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Open source and libre/free software are particularly vulnerable to a future where AI-generated code is ruled to be either infringing or public domain. In the f

Open source and libre/free software are particularly vulnerable to a future where AI-generated code is ruled to be either infringing or public domain. In the former case, disentangling AI-edits from human edits could tie a project up in legal proceedings for years and projects don't have any funding to fight a copyright suit. Specifically, code that is AI-generated and subsequently modified or incorporated in the rest of the code would raise the question of whether subsequent human edits were non-fair-use derivative works. In the latter case the license restrictions no longer apply to portions of the codebase raising similar issues from derived code; a project that is only 98% OSS/FS licensed suddenly has much less leverage in takedowns to companies abusing the license terms; having to prove that infringers are definitely using the human-generated and licensed code. Proprietary software is only mildly harmed in either case; it would require speculative copyright owners to disassemble their binaries and try to make the case that AI-generated code infringed without being able to see the codebase itself. And plenty of proprietary software has public domain code in it already.

deadbabe 1y ago
If a software is truly wide open source in the sense of “do whatever the fuck you want with this code, we don’t care”, then it has nothing to fear from AI.
- candiddevmike 1y ago
  Won't apply to closed source, not public code, which the GPL (QEMU uses) is quite good at ensuring becomes open source...
- kgwxd 1y ago
  Can't release someone else's proprietary source under a "do whatever the fuck you want" license and actually do whatever the fuck you want, without getting sued.
  - deadbabe 1y ago
    It’d be like trying to squeeze blood from a stone
    - clipsy 1y ago
      It'd be like trying to squeeze blood from every single entity using the offending code, actually.
    - CursedSilicon 1y ago
      It's incredible watching someone who has no idea what they're talking about boast so confidently about what people "can" or "can't" do
  - iechoz6H 1y ago
    You can do that but the fact you don't get sued is more luck than judgement.
  - rzzzt 1y ago
    The license does exist so you can release your own software under it, however: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WTFPL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WTFPL
  - TeMPOraL 1y ago
    Only more reason for OSS to embrace AI generation - once it leaks into enough widely used or critical (think cURL) dependencies and exceeds certain critical mass, any judgement on the IP aspects other than "public domain" (in the broader sense) will become infeasible, as enforcing a different judgement would be like doing open heart surgery on the global economy.
    - windward 1y ago
      That's the situation we're already in with copyleft licences but legal teams still treat them like the plague.
- behringer 1y ago
  Open source is about sharing the source code. You generally need to force companies to share their source code derived from your project, or else companies will simply take it, modify it, and never release their changes,and charge for it too.
  - TeMPOraL 1y ago
    Sharing is caring, being forced to share does not foster care. Companies don't care, so if you release something as open source that's relevant to them, "companies will simply take it, modify it, and never release their changes,and charge for it too" - but that is what companies do, that is their very nature, and you knew that when you first opened the source. You also knew that when you picked a license, and it's a major reason for the particular choice you made. Want to force companies to share? Pick GPL. If you decide to yoke a dragon, and it instead snatches your shiny lure and flies away to its cave, you don't get to complain that the dragon isn't playing nice and doesn't want to become your beast of burden. If you picked MIT as your license, that's on you.
zer00eyz 1y ago
> or public domain https://news.artnet.com/art-world/ai-art-us-copyright-office-2604297 https://news.artnet.com/art-world/ai-art-us-copyright-office... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_dispute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput... Im pretty sure that this ship has sailed.
- raincole 1y ago
  It's sailed, but towards the other way: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cg5vjqdm1ypo https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cg5vjqdm1ypo
  - fc417fc802 1y ago
    That's a brand new ongoing lawsuit. The ship hasn't sailed in either direction yet. It hasn't even been clearly established if Midjourney has liability let alone where the bounds for such liability might lie. Remember, anyone can attempt to sue anyone for anything at any time in a functional system. How far the suit makes it is a different matter.
  - zer00eyz 1y ago
    https://www.wired.com/story/ai-art-copyright-matthew-allen/ https://www.wired.com/story/ai-art-copyright-matthew-allen/ https://www.cnbc.com/2025/03/19/ai-art-cannot-be-copyrighted-appeals-court-rules.html https://www.cnbc.com/2025/03/19/ai-art-cannot-be-copyrighted... Here are cases where the product of AI/ML are not the products of people and not capable of being copyrighted. These are about the OUTPUT being unable to be copyrighted.
  - gwd 1y ago
