It's just unsettled law, and the link is basically an opinion piece. But guess who wins major legal battles like this - yep, the big corps. There's only one way this is going to go for AI generated code

It is true that AI work (and anything derived from it that isn't significantly transformative) is public domain. That said, the copyright of code that is a mix of AI and human is much more legally grey.

In other work, where it can be more separated, individual elements may have different copyright. For example, a comic was made using AI generated images. It was ruled that all the images were thus public domain. Despite that, the text and the layout of the comic was human-made and so the copyright to that was owned by the author. Code, obviously can't be so easily divided up, and it will be much harder to define what is transformative or not. As such, its a legal grey area that will probably depend on a case-by-case basis.

Even if it were, it would be for you or I, but not for Microsoft, apple, Google, or Amazon.

The US copyright office confirms this. https://www.copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-Intelligence-Part-2-Copyrightability-Report.pdf

does the public really want more garbage than they already has?

Haven't we been exposed to enough horror?

Probably wouldn't work, at this point I doubt they're capable of feeling shame anymore, if they ever were.

It's just the code that's not under copyright, so if someone leaked it you could legally copy and distribute any parts which are AI generated but it wouldn't invalidate copyright on the official binaries.

If all the code were AI generated (or enough of it to be able to fill in the blanks), you might be able to make a case that it's legal to build and distribute binaries, but why would you bother distributing that slop?

The law is very clear that non-human generated content cannot hold copyright.

That monkey that took a picture of itself is a famous example.

But yes, the OP is missing some context. If a human was involved, say in editing the code, then that edited code can be subject to copyright. The unedited code likely cannot.

Human written code cannot be stripped of copyright protection regardless of how much AI garbage you shove in.

Still, all of this is meaningless until a few court cases happen.

People will believe anything if the icon on the tweet looks authoritative and the grammar is sound.

I work for a large enterprise firm, our corporate lawyer has told be about this exact scenario so I'm inclined to believe it's real.

That being said, for established projects it won't be that hard to prove the non-AI bit because you have a long commit history that predates the tooling.

Even if you were to assume that all commits after a certain date were AI generated, the OP is slightly off in their attestation that any AI code suddenly makes the whole thing public domain, it would only be if a majority of the codebase was AI coded (and provably so).

So yes all the vibe coded shite is a lost cause, but stuff like Windows isn't in any danger.

There was a case in which a monkey took a picture and the owner of the camera wanted to publish the photo. Peta sued and lost because an animal can't hold any copyright as an human author is required for copyright.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_dispute

As you also find in the wikipedia article, this case is used to argue that ai generated content is not by an human author and consequently not copyrightable.

If there was an actual civil suit you'd probably be able to subpoena people for that information, and the standard is only more likely than not. I have no idea if the general idea is bullshit, though.

IANAL

By that same logic LLMs themselves (by now some AI bro had to vibe code something there)

I'm guessing LLMs are still really really bad at that kind of programming. The packaging of the LLM, sure.

& their trained datapoints

For legal purposes, it seems like the weights would be generated by the human-made training algorithm. I have no idea if that's copyrightable under US law. The standard approach seems to be to keep them a trade secret and pretend there's no espionage, though.