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AI Code is Hollowing Out Open Source, and Maintainers are Looking the Other Way (www.quippd.com)

submitted 3 months ago by yoasif@fedia.io to c/foss@beehaw.org

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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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[–] Buelldozer@lemmy.today 0 points 3 months ago (1 children)

This is a fast path to open source irrelevancy, since the US copyright office has deemed LLM outputs to be uncopyrightable.

This is a misunderstanding of US Copyright. Here's a link to the compendium so you can verify for yourself.

Section 313 says "Although uncopyrightable material, by definition, is not eligible for copyright protection, the Office may register a work that contains uncopyrightable material, provided that the work as a whole contains other material that qualifies as an original work of authorship..."

This means that LLM created code that's embedded in a larger work may be registered.

Section 313.2 says "Similarly, the Office will not register works produced by a machine or mere mechanical process that operates randomly or automatically without any creative input or intervention from a human author."

Meaning that LLM created code CAN be registered as long as an author has some creative input or intervention in the process. I'd posit that herding an LLM system to create the code definitely qualifies as "creative input or intervention". If someone feels it isn't then all they need to do is change something, literally anything, and suddenly it becomes a derivative work of an uncopyrighted source and the derivative can then be registered (to a human) and be subject to copyright.

In short, it's fine. Take a breath.

[–] LukeZaz@beehaw.org 0 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

In short, it’s fine. Take a breath.

Ehhhhh, that depends on how you take it. Personally, no, I'm not very worried about the legal aspect. But,

It's still LLMs. FOSS communities have been better than average, but that bar is a low one considering coders generally have been using LLMs most of all. And LLM usage is reckless, not to mention presently harmful in numerous ways. (And yes, this means the latest models too. "Looks good" doesn't mean it is good.) I'd just as soon FOSS not use the tech at all.