cross-posted from: https://feddit.online/c/tech@feddit.online/p/2115447/all-ai-generated-code-should-be-open-source
Not a hot take at all
All AI code has been indirectly stolen from open source projects, it only makes sense that the output should be open source as well, see GPL for that.
I’ve said for years that all of the “good” or “useful” aspects of LLMs are because they ignore copyright. They’re a glimpse of the creative freedom that IP law stifles.
This is exactly how it should work. Any code copied from GNU GPL code should legally also be GNU GPL, no ifs, ands or buts.
Oh, your training data set contains GPL code? Guess what, all the output from that model is now GPL. It’s your burden to prove that your training data does not contain any GPL code.
It’s nearly impossible to prove a negative. But it would be trivial to ask it for code from a GPL project. If it can provide it, it’s in the model.
It’s nearly impossible to prove a negative.
In a general, open-ended situation, sure. In this case, the model developer has all of the training data that was input for training the model. It should take all of half an hour to determine if there is any GPL code in the training data set.
Hi, I am from OpenAI/Alphabet/Meta, I have checked our training data and it contains no GPL code, or copyrighted or pirated media of any kind, it’s all perfectly totally 100% legit. Thank you for your inquiry, hope this solves the issue and have a good day.
Right, so, then we have a paper trail of fraud. Forcing them to make such a statement in writing is useful.
This guy gets it.
Imagine if any work made by AI was free use, public domain, uncopyrightable. Bet that would change the equation for corporations a bit.
Make a movie using AI? Anyone can make copies and distribute them freely.
I’m pretty sure, at least in the USA, there have been rulings that there must be human authorship for something to have copyright protection. This has happened both in the courts and the US Copyright Office has spoken on the matter as well. If you’re interested in one of the court cases I’d suggest looking up Thaler v. Perlmutter.
There was a stipulation though, any human made parts of a work is copyrightable, so in your scenario of copying a movie would probably still be illegal unless the entire movie was created by gen ai, but it would seem that you could probably cut the gen ai bits and release and reuse them without violating any copyright, but I’m also not a lawyer so…
Your right, but it should apply to the whole work. We need to Stop fucking around and put the brakes on them.
I’m not 100% sure how I feel about that take. Part of me agrees, but also part of me doesn’t. Especially with big projects like a movie it could be easy for one person to slip in a tiny bit of ai generated work and now the whole movie loses its copyright? Seems like a bit too much of an overcorrection to me.
I do strongly agree that we need to hit the brakes hard and really work through a lot of the issues gen ai has brought up.
That gives great incentive for people to stop using it and to heavily restrict its use to only what is needed. If an entire project can be poisoned just like that, larger companies will absolutely hound AI companies to make their output 100% identifiable.
Nuance is the hard part for sure. Im open to ideas.
This is true for at least ai generated images I have heard.
The problem is thst public domain is worse than copyleft.
And NEVER sell them, that should be still a crime
Any time you stick a non-commercial clause to a license, it prohibits a ton of stuff because well, you can’t use any of it if doing so makes you money. Like, want to run a website, or make youtube videos, or stream, and you have ads or donations enabled, or patreon or anything like that? If so, you can’t use NC licensed content.
That’s why one important part of public domain is that nobody is also prevented from selling them, so that the content is actually free for anyone to use.
The thing is that, as AI are created from theft, then their output must never be sold.
if we weren’t in a game where everyone has to collect as much money as possible, we all could be living in the 2026 that we were promised.
I forget when did world war III start in the Star Trek universe?
And pay the rights holders from the training materials.
Also require them to get permission to use the data in the training process before they pay to use it.
It’s already the end of copyright. Want something protected? Jut ask ai to make a clean-room version of it /s
… and then release it under GPL.
I think you would be suprised how much of the code that is written by AI is solving the same problems every company solves, and is totally useless outside the company. Very little of it is really novel or valuable. And that is the code not being written by AI.
Which is fine, no one cares, they’re not redistributing or selling it so licensing probably isn’t needed or important. (IDK not a lawyer).
But if someone does want to sell or redistribute, then any model with, say, GPL input should (I think) be passing on the GPL terms with the redistribution of the derived work.
Yep. I have loads of PowerShell scripts that will never be used again because they were specific to the company they were written for.
Everything is foss if you try hard enough.
Except generated code in a lot of places simply cannot be copyrighted for starters (there is degree this can vary from place to place, from having some edits to being just a small part of the entire project)
Source? I’m pretty sure that’s true for images, but copywrite law can vary greatly depending on medium, and context.
Fair ask, here https://fsfe.org/news/2026/news-20260825-01.html
I’m pretty sure that’s true for images
Threshold of originality doesn’t distinguish between images and code. Either it’s human creative work or it’s not. Chore isn’t creative work, so the amount of invested time doesn’t count.
