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this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2026
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Fuck AI
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AI, in this case, refers to LLMs, GPT technology, and anything listed as "AI" meant to increase market valuations.
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Commenter is right. It remains to be seen whether or not it's actually possible to license code generated this way as anything other than like MIT.
A person didn't really make it, and so a person doesn't really own it.
All AI generated code should be GPL. It was trained on all of us, and its output belongs to all of us.
That would be a copyright violation.
You can't take closed-source code, make a derivative of it, and then GPL it. That's illegal
I mean that if it's allowed at all legally, it should only be licensable under GPL. Or something like that, idk, I'm half sleepy right now
If the model was trained on GPL code then one could argue anything the model outputs is a derivative.
MIT code can be used in GPL projects though. It simply becomes GPL code.
The hiccup is that the statement is that pure AI output is not subject to copyright, but once a human does something 'transformative' to it, then that is. So if a human can work back to the untouched AI output, they can go to town but they can't reproduce any modification that was done after the AI generation. Since in practice, the GenAI row output is not provided it's impossible for the human to know what the human touches were to undo, so that scenario does not present a whole lot of realistic implications.
The person who built it owns it, and can transfer that ownership to the person that paid for it.
If a machine made it, no one owns it.
Copyright applies to creative works, which are defined as a manifestation of creative effort in the world through a creative process involving one or more individuals. It can be argued that since no human creativity was involved, copyright does not apply.
I probably could have worded it better.
To answer your point, creating an object using a machine is not a creative process by the definition used in this context, unless you put your creativity in it too. It's the difference between creating a dress based on your own design and making it based on someone else's. The ownership comes from the ideation, not the machanical process used to make the dress.
The key difference between AI and other tools is that it replaces the creative part of the process, thus removing the human factor.
As a side note, most of the time the end product contains both elements generated with AI and others done by humans. How much human contribution is required for it to be considered a creative work will probably be up to courts and lawmakers I'm afraid.
On a more ideological note, one could argue that AI models were created using basically the entirety of humanity works, often without compensating the ones holding the rights to such works, and thus should be owned by all humanity.
"creativity" is not as easy to define as you seem to imply. When photography replaced a lot of portrait painters, does that mean it wasn't creative work? I mean sure painters can still paint other things, but likewise, coders can still code without AI. Does this just mean that there is "non-creative" code (the code that AI can generate) and "creative" code?
I said in my reply that determining whether something that was made with both AI and human contributions should be deemed a work of human creativity is not trivial. That being said, I can't consider a piece of code entirely written by AI to fit the criteria for copyright protection.
And, dude, photography is 100% creative work and recognized as such everywhere. Yes, the machine takes the picture, but there's a human who decided the subject, how to frame it, light, composition, not to mention the artistic intent, what he means to convey with that picture.
Then is AI code creative because the human wrote the prompt or guided the agent? But as you already said you agree that creativity is hard to define, I'm ok with us disagreeing on the exact boundary.
honestly copyright was already BS as is. "Fair use" is such a mess
Haha I totally agree that copyright is a mess!
That's something that is and will be argued about to the death. I don't think that a prompt is enough to say the person writing it had a part on the creation of the thing, but I know someone will disagree. I see it as someone commissioning a portrait from a painter. No matter how detailed the request is, no one would say that the customer painted the picture.
Aside from that, I guess what I'm trying to say is that, in my view, creativity is something inherently human, and so can't be attributed to a machine or software by definition.
I like the comparison the other use made to GUI tools like Wix or Squarespace. If a user creates a page on Wix, they design the layout, the color palette, the content, etc. which is all undoubtedly up to the creativity of the user. How is prompting an llm to build the same website any less creative? The user is going through almost the same steps, designing the layout and all that, but because they're using natural language instead of a drag and drop tool, suddenly it's not a creative task?
Maybe neither of them are. I wouldn't expect someone who made a website using one of those tools to claim some form of copyright on that and suing other similar websites.
How about photoshop then? Or music creation tools like Garage Band? Does any assistance by software invalidate the creative pursuit of the user? By extension you could argue that all 3rd gen programming languages are the same, you're not writing the 1s and 0s for your code, the machine is doing it for you.
Sorry man, it seems we're at an impasse here.
Either I can't articulate my point via comments or you're determined not to get it no matter how I explain it.