    On the contrary. IANAL, but this is my understanding of the law (setting aside the "work for hire" thing for simplicity) 1. If you come up with something completely new, you are the sole copyright holder. 2. If you take someone else's copyrighted work and transform it, then both of you have a copyright on the derivative work. So if you write a brand new comic book that includes Darth Vader, you can't sell that without Disney's permission [1]: they have a copyright on Darth Vader, and so your comic book is partly copyrighted by them. But at the same time, they can't sell it without your permission, because you have a copyright on the comic book too. In the case of Midjourney outputs, my understanding of the current state of the law is this: 1. Only humans can create copyrights 2. So if Midjourney creates an entirely new image that's not derivative of anyone else's work (as defined by long-established copyright law on derivative works), then nobody owns the copyright, and it's in the public domain 3. If Midjourney creates an image that is derived from someone else's work (as defined by long established copyright law on derivative works), then only Disney has a copyright on that derivative work. And so, in theory, Disney could distribute Darth Vader images you made with Midjourney, unless you can convince the court that you had enough creative influence over them to warrant a copyright. [1] Yes of course fair use, trying to make a point here
AJ007 1y ago
I understand what experienced developers don't want random AI contributions from no-knowledge "developers" contributing to a project. In any situation, if a human is review AI code line by line that would tie up humans for years, even ignoring anything legally. #1 There will be no verifiable way to prove something was AI generated beyond early models. #2 Software projects that somehow are 100% human developed will not be competitive with AI assisted or written projects. The only room for debate on that is an apocalypse level scenario where humans fail to continue producing semiconductors or electricity. #3 If a project successfully excludes AI contributions (not clear how other than controlling contributions to a tight group of anti-AI fanatics), it's just going to be cloned, and the clones will leave it in the dust. If the license permits forking then it could be forked too, but cloning and purging any potential legal issues might be preferred. There still is a path for open source projects. It will be different. There's going to be much, much more software in the future and it's not going to be all junk (although 99% might.)
- Eisenstein 1y ago
  If AI can generate software so easily and which performs the expected functions, why do we even need to know that it did so? Isn't the future really just asking an AI for a result and getting that result? The AI would be writing all sorts of bespoke code to do the thing we ask, and then discard it immediately after. That is what seems more likely, and not 'so much software we have to figure out rights to'.
- amake 1y ago
  > #2 Software projects that somehow are 100% human developed will not be competitive with AI assisted or written projects Still waiting to see evidence of AI-driven projects eating the lunch of "traditional" projects.
  - viraptor 1y ago
    It's happening slowly all around. It's not obvious because people producing high quality stuff have no incentive at all to mark their changes as AI-generated. But there are also local tools generated faster than you could adjust existing tools to do what you want. I'm running 3 things now just for myself that I generated from scratch instead of trying to send feature requests to existing apps I can buy. It's only going to get more pervasive from now on.
koolala 1y ago
This is a win for MIT license though.
- graemep 1y ago
  From what point of view? For someone using MIT licensed code for training, it still requires a copy of the license and the copyright notice in "copies or substantial portions of the software". SO I guess its fine for a snippet, but if the AI reproduces too much of it, then its in breach. From the point of view of someone who does not want their code used by an LLM then using GPL code is more likely to be a breach.
Thorrez 1y ago
Is there any likelihood that the output of the model would be public domain? Even if the model itself is public domain, the prompt was created by a human and impacted the output, so I don't see how the output could be public domain. And then after that, the output was hopefully reviewed by the original prompting human and likely reviewed by another human during code review, leading to more human impact on the final code.
- AndrewDucker 1y ago
  There is no copyright in AI art. Presumably the same reasoning would apply to AI code: https://iclg.com/news/22400-us-court-confirms-ai-generated-art-cannot-be-copyrighted https://iclg.com/news/22400-us-court-confirms-ai-generated-a...
  - lars_francke 1y ago
    This particular case is US only. The rest of the world might decide differently.
    - AndrewDucker 1y ago
      Absolutely. And as long as you're not worried about people in the USA reusing your code then you're all good!
  - Thorrez 1y ago
    >The court further reiterated that the human authorship requirement does not “impede the protection of works made with artificial intelligence”, as the USCO has previously permitted the registration of works “made by human authors who use artificial intelligence”. It continued that “line-drawing disagreements” over the extent to which artificial intelligence contributed to a human author’s work are “neither here nor there”, as Thaler had listed the Creativity Machine as the sole author. It sounds like in this case the the guy claimed the AI was the sole author, and that's why there's no copyright. But if a human is using AI as a tool, then there can be copyright.
graemep 1y ago
