If you use AI-generated code, you currently cannot claim copyright on it in the US.
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@jamie It may not be copyrightable but it can still count as one of the other forms of IP, such as trade secrets, which as a former employee you can very easily be prosecuted for divulging. And there are usually NDAs on top of that. (sorry, replied to wrong post before)
@dwineman Yeah, there are a few approaches to IP law that they'd still have available. But even then, the discovery process would probably require them to air out some of their laundry, too.
IIRC one of the AI platforms was sued recently and settled out of court. Someone on here pointed out that they likely did that to avoid discovery, which would enter a lot of internal data into public record. I'm fuzzy on the details, but the gist was companies generally don't like to go to court over this.
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@dwineman Yeah, there are a few approaches to IP law that they'd still have available. But even then, the discovery process would probably require them to air out some of their laundry, too.
IIRC one of the AI platforms was sued recently and settled out of court. Someone on here pointed out that they likely did that to avoid discovery, which would enter a lot of internal data into public record. I'm fuzzy on the details, but the gist was companies generally don't like to go to court over this.
@jamie The problem is that as an individual, that process would likely bankrupt you well before it even got to discovery, and the company knows that.
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@jaredwhite Yeah, you didn't miss much. Mainly he was replying to things I wasn't saying. Easiest argument I've had on the internet in years.
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@jamie The problem is that as an individual, that process would likely bankrupt you well before it even got to discovery, and the company knows that.
@dwineman 100%. They don't need a favorable judgement to silence you.
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If you use AI-generated code, you currently cannot claim copyright on it in the US. If you fail to disclose/disclaim exactly which parts were not written by a human, you forfeit your copyright claim on *the entire codebase*.
This means copyright notices and even licenses folks are putting on their vibe-coded GitHub repos are unenforceable. The AI-generated code, and possibly the whole project, becomes public domain.
Source: https://www.congress.gov/crs_external_products/LSB/PDF/LSB10922/LSB10922.8.pdf
@jamie RIP microsoft
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Stop whining. You and about seventy zillion terrified sheep running around here bleating about the Terrible AI monster under the bed.
@tuban_muzuru @jamie as a random viewer of this thread, you come off as utterly insufferable, which might not be what you think you come off as, and so you might want to reconsider your behavior
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If you use AI-generated code, you currently cannot claim copyright on it in the US. If you fail to disclose/disclaim exactly which parts were not written by a human, you forfeit your copyright claim on *the entire codebase*.
This means copyright notices and even licenses folks are putting on their vibe-coded GitHub repos are unenforceable. The AI-generated code, and possibly the whole project, becomes public domain.
Source: https://www.congress.gov/crs_external_products/LSB/PDF/LSB10922/LSB10922.8.pdf
@jamie Anything AI-generated is free, BUT anything AI-generated is also worse than simply worthless.
*shrug* -
If you use AI-generated code, you currently cannot claim copyright on it in the US. If you fail to disclose/disclaim exactly which parts were not written by a human, you forfeit your copyright claim on *the entire codebase*.
This means copyright notices and even licenses folks are putting on their vibe-coded GitHub repos are unenforceable. The AI-generated code, and possibly the whole project, becomes public domain.
Source: https://www.congress.gov/crs_external_products/LSB/PDF/LSB10922/LSB10922.8.pdf
@jamie, so if a code review agent corrects a variable name in a proprietary 5M LOC project and that AI edit is not documented (where?), the entire project becomes public domain?
(Asking not you specifically but to entertain the thought such a law could be written without nuance.)
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If you use AI-generated code, you currently cannot claim copyright on it in the US. If you fail to disclose/disclaim exactly which parts were not written by a human, you forfeit your copyright claim on *the entire codebase*.
This means copyright notices and even licenses folks are putting on their vibe-coded GitHub repos are unenforceable. The AI-generated code, and possibly the whole project, becomes public domain.
Source: https://www.congress.gov/crs_external_products/LSB/PDF/LSB10922/LSB10922.8.pdf
@jamie Hmm... this sounds like it's saying is that if a work (e.g. a code base) includes AI-generated content and doesn't identify which parts of it were AI-generated, the whole work and every part of the work, even the human-created parts, become ineligible for copyright. I believe that's wrong. (Maybe misleading, at best, if you meant it in some other way.) I mean, I can't say so authoritatively, since I'm a copyright nerd, not a lawyer, but I'm becoming increasingly convinced the more I look into it. If nothing else, it'd be a quick way to invalidate anybody's copyright on anything by just combining it with some AI-generated content and releasing the combination.
I think a more accurate statement would be that if you fail to disclose which parts were not written by a human, the copyright status of the work is unclear. The human contributions are still copyrighted by their authors, but there are some things that can't be done with the work as a whole without knowing which contributions those are.
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@fsinn @jamie My understanding was that training an AI model on copyrighted work was fair use, because the actual "distribution"--when the AI generates something from a prompt--uses a diminimus amount of copyrighted content from an individual work, except if the user explicitly prompted something like, "Give me Homer Simpson surfing a space orca," at which point the AI company would throw the user all the way under the bus.
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You're attempting to say " If you fail to disclose/disclaim exactly which parts were not written by a human, you forfeit your copyright claim on *the entire codebase*
I'll be gracious and say that's not what the law says, and if you want, I can be a jackass about this because it's not true and the last thing this place needs is yet another Chicken Little making absurd claims.
@tuban_muzuru @jamie That's not alarm, that's joy. -
.... how can you distinguish between 'em?
tuban_muzuru Jamie Gaskins Without adequate repo discipline? You cannot reliably. Stylometry might get some likelihood, at best.
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