It's not worded great (code can be owned under current law). But surprisingly enough, there is a core here that is more than opinion, it just needs some elabora

It's not worded great (code can be owned under current law). But surprisingly enough, there is a core here that is more than opinion, it just needs some elaboration. It's also going to be hotly debated in the future, because right now most of the commercial AI-generators are just kind of ignoring this and at some point I think they're going to make the argument, "this law/interpretation can't hold or else it would be commercially devastating for us, and it needs to change." But under current US copyright law, the US copyright office has pretty consistently ruled that: - purely functional expressions without a creative aspect can't be copyrighted (ie, you patent an invention, you don't copyright it, and stuff like recipes aren't eligible for copyright at all, only the surrounding text is). - AI-generated content does not have a creative aspect and isn't eligible for copyright protection. They've even gone so far as to revoke copyright protections to AI-generated content[0][1]. We haven't gotten a similar ruling about code that I'm aware of, but given that the US copyright office already only grants copyright to code under the assumption that coding is a creative act, it's very difficult to imagine code having more legal protections than an image or a book. ---- In my opinion, this is the much more interesting debate than model's source[2], because nobody is really talking about it, and depending on how the inevitable legal challenges play out, it could completely change the field. It's an interesting choice to think about -- let's say an AI gets good enough that you can sit down, describe an app, and the AI just generates it straight up. Would you still use that tool even if the resulting code was public domain and you couldn't assert ownership over it? Which would be more important: the accessibility/ease-of-creation, or owning it? It's also interesting because I haven't heard a ton of good legal arguments from people about why this shouldn't be the case, so there's a nontrivial chance that it holds in the future. I've heard tons of logic-based arguments: "it's creative because I decided what to generate, photographs are copyrightable, etc..." And those aren't necessarily bad arguments, they're just arguments that the US copyright office has already rejected. I haven't seen a lot of arguments about "here's why AI generated code would be eligible without a legal challenge overturning existing copyright rules." ---- [0]: https://www.theverge.com/2022/2/21/22944335/us-copyright-office-reject-ai-generated-art-recent-entrance-to-paradise https://www.theverge.com/2022/2/21/22944335/us-copyright-off... [1]: https://aibusiness.com/ml/ai-generated-comic-book-loses-copyright-protection https://aibusiness.com/ml/ai-generated-comic-book-loses-copy... [2]: Not that the debate over the training data isn't interesting or important; that could also have implications for stuff like fair-use in transformative contexts. It's just that I think it's less likely to have far-reaching implications or be upheld.