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Its license washing. The code is great because its already a problem solved by someone else. The AI can spit out the solution with no license and no attribution

Its license washing. The code is great because its already a problem solved by someone else. The AI can spit out the solution with no license and no attribution and somehow its legal. I hope American tech legislation holds that same energy once others start taking American IP and spitting it back out with no license or attribution.

irishcoffee 8mo ago
The models need to get burned down and retrained with these considerations baked in.
- blackqueeriroh 8mo ago
  No. We need to light all IP law on fire. You shouldn’t able to license or patent software.
  - reverius42 8mo ago
    What about novels? Nonfiction books? Scientific papers? Poems? Those things are all in the training data too.
userbinator 8mo ago
Do you give attribution to all the books, articles, etc. you've read? Everything is a derivative work.
- YeGoblynQueenne 8mo ago
  You mean there are no new ideas? I think that's a big claim. As a for instance, how is mergesort "derivative work" of bubblesort?
- wredcoll 8mo ago
  No but for a while we were required to pay amazon when we implemented a way to save payment details on a website.
- Guvante 8mo ago
  Actually you might need to depending on how similar your implementation is. Copyright law here is quite nuanced. See the Google vs Oracle case about Java.
ThunderSizzle 8mo ago
I've seen many discussions stating patent hoarding has gone too far, and also that copyright for companies have gone way too far (even so much that Amazon can remove items from your purchase library if they lose their license to it). Then AI begins to offer a method around this over litigious system, and this becomes a core anti-AI argument. I do think it's silly to think public code (as in, code published to the public) won't be re-used by someone in a way your license dictates. I'd you didn't want that to happen, don't publish your code. Having said that, I do think there's a legitimate concern here.
- Retric 8mo ago
  A great deal of code on GitHub was not posted there by the original authors. So any argument that posting stuff online provides an implicit license is severely flawed.
- ibeckermayer 8mo ago
  1. Equality under the law is important in its own right. Even if a law is wrong, it isn’t right to allow particular corporations to flaunt it in a way that individuals would go to prison for. 2. GPL does not allow you to take the code, compress it in your latent space, and then sell that to consumers without open sourcing your code.
  - creato 8mo ago
    > Even if a law is wrong, it isn’t right to allow particular corporations to flaunt it in a way that individuals would go to prison for. No one goes to prison for this. They might get sued, but even that is doubtful.
    - ibeckermayer 8mo ago
      Just flat out false, and embarrassingly so, but spoken with the unearned authority of an LLM. See: The Pirate Bay.
    - degamad 8mo ago
      Aaron Swartz would probably disagree. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz
candiddevmike 8mo ago
If I include licensed code in a prompt and have a LLM include it in the output, is it still licensed?
phpnode 8mo ago
The other day I had an agent write a parser for a niche query language which I will not name. There are a few open source implementations of this language on github, but none of them are in my target language and none of them are PEGs. The agent wrote a near perfect implementation of this query language in a PEG. I know that it looked at the implementations that were on github, because I told it to, yet the result is nothing like them. It just used them as a reference. Would and should this be a licensing issue (if they weren't MIT)?
- Guvante 8mo ago
  No one knows until a law about it is written. You could postulate based on judicial rulings but unless those are binding you are effectively hypothesizing.
- fsmv 8mo ago
  It would be nice to give them some kind of attribution in the readme or something since you know which projects you referenced
  - r-w 8mo ago
    Exactly. If you have the decency to ask, you probably have the capacity to be courteous beyond the minimum required by law.
    - phpnode 8mo ago
      I'm more interested in the general question rather than the specifics of this situation, which I'm sure is now incredibly common. I know it looked at those implementations because I asked it to, and therefore I will credit those projects when I release this library. In general though, people do not know what other material the agents looked at in order to derive their results, therefore they can't give credit, or even be sure that they are technically complying with the relevant licenses.
tty456 8mo ago
At the end of the day it's up to the publisher of the work to attribute the sources that might end up in some commercial or public software derivative.
_zagj 8mo ago
> The AI can spit out the solution with no license and no attribution and somehow its legal Note that even MIT requires attribution.
- _zagj 8mo ago
  I'm not sure why this was downvoted. The MIT license, which many devs (and every LLM) treat as if it were public domain, still requires inclusion of the license and its copyright notice verbatim in derivative works.
20k 8mo ago
This is why its astonishing to me that AI has passed any legal department. I regularly see AI output large chunks of code that are 100% plagiarised from a project - its often not hard to find the original source by just looking up snippets of it. 100s of lines of code just completely stolen Ai doesn't actually wash licenses, it literally can't. Companies are just assuming they're above the law
- thedevilslawyer 8mo ago
  This is oft-repeated but never backed up by evidence. Can you share the snippet that was plagiarized?
  - vohk 8mo ago
    I can't offer an example of code, but considering researchers were able to cause models to reproduce literary works verbatim, it seems unlikely that a git repository would be materially different. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/01/ai-memorization-research/685552/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/01/ai-memorizati...
    - thedevilslawyer 8mo ago
      Assuming that even works from a researcher's perspective, it's working back from a specific goal. There's 0 actual instances (and I've been looking) where verbatim code has been spat out. It's a convenient criticism of LLMs, but a wrong one. We need to do better.
      - latexr 8mo ago
        > There's 0 actual instances (and I've been looking) where verbatim code has been spat out. That’s not true. I’ve seen it happen and remember reports where it was obvious it happened (and trivial to verify) because the LLM reproduced the comments with source information. Either way, plagiarism doesn’t require one to copy 100% verbatim (otherwise every plagiarist would easily be off the hook). It still counts as plagiarism if you move a space or rename a variable. https://xcancel.com/DocSparse/status/1581461734665367554 https://xcancel.com/DocSparse/status/1581461734665367554 https://xcancel.com/mitsuhiko/status/1410886329924194309 https://xcancel.com/mitsuhiko/status/1410886329924194309 > We need to do better. I agree. We have to start by not dismissing valid criticisms by appealing to irrelevant technicalities which don’t excuse anything.
palmotea 8mo ago
> The AI can spit out the solution with no license and no attribution and somehow its legal. Has that been properly adjudicated? That's what the AI companies and their fans wish, but wishing for something doesn't make it true.
sharperguy 8mo ago
To me, it's just further evidence that trying to assert ownership over a specific sequence of 1s and 0s is an entirely futile and meaningless endeavor.
- Hendrikto 8mo ago
  Regardless of your opinion on that (I largely agree with you), that is not the current law, and people went to prison for FAR less. Remember Aaron Swartz, for example.
Andrex 8mo ago
I did have the thought that the SCOTUS ruling against Oracle slightly opened the door to code not being copyrightable (they deliberately tap-danced around the issue). Maybe that's the future: all code is plumbing; no art, no creative intent.
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]