Proprietary source code would not usually end up training LLMs. Unless its leaked, how would an LLM have access to it? > it would require speculative copyright owners to disassemble their binaries I wonder whether AI might be a useful tool for making that easier. If you have evidence then you can get courts to order disclosure or examination of code. > And plenty of proprietary software has public domain code in it already. I am pretty sure there is a significant amount of proprietary code that has FOSS code in it, against license terms (especially GPL and similar). A lot of proprietary code is now been written using AIs trained on FOSS code, and companies are open about this. It might open an interesting can of worms.
- physicsguy 1y ago
  > Unless its leaked Given the number of people on HN that say they're using for e.g. Cursor, OpenAI, etc. through work, and my experience with workplaces saying 'absolutely you can't use it', I suspect a large amount is being leaked.
  - graemep 1y ago
    I thought most of these did not use users context and input for training?
- pmlnr 1y ago
  Licence incompatibility is enough.
strogonoff 1y ago
People sometimes miss that copyleft is powered by copyright. Copyleft (which means Linux, Blender, and plenty of other goodness) needs the ability to impose some rules on what users do with your work, presumably in the interest of common good. Such ability implies IP ownership. This does not mean that powerful interests abusing copyright with ever increasing terms and enforcement overreach is fair game. It harms common interest. However, it does mean that abusing copyright from the other side and denouncing the core ideas of IP ownership—which is now sort of in the interest of certain companies (and capital heavily invested in certain fashionable but not yet profitable startups) based around IP expropriation—harms common interest just as well.
- ben_w 1y ago
  While this is a generally true statement (and has echoes in other areas like sovereign citizens), GenAI may make copyright (and copyleft) economically redundant. While the AI we have now is not good enough to make an entire operating system when asked*, if/when they can, the benefits of all the current licensing models evaporate, and it doesn't matter if that model is proprietary with no source, or GPL, or MIT, because by that point anyone else can reproduce your OS for whatever the cost of tokens is without ever touching your code. But as we're not there yet, I agree with @benlivengood that (most**) OSS projects must treat GenAI code as if it's unusable. * At least, not a modern OS. I've not tried getting any model to output a tiny OS that would fit in a C64, and while I doubt they can currently do this, it is a bet I might lose, whereas I am confident all models would currently fail at e.g. reproducing Windows XP. ** I think MIT licensed projects can probably use GenAI code, they're not trying to require derivatives to follow the same licence, but I'm not a lawyer and this is just my barely informed opinion from reading the licenses.
  - strogonoff 1y ago
    I have a few sociophilosophical quibbles about the impact of this, but to focus on a practical part: > by that point anyone else can reproduce your OS for whatever the cost of tokens is without ever touching your code. Do you think that the cost of tokens will remain low enough once these companies for now operating at loss have to be profitable, and it really is going to be “anyone else”? Or, would it be limited to “big tech” or select few corporations who can pay a non-trivial amount of money to them? Do you think it would mean they essentially sell GPL’ed code for proprietary use? Would it not affect FOSS, which has been till now partially powered by the promise to contributors that their (often voluntary) work would remain for public benefit? Do you think someone would create and make public (and gather so much contributor effort) something on the scale Linux, if they knew that it would be open to be scraped by an intermediary who can sell it at whatever price they choose to set to companies that then are free to call it their own and repackage commercially without contributing back, providing their source or crediting the original authors in any way?
olalonde 1y ago
Seems like a fake problem. Who would sue QEMU for using AI-generated code? OpenAI? Anthropic?
- ethbr1 1y ago
  Anyone whose code is in a used model's training set.* This is about future existential tail risk, not current risk. * Depending on future court decisions in different jurisdictions
  - olalonde 1y ago
    Again, seems so implausible that it's not worth worrying about.
    - ethbr1 1y ago
      Were you around for SCO? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_SCO%E2%80%93Linux_disputes#Timeline https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_SCO%E2%80%93Linu... IP disputes aren't trivial, especially for shoestring-funded OSS.
    - consp 1y ago
      It is implausible until it isn't and qemu is taking a very cheap and easy step to outright ban it and covering their ass just in case. The threat is low plausibility but high risk and thus a valid one to consider.
      - olalonde 1y ago
        I disagree. Open source projects routinely deal with far greater risk, like employees contributing open source code on company time without explicit authorization. Yet they generally allow code from anyone without much verification (some have a contributor agreement but it's based on trust, there's no actual verification). I stand by my 2022 prediction[0]: no one will get sued for using LLM-generated code. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31849027 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31849027
stronglikedan 1y ago
To me, AI doesn't generate code by itself, so there's no difference between the outputted code or code written by the human that prompted it. As well, the humans that prompt it are solely responsible for making sure it is correct, and solely to blame for any negative outcomes of its use, just as if they had written it themselves.
sswam 1y ago
[dead]

