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AI Code is Hollowing Out Open Source, and Maintainers are Looking the Other Way (www.quippd.com)
submitted 7 months ago by to c/fuck_ai@lemmy.world
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TL;DR: The advent of AI based, LLM coding applications like Anthropic’s Claude and ChatGPT have prompted maintainers to experiment with integrating LLM contributions into open source codebases. This is a fast path to open source irrelevancy, since the US copyright office has deemed LLM outputs to be uncopyrightable. This means that as more uncopyrightable LLM outputs are integrated into nominally open source codebases, value leaks out of the project, since the open source licences are not operative on public domain code. That means that the public domain, AI generated code can be reused without attribution, and in the case of copyleft licences - can even be used in closed source projects.

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[–] [S] 3 points 7 months ago (4 children)

How does this apply to software made by, say, Anthropic? They proudly say Claude Code is written by AI. If it can’t be copywritten, or licensed, then it’s just a matter of figuring out how to acquire a copy of the source code, and you could do whatever with it. Right?

If you were on Mastodon last week when the Claude source code was released (by Claude, accidentally), people were joking about how Anthropic was trying to use the DMCA to get the source removed from websites -- even though clearly, copyrights don't apply, since the code is clearly in the public domain.

If the LLM wrote the code, it is uncopyrightable.

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  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago* (3 children)

    Yes, but can it be licensed. Why is my question so confusing? Is copyright a prerequisite to a license?

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago (2 children)

    What do you mean? What do you think the license is for? If I own the copyright to something, only I can use it but I can allow others to use it by giving them a license. If something is not copyrighted, anyone can use it because no one controls the rights.

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  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 child)

    I guess it was just as simple as you say, I was just looking for a “yeah, that’s how it is.” I guess. I was having a conversation, looking for a clear reflection that I was correct or not.

    But also, I feel like there must be room for exploration here, since mixing AI generated with hand written is a thing. And there must be something around the facilitation/collaboration part. It feels like it’s not just as simple as free code that is controlled via access to the source.

    I totally understand that purely generated output is not copyrightable. That’s clear. But I feel like there must be grey area yet to be litigated.

    Can I legally reverse engineer AI generated software? Does it matter what modules are hand written and what ones are not when I reverse engineer it? How is this accounted for in licenses? Terms of Service?

    Can you even put terms and conditions on this supposed public domain copyright free compiled software product? Etc. etc.

    Is the compiled version even different than the raw AI generated source code in its ability to be licensed?

    How do you prove code is AI generated? How do you pick it apart when it’s only ai augmented?

    This is why I’m asking the questions I am. It just doesn’t feel like it all hangs together clearly.

    What rights does one have to AI generated code? Be it compiled or source. It’s surely not just communal.

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 7 months ago

    Can I legally reverse engineer AI generated software?

    If you have the source, why would you need to?

    Can you even put terms and conditions on this supposed public domain copyright free compiled software product?

    You can put terms on anything, but you can't protect the underlying asset if someone breaks your terms. Think of the code produced by Grsecruity that they put behind a paywall -- people were free to release the code (since it was licensed as open source as a derivative work), but obviously Grsecruity was able to discontinue their agreement with their clients who would do so.

    Is the compiled version even different than the raw AI generated source code in its ability to be licensed?

    People aren't generally licensing compiled binaries as open source, since you can't produce derivative works from them. But I think that if there is no copyright protection for the work, compiling it doesn't change the copyrightability. Curious what you think.

    What rights does one have to AI generated code? Be it compiled or source. It’s surely not just communal.

    Why is that surely the case? It is public domain - that is the most "communal" you can get for copyright.

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