irishcoffee 8mo ago

The models need to get burned down and retrained with these considerations baked in.

blackqueeriroh 8mo ago
No. We need to light all IP law on fire. You shouldn’t able to license or patent software.
- reverius42 8mo ago
  What about novels? Nonfiction books? Scientific papers? Poems? Those things are all in the training data too.

userbinator 8mo ago

Do you give attribution to all the books, articles, etc. you've read? Everything is a derivative work.

YeGoblynQueenne 8mo ago
You mean there are no new ideas? I think that's a big claim. As a for instance, how is mergesort "derivative work" of bubblesort?
wredcoll 8mo ago
No but for a while we were required to pay amazon when we implemented a way to save payment details on a website.
Guvante 8mo ago
Actually you might need to depending on how similar your implementation is. Copyright law here is quite nuanced. See the Google vs Oracle case about Java.

ThunderSizzle 8mo ago

I've seen many discussions stating patent hoarding has gone too far, and also that copyright for companies have gone way too far (even so much that Amazon can remove items from your purchase library if they lose their license to it). Then AI begins to offer a method around this over litigious system, and this becomes a core anti-AI argument. I do think it's silly to think public code (as in, code published to the public) won't be re-used by someone in a way your license dictates. I'd you didn't want that to happen, don't publish your code. Having said that, I do think there's a legitimate concern here.

Retric 8mo ago
A great deal of code on GitHub was not posted there by the original authors. So any argument that posting stuff online provides an implicit license is severely flawed.
ibeckermayer 8mo ago
1. Equality under the law is important in its own right. Even if a law is wrong, it isn’t right to allow particular corporations to flaunt it in a way that individuals would go to prison for. 2. GPL does not allow you to take the code, compress it in your latent space, and then sell that to consumers without open sourcing your code.
- creato 8mo ago
  > Even if a law is wrong, it isn’t right to allow particular corporations to flaunt it in a way that individuals would go to prison for. No one goes to prison for this. They might get sued, but even that is doubtful.
  - ibeckermayer 8mo ago
    Just flat out false, and embarrassingly so, but spoken with the unearned authority of an LLM. See: The Pirate Bay.
  - degamad 8mo ago
    Aaron Swartz would probably disagree. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz

candiddevmike 8mo ago

If I include licensed code in a prompt and have a LLM include it in the output, is it still licensed?

