really isn’t anything here to get worked up over.

Re: Ownership of AI-Generated Code Hotly Disputed

#10

Post by padolsey » Fri, Dec 30, 2022, 4:23 PM UTC

Outside of AI models, copy/pasting snippets from the likes of StackOverflow is already on unsteady ground. The threshold to bother with (and win) legal fights is pretty high. AI is catalyzing some kind of slow revolution in what "ownership" is, but there doesn't seem to be any definition that would _always_ satisfy common sense. Even if github yields and adds attribution or filters on license types, there's still a massive trove of knotted data in all these newer text/language/image/code models. Most of it is not truly public domain.. and a lot of it is wholly private and would involve contravention of regs like GDPR if used. Data used to feed these huge models is, sometimes (technically speaking...) stolen, commandeered, swiped from unassuming creators. Many artists the world over are rightfully furious about DALL-E and Stable Diffusion. I wonder where this will all end!

AI needs to be regulated somehow. Precedent needs to be set.