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I love this optimistic take. Unfortunately, I believe the following will happen: By positioning themselves close to law makers, the AI companies will in the ne

by Gud 8mo ago

I love this optimistic take. Unfortunately, I believe the following will happen: By positioning themselves close to law makers, the AI companies will in the near future declare ownership of all software code developed using their software. They will slowly erode their terms of service, as happens to most internet software, step by step, until they claim total ownership. The point is to license the code.

alwillis 8mo ago
> the AI companies will in the near future declare ownership of all software code developed using their software. Pretty sure this isn’t going to happen. AI is driving the cost of software to zero; it’s not worth licensing something that’s a commodity. It’s similar to 3D printing companies. They don’t have IP claims on the items created with their printers. The AI companies currently don’t have IP claims on what their agents create. Uncle Joe won’t need to pay OpenAI for the solitaire game their AI made for him. The open source models are quite capable; in the near future there won’t be a meaningful difference for the average person between a frontier model and an open source one for most uses including creating software.
- Gud 8mo ago
  1. Commodities are huge business. 2. Show me these open source models that cost me $20/month to operate, because that’s what I pay for ChatGPT/Claude. 3. This is not at all similar to “3D printing”. 4. Nobody cares about some solitaire game
theshrike79 8mo ago
> AI companies will in the near future declare ownership of all software code developed using their software. (X) Doubt Copyright law is WEEEEEEIRRRDD and our in-house lawyer is very much into that, personally and professionally. An example they gave us during a presentation: A monkey took a selfie of itself in 2011. We still don't know who has the copyright to that image: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_dispute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput... IIRC the latest resolution is "it's not the monkey", but nobody has ruled the photographer has copyright either. =) Copyright law has this thing called "human authorship" that's required to apply copyright to a work. Animals and machines can't have a copyright to anything. A second example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zarya_of_the_Dawn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zarya_of_the_Dawn A comic generated with Midjourney had its copyright revoked when it was discovered all of the art was done with Generative AI. AI companies have absolutely mindboggling amounts of money, but removing the human authorship requirement from copyright is beyond even them in my non-lawyer opinion. It would bring the whole system crashing down and not in a fun way for anyone.
overgard 8mo ago
AFAIK you can't copyright AI generated content. I don't know where that gets blurry when it's mixed in with your own content (ie, how much do you need to modify it to own it), but I think that by that definition these companies couldn't claim your code at all. Also, with the lawsuit that happened to Anthropic where they had to pay billions for ingesting copyrighted content, it might actually end up working the other way around.
- orangecoffee 8mo ago
  This is incorrect. IN the older world, you would not say intelligence autocompleted code was not copyrightable. Agentic code is the same on steroids. The strong argument: It's absolutely auto completed code for the prompter, and hence fully copyright-able by them.

by Gud 8mo ago

alwillis 8mo ago

> the AI companies will in the near future declare ownership of all software code developed using their software. Pretty sure this isn’t going to happen. AI is driving the cost of software to zero; it’s not worth licensing something that’s a commodity. It’s similar to 3D printing companies. They don’t have IP claims on the items created with their printers. The AI companies currently don’t have IP claims on what their agents create. Uncle Joe won’t need to pay OpenAI for the solitaire game their AI made for him. The open source models are quite capable; in the near future there won’t be a meaningful difference for the average person between a frontier model and an open source one for most uses including creating software.

Gud 8mo ago
1. Commodities are huge business. 2. Show me these open source models that cost me $20/month to operate, because that’s what I pay for ChatGPT/Claude. 3. This is not at all similar to “3D printing”. 4. Nobody cares about some solitaire game

theshrike79 8mo ago

> AI companies will in the near future declare ownership of all software code developed using their software. (X) Doubt Copyright law is WEEEEEEIRRRDD and our in-house lawyer is very much into that, personally and professionally. An example they gave us during a presentation: A monkey took a selfie of itself in 2011. We still don't know who has the copyright to that image: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_dispute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput... IIRC the latest resolution is "it's not the monkey", but nobody has ruled the photographer has copyright either. =) Copyright law has this thing called "human authorship" that's required to apply copyright to a work. Animals and machines can't have a copyright to anything. A second example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zarya_of_the_Dawn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zarya_of_the_Dawn A comic generated with Midjourney had its copyright revoked when it was discovered all of the art was done with Generative AI. AI companies have absolutely mindboggling amounts of money, but removing the human authorship requirement from copyright is beyond even them in my non-lawyer opinion. It would bring the whole system crashing down and not in a fun way for anyone.

overgard 8mo ago

AFAIK you can't copyright AI generated content. I don't know where that gets blurry when it's mixed in with your own content (ie, how much do you need to modify it to own it), but I think that by that definition these companies couldn't claim your code at all. Also, with the lawsuit that happened to Anthropic where they had to pay billions for ingesting copyrighted content, it might actually end up working the other way around.

orangecoffee 8mo ago
This is incorrect. IN the older world, you would not say intelligence autocompleted code was not copyrightable. Agentic code is the same on steroids. The strong argument: It's absolutely auto completed code for the prompter, and hence fully copyright-able by them.