phpnode 8mo ago

The other day I had an agent write a parser for a niche query language which I will not name. There are a few open source implementations of this language on github, but none of them are in my target language and none of them are PEGs. The agent wrote a near perfect implementation of this query language in a PEG. I know that it looked at the implementations that were on github, because I told it to, yet the result is nothing like them. It just used them as a reference. Would and should this be a licensing issue (if they weren't MIT)?

Guvante 8mo ago
No one knows until a law about it is written. You could postulate based on judicial rulings but unless those are binding you are effectively hypothesizing.
fsmv 8mo ago
It would be nice to give them some kind of attribution in the readme or something since you know which projects you referenced
- r-w 8mo ago
  Exactly. If you have the decency to ask, you probably have the capacity to be courteous beyond the minimum required by law.
  - phpnode 8mo ago
    I'm more interested in the general question rather than the specifics of this situation, which I'm sure is now incredibly common. I know it looked at those implementations because I asked it to, and therefore I will credit those projects when I release this library. In general though, people do not know what other material the agents looked at in order to derive their results, therefore they can't give credit, or even be sure that they are technically complying with the relevant licenses.

tty456 8mo ago

At the end of the day it's up to the publisher of the work to attribute the sources that might end up in some commercial or public software derivative.

_zagj 8mo ago

> The AI can spit out the solution with no license and no attribution and somehow its legal Note that even MIT requires attribution.

_zagj 8mo ago
I'm not sure why this was downvoted. The MIT license, which many devs (and every LLM) treat as if it were public domain, still requires inclusion of the license and its copyright notice verbatim in derivative works.

20k 8mo ago

This is why its astonishing to me that AI has passed any legal department. I regularly see AI output large chunks of code that are 100% plagiarised from a project - its often not hard to find the original source by just looking up snippets of it. 100s of lines of code just completely stolen Ai doesn't actually wash licenses, it literally can't. Companies are just assuming they're above the law

thedevilslawyer 8mo ago
This is oft-repeated but never backed up by evidence. Can you share the snippet that was plagiarized?
- vohk 8mo ago
  I can't offer an example of code, but considering researchers were able to cause models to reproduce literary works verbatim, it seems unlikely that a git repository would be materially different. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/01/ai-memorization-research/685552/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/01/ai-memorizati...
  - thedevilslawyer 8mo ago
    Assuming that even works from a researcher's perspective, it's working back from a specific goal. There's 0 actual instances (and I've been looking) where verbatim code has been spat out. It's a convenient criticism of LLMs, but a wrong one. We need to do better.
    - latexr 8mo ago
      > There's 0 actual instances (and I've been looking) where verbatim code has been spat out. That’s not true. I’ve seen it happen and remember reports where it was obvious it happened (and trivial to verify) because the LLM reproduced the comments with source information. Either way, plagiarism doesn’t require one to copy 100% verbatim (otherwise every plagiarist would easily be off the hook). It still counts as plagiarism if you move a space or rename a variable. https://xcancel.com/DocSparse/status/1581461734665367554 https://xcancel.com/DocSparse/status/1581461734665367554 https://xcancel.com/mitsuhiko/status/1410886329924194309 https://xcancel.com/mitsuhiko/status/1410886329924194309 > We need to do better. I agree. We have to start by not dismissing valid criticisms by appealing to irrelevant technicalities which don’t excuse anything.

palmotea 8mo ago

> The AI can spit out the solution with no license and no attribution and somehow its legal. Has that been properly adjudicated? That's what the AI companies and their fans wish, but wishing for something doesn't make it true.

sharperguy 8mo ago

To me, it's just further evidence that trying to assert ownership over a specific sequence of 1s and 0s is an entirely futile and meaningless endeavor.

Hendrikto 8mo ago
Regardless of your opinion on that (I largely agree with you), that is not the current law, and people went to prison for FAR less. Remember Aaron Swartz, for example.

Andrex 8mo ago

I did have the thought that the SCOTUS ruling against Oracle slightly opened the door to code not being copyrightable (they deliberately tap-danced around the issue). Maybe that's the future: all code is plumbing; no art, no creative intent.

deleted 8mo ago

[deleted]