deadbabe 1y ago

If a software is truly wide open source in the sense of “do whatever the fuck you want with this code, we don’t care”, then it has nothing to fear from AI.

candiddevmike 1y ago
Won't apply to closed source, not public code, which the GPL (QEMU uses) is quite good at ensuring becomes open source...
kgwxd 1y ago
Can't release someone else's proprietary source under a "do whatever the fuck you want" license and actually do whatever the fuck you want, without getting sued.
- deadbabe 1y ago
  It’d be like trying to squeeze blood from a stone
  - clipsy 1y ago
    It'd be like trying to squeeze blood from every single entity using the offending code, actually.
  - CursedSilicon 1y ago
    It's incredible watching someone who has no idea what they're talking about boast so confidently about what people "can" or "can't" do
- iechoz6H 1y ago
  You can do that but the fact you don't get sued is more luck than judgement.
- rzzzt 1y ago
  The license does exist so you can release your own software under it, however: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WTFPL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WTFPL
- TeMPOraL 1y ago
  Only more reason for OSS to embrace AI generation - once it leaks into enough widely used or critical (think cURL) dependencies and exceeds certain critical mass, any judgement on the IP aspects other than "public domain" (in the broader sense) will become infeasible, as enforcing a different judgement would be like doing open heart surgery on the global economy.
  - windward 1y ago
    That's the situation we're already in with copyleft licences but legal teams still treat them like the plague.
behringer 1y ago
Open source is about sharing the source code. You generally need to force companies to share their source code derived from your project, or else companies will simply take it, modify it, and never release their changes,and charge for it too.
- TeMPOraL 1y ago
  Sharing is caring, being forced to share does not foster care. Companies don't care, so if you release something as open source that's relevant to them, "companies will simply take it, modify it, and never release their changes,and charge for it too" - but that is what companies do, that is their very nature, and you knew that when you first opened the source. You also knew that when you picked a license, and it's a major reason for the particular choice you made. Want to force companies to share? Pick GPL. If you decide to yoke a dragon, and it instead snatches your shiny lure and flies away to its cave, you don't get to complain that the dragon isn't playing nice and doesn't want to become your beast of burden. If you picked MIT as your license, that's on you.

zer00eyz 1y ago

> or public domain https://news.artnet.com/art-world/ai-art-us-copyright-office-2604297 https://news.artnet.com/art-world/ai-art-us-copyright-office... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_dispute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput... Im pretty sure that this ship has sailed.

raincole 1y ago
It's sailed, but towards the other way: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cg5vjqdm1ypo https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cg5vjqdm1ypo
- fc417fc802 1y ago
  That's a brand new ongoing lawsuit. The ship hasn't sailed in either direction yet. It hasn't even been clearly established if Midjourney has liability let alone where the bounds for such liability might lie. Remember, anyone can attempt to sue anyone for anything at any time in a functional system. How far the suit makes it is a different matter.
- zer00eyz 1y ago
  https://www.wired.com/story/ai-art-copyright-matthew-allen/ https://www.wired.com/story/ai-art-copyright-matthew-allen/ https://www.cnbc.com/2025/03/19/ai-art-cannot-be-copyrighted-appeals-court-rules.html https://www.cnbc.com/2025/03/19/ai-art-cannot-be-copyrighted... Here are cases where the product of AI/ML are not the products of people and not capable of being copyrighted. These are about the OUTPUT being unable to be copyrighted.
- gwd 1y ago
  On the contrary. IANAL, but this is my understanding of the law (setting aside the "work for hire" thing for simplicity) 1. If you come up with something completely new, you are the sole copyright holder. 2. If you take someone else's copyrighted work and transform it, then both of you have a copyright on the derivative work. So if you write a brand new comic book that includes Darth Vader, you can't sell that without Disney's permission [1]: they have a copyright on Darth Vader, and so your comic book is partly copyrighted by them. But at the same time, they can't sell it without your permission, because you have a copyright on the comic book too. In the case of Midjourney outputs, my understanding of the current state of the law is this: 1. Only humans can create copyrights 2. So if Midjourney creates an entirely new image that's not derivative of anyone else's work (as defined by long-established copyright law on derivative works), then nobody owns the copyright, and it's in the public domain 3. If Midjourney creates an image that is derived from someone else's work (as defined by long established copyright law on derivative works), then only Disney has a copyright on that derivative work. And so, in theory, Disney could distribute Darth Vader images you made with Midjourney, unless you can convince the court that you had enough creative influence over them to warrant a copyright. [1] Yes of course fair use, trying to make a point here