I think it's time to call it quits and use our time more productively. Cheers.
Sorry, I hope I didn't sound combative, I'm just genuinely curious about how people bifurcate these ideas. If anyone else wants to give their perspective I'd be glad to hear it.
In my mind, the use of tools has no bearing on the creativity of the user. I don't really see a difference between coming up with an idea for a beautiful website and then creating it by writing react vs creating it by writing prompts. Just like i dont think writing vanilla javascript is better than writing react, or assembly better than javascript.
The creation is the important part, coming up with an idea for something that could improve the world around you, and then bringing that thing into existence.
Don't worry, comments threads aren't really the best medium for complex and in depth discussions.
Maybe where we don't agree is on the role of AI and the difference between AI and other types of tools.
The way I see it, other tools perform are "dumb", as in they do exactly what you tell them to and nothing else. AI, on the other hand, does more than that, making decisions instead of leaving them to the user.
I think I understand where we're diverging here, and part of it was due to poor reading comprehension by me. When I saw your comment:
"I said in my reply that determining whether something that was made with both AI and human contributions should be deemed a work of human creativity is not trivial. That being said, I can’t consider a piece of code entirely written by AI to fit the criteria for copyright protection.
And, dude, photography is 100% creative work and recognized as such everywhere. Yes, the machine takes the picture, but there’s a human who decided the subject, how to frame it, light, composition, not to mention the artistic intent, what he means to convey with that picture."
in my mind I read that as "I can't consider a piece of code entirely written by AI to be creative work", which isn't what you actually said. I absolutely agree that AI can be used in non-creative ways, but I want to spend minute to mention how I think AI can actually enable creativity rather than replace it.
I'm a software developer for a pretty big enterprise and the way I use AI is not creative in the slightest. Writing code is the part of my job that I like the most so I never really use AI outside of automating boring stuff that I don't want to do, like taking my commits from the past week and writing an update for management each Friday, stuff like that. I also used it recently to write a test suite for a python backend that I was migrating from Flask to Fast API and it worked pretty well for that, but obviously I wouldn't consider that a creative endeavor.
However I have a friend who is a civil engineer, who is pretty comfortable with computers and has done a little modding for old games. I've tried to get her to learn some basic python for data analysis for her work, but she gets intimidated by the idea of programming. For the past few months, she's been using claude to create a website for people in her section to use at work. She takes bridge inspection and location data, does some basic statistics like grouping average inspection scores per county, and then displays all the data on a map with styled points and lines the end user can click to find out more information about the bridge.
Even though she hasn't written a single line of code, she has spent 4 or 5 months creating an application, learning the entire stack, redesigning each page/view, understanding how maplibre works and making decisions about how to render the objects, how the information should be arranged, how the pop up dialogues should work, interlinking functionality with other apps they use for work, etc. What irked me was the thought that someone could look at her work and completely dismiss it as non-creative simply because her hands didn't type the code for all the decisions she made in designing it. The way I see it, working with AI like this is no different than the decision making you mentioned in reference to photography. She is still in control of the vast majority of the design and functionality of the website, even though she's not personally deciding the border radius for each button.
Hopefully you can see my perspective there, and sorry again if my earlier comment sounded dismissive or combative. I came to lemmy from reddit a few years ago and I think the thing I love the most about this site is the fact that you can actually have constructive and nuanced conversations with people who disagree with you without it devolving into name calling or shouting. Thank you for giving me a chance to get that off my chest <3
I can't promise I'll get back to you on the hour, or whatever, but you can play against me.
A key disconnect I'm noticing is that, and this is common with STEM people, you do not view the programming itself, that is the software as written, as an expression of art or creativity. You lack a degree of respect for the profession and the work it produces.
I think, because you are only concerned with the end product. A website can be beautiful for more reasons than just the colors it chooses, you know.
I also see you trying to reduce this to a binary decision on the matter, that if you can prove an iota of creativity, then the entire project is creative, but that's not really how people think about these things.
There is a spectrum of effort. Everyone can cook, but not everyone is a cook. And not every cook is a chef. There are varying levels of skill and application being described here.
To borrow someone else's creativity, with a recipe, or pre-seasoned meat, or a javascript library, might leave people with the feeling that the project is still wholistically creative because the parts you had not touched were still touched by someone. But this only goes so far: people are good at subtracting others' efforts from your own, and if you're work is too derivative, people will not feel as if you've added anything.
