> How do you prove whether or not someone has used AI? In this case it's rather easy, they admit it officially and publicly. In other cases it might be harder,

> How do you prove whether or not someone has used AI? In this case it's rather easy, they admit it officially and publicly. In other cases it might be harder, we might need a whistleblower. I am sure in some cases where it happened, it'll be impossible to prove. Difficulty of proving it is not a valid reason for making something harmful legal. > But it's different enough that it would not, and should not, be considered copyright infringement. Yes, the line has to be drawn somewhere. The (typical) human brain for example has limitations how much code it can memorize and reproduce verbatim. LLMs don't have them (they're orders of magnitude higher on current hardware and models and they're essentially unlimited in principle). > But luckily, we don't let Google say "you aren't allowed to work for anyone else after you've seen our source code." But we also don't expect the new employee to build a competitor for one of google's services or internal tools in record time that can be measured in LOC per minute. An appropriately trained LLM certainly could. --- Ultimately we strayed from the main point. Copyright exists to protect authors and their intentions against parasites. If somebody's intention is to offer code for free as long as people who build on top of it also release their work for free (a slight simplification and misinterpretation of the GPL), then copyright exists to make sure that happens. That for example somebody who focuses solely on advertising (non productive zero-sum work) can't take that code and profit from it leaving the original author to eat dirt. There's also the question of income per unit of work vs "passive" income. Many builder professions get paid only as long as they're actively putting in work. We as programmers are privileged in that our product can often run without constant work and produce positive value automatically (but we only get the continuous value out of it if we own the product, not if we produced it for somebody else). Now, I believe that giving somebody fixed amount of compensation for building something that produces continuous value is fundamentally unfair, exploitative and abusive. Many people will no doubt disagree, must of the world has probably not ever thought about it by the looks of it. LLMs take this to a whole new level. They can bring in enormous amounts of money (both in subscriptions to their services and in value produced by their output). Yet the people who built the training data that made it all possible don't get _any_ compensation at all.