AJ007 1y ago

I understand what experienced developers don't want random AI contributions from no-knowledge "developers" contributing to a project. In any situation, if a human is review AI code line by line that would tie up humans for years, even ignoring anything legally. #1 There will be no verifiable way to prove something was AI generated beyond early models. #2 Software projects that somehow are 100% human developed will not be competitive with AI assisted or written projects. The only room for debate on that is an apocalypse level scenario where humans fail to continue producing semiconductors or electricity. #3 If a project successfully excludes AI contributions (not clear how other than controlling contributions to a tight group of anti-AI fanatics), it's just going to be cloned, and the clones will leave it in the dust. If the license permits forking then it could be forked too, but cloning and purging any potential legal issues might be preferred. There still is a path for open source projects. It will be different. There's going to be much, much more software in the future and it's not going to be all junk (although 99% might.)

Eisenstein 1y ago
If AI can generate software so easily and which performs the expected functions, why do we even need to know that it did so? Isn't the future really just asking an AI for a result and getting that result? The AI would be writing all sorts of bespoke code to do the thing we ask, and then discard it immediately after. That is what seems more likely, and not 'so much software we have to figure out rights to'.
amake 1y ago
> #2 Software projects that somehow are 100% human developed will not be competitive with AI assisted or written projects Still waiting to see evidence of AI-driven projects eating the lunch of "traditional" projects.
- viraptor 1y ago
  It's happening slowly all around. It's not obvious because people producing high quality stuff have no incentive at all to mark their changes as AI-generated. But there are also local tools generated faster than you could adjust existing tools to do what you want. I'm running 3 things now just for myself that I generated from scratch instead of trying to send feature requests to existing apps I can buy. It's only going to get more pervasive from now on.

koolala 1y ago

This is a win for MIT license though.

graemep 1y ago
From what point of view? For someone using MIT licensed code for training, it still requires a copy of the license and the copyright notice in "copies or substantial portions of the software". SO I guess its fine for a snippet, but if the AI reproduces too much of it, then its in breach. From the point of view of someone who does not want their code used by an LLM then using GPL code is more likely to be a breach.

Thorrez 1y ago

Is there any likelihood that the output of the model would be public domain? Even if the model itself is public domain, the prompt was created by a human and impacted the output, so I don't see how the output could be public domain. And then after that, the output was hopefully reviewed by the original prompting human and likely reviewed by another human during code review, leading to more human impact on the final code.

AndrewDucker 1y ago
There is no copyright in AI art. Presumably the same reasoning would apply to AI code: https://iclg.com/news/22400-us-court-confirms-ai-generated-art-cannot-be-copyrighted https://iclg.com/news/22400-us-court-confirms-ai-generated-a...
- lars_francke 1y ago
  This particular case is US only. The rest of the world might decide differently.
  - AndrewDucker 1y ago
    Absolutely. And as long as you're not worried about people in the USA reusing your code then you're all good!
- Thorrez 1y ago
  >The court further reiterated that the human authorship requirement does not “impede the protection of works made with artificial intelligence”, as the USCO has previously permitted the registration of works “made by human authors who use artificial intelligence”. It continued that “line-drawing disagreements” over the extent to which artificial intelligence contributed to a human author’s work are “neither here nor there”, as Thaler had listed the Creativity Machine as the sole author. It sounds like in this case the the guy claimed the AI was the sole author, and that's why there's no copyright. But if a human is using AI as a tool, then there can be copyright.

graemep 1y ago

Proprietary source code would not usually end up training LLMs. Unless its leaked, how would an LLM have access to it? > it would require speculative copyright owners to disassemble their binaries I wonder whether AI might be a useful tool for making that easier. If you have evidence then you can get courts to order disclosure or examination of code. > And plenty of proprietary software has public domain code in it already. I am pretty sure there is a significant amount of proprietary code that has FOSS code in it, against license terms (especially GPL and similar). A lot of proprietary code is now been written using AIs trained on FOSS code, and companies are open about this. It might open an interesting can of worms.