The problem with referencing something like Wix is that Wix already represents a diminished creative effort. You as a Wix user make fewer decisions; there are fewer opportunities to express your creativity and skill.
This doesn't mean a Wix website isn't creative whatsoever. It just depends on what you're measuring.
You use this word, 'better', but I don't know what this word means. Is writing vanilla javascript better than writing React? Better in what way?
With regard to creativity, I would argue that vanilla JS is more creative: the brainwork of React's pre-made solutions can't be used, so new ones must be thought up.
If you're following, you should be able to see where the argument that AI isn't creative comes from. The more decisions it makes for you, the fewer decisions you are making.
Art and creativity are affects of the social realm. For something to be creative, you have to be involved. You have to be able to show what it is that you did and why you did it, what thoughts and feelings you had while making it—otherwise, no one will care.
Nor should they. You understand the frustration people feel when calling a customer support line and getting an automated system instead of a real person, yes? Art isn't that different.
Art is conversational. If you listen to high-end art people talk about it, they use this term a lot. They don't mean that art inspires conversation, they mean that it is conversation, like body language.
I would not seriously argue that an AI user has never been creative, that an iota cannot be found. But, generally speaking, they tend to let the AI make so many decisions that I do not think they are involved in the conversation of their own work. I could not ask them and they could not tell me.
And this poses a problem even for work that isn't meant to be consumed publically, like software code. If a person isn't much involved in the coversation of their own work—if they don't know the words they're using or why—then I can't trust their work.
Am I a chef because I ordered a pizza and modified some toppings?
are you an artist because you framed a photo while shooting it?
Point being that if you're going to call photographers creative, then prompting is arguably just as creative
No it absolutely isn't, and this hot take marks you as someone very obviously completely ignorant of photography.
At its very best, slop creation is art direction. And most of it doesn't even reach that level of artistry.
It's slop. Pure and simple. Anybody calling it art is an ignorant jackass.
No but this was the exact criticism levelled by painters against photographers when cameras became more widespread. It's absolutely a valid argument.
This sounds like no true scotsman. Because I think AI prompting can take just as much creativity as shooting a photo, I must not be a true photographer...
How do you measure creativity so that we can decide if using AI is creative or not? And no, you can't just claim "creativity = not using AI", since that would create a circular argument
Why is a slop-monger even in a group literally called "Fuck AI"?!
Piss off, sea lion.
So you can't come up with a valid argument so you just resort to name calling? Please, you don't speak for the community
So what you're saying is that there's a tipping point in "intellectual property" where after a certain amount of creative help from a machine it stops being your idea/property?
My mind goes to real play DND podcasts. There is a framework that allows them to tell their story, but the story still belongs to them.
So like if an LLM writes a function to make the program work properly, like to avoid a logic error you didn't forsee without you asking it too. You don't own that function? Would it be different if you asked it to fix that bug, or do you have to say how to fix the bug?
Well, probably? I'm by no means an expert, so I don't know how that could be defined or work in practice. And I think it'll take us a long time to figure this one out
Sounds like prompt logs need to be tracked in git with reference. But also it sounds basically unenforceable.
In the usa, it has been ruled in the past that only human can have copyright. And if a human is not the author, they don't have the copyright.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_dispute
This has also come up for generative AI with consistent result.
Problem in those cases is that they hinged upon the human passing through the non-human product without even claiming to have modified it. If human modification has been done, then that modification is subject to copyright. In the case of a composite of human and non-human origination, good luck extracting the non-human portion of the work to take advantage of that copyright opening.
Yes. My point was that the person's comparison is shit. That genAI's and human's output aren't the same.
I agree it is a crap comparison, just warning that even as the slop straight from the LLM is not copyrightable, blend in a little human touch up and it is "blessed" into being copyrighted. So it's of little consequence unless the operator just passes it through untouched or makes it somehow easy to identify and remove the human tweaks.
In terms of slopping up a rip off under the assumption that it would obviously be the same as the original slop operators starting point, AI companies in their defense have already stated that operators can violate copyright implicitly as they legally declared they aren't on the hook for any resultant infringement...
I wonder if their legal "protection" will work in court.
Intentionally absurd comparison: if I would host all the batman movies on a public website but make people agree to they are legally responsible for illegally downloading