physicsguy 1y ago
> Unless its leaked Given the number of people on HN that say they're using for e.g. Cursor, OpenAI, etc. through work, and my experience with workplaces saying 'absolutely you can't use it', I suspect a large amount is being leaked.
- graemep 1y ago
  I thought most of these did not use users context and input for training?
pmlnr 1y ago
Licence incompatibility is enough.

strogonoff 1y ago

People sometimes miss that copyleft is powered by copyright. Copyleft (which means Linux, Blender, and plenty of other goodness) needs the ability to impose some rules on what users do with your work, presumably in the interest of common good. Such ability implies IP ownership. This does not mean that powerful interests abusing copyright with ever increasing terms and enforcement overreach is fair game. It harms common interest. However, it does mean that abusing copyright from the other side and denouncing the core ideas of IP ownership—which is now sort of in the interest of certain companies (and capital heavily invested in certain fashionable but not yet profitable startups) based around IP expropriation—harms common interest just as well.

ben_w 1y ago
While this is a generally true statement (and has echoes in other areas like sovereign citizens), GenAI may make copyright (and copyleft) economically redundant. While the AI we have now is not good enough to make an entire operating system when asked*, if/when they can, the benefits of all the current licensing models evaporate, and it doesn't matter if that model is proprietary with no source, or GPL, or MIT, because by that point anyone else can reproduce your OS for whatever the cost of tokens is without ever touching your code. But as we're not there yet, I agree with @benlivengood that (most**) OSS projects must treat GenAI code as if it's unusable. * At least, not a modern OS. I've not tried getting any model to output a tiny OS that would fit in a C64, and while I doubt they can currently do this, it is a bet I might lose, whereas I am confident all models would currently fail at e.g. reproducing Windows XP. ** I think MIT licensed projects can probably use GenAI code, they're not trying to require derivatives to follow the same licence, but I'm not a lawyer and this is just my barely informed opinion from reading the licenses.
- strogonoff 1y ago
  I have a few sociophilosophical quibbles about the impact of this, but to focus on a practical part: > by that point anyone else can reproduce your OS for whatever the cost of tokens is without ever touching your code. Do you think that the cost of tokens will remain low enough once these companies for now operating at loss have to be profitable, and it really is going to be “anyone else”? Or, would it be limited to “big tech” or select few corporations who can pay a non-trivial amount of money to them? Do you think it would mean they essentially sell GPL’ed code for proprietary use? Would it not affect FOSS, which has been till now partially powered by the promise to contributors that their (often voluntary) work would remain for public benefit? Do you think someone would create and make public (and gather so much contributor effort) something on the scale Linux, if they knew that it would be open to be scraped by an intermediary who can sell it at whatever price they choose to set to companies that then are free to call it their own and repackage commercially without contributing back, providing their source or crediting the original authors in any way?

olalonde 1y ago

Seems like a fake problem. Who would sue QEMU for using AI-generated code? OpenAI? Anthropic?

ethbr1 1y ago
Anyone whose code is in a used model's training set.* This is about future existential tail risk, not current risk. * Depending on future court decisions in different jurisdictions
- olalonde 1y ago
  Again, seems so implausible that it's not worth worrying about.
  - ethbr1 1y ago
    Were you around for SCO? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_SCO%E2%80%93Linux_disputes#Timeline https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_SCO%E2%80%93Linu... IP disputes aren't trivial, especially for shoestring-funded OSS.
  - consp 1y ago
    It is implausible until it isn't and qemu is taking a very cheap and easy step to outright ban it and covering their ass just in case. The threat is low plausibility but high risk and thus a valid one to consider.
    - olalonde 1y ago
      I disagree. Open source projects routinely deal with far greater risk, like employees contributing open source code on company time without explicit authorization. Yet they generally allow code from anyone without much verification (some have a contributor agreement but it's based on trust, there's no actual verification). I stand by my 2022 prediction[0]: no one will get sued for using LLM-generated code. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31849027 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31849027

stronglikedan 1y ago

To me, AI doesn't generate code by itself, so there's no difference between the outputted code or code written by the human that prompted it. As well, the humans that prompt it are solely responsible for making sure it is correct, and solely to blame for any negative outcomes of its use, just as if they had written it themselves.

sswam 1y ago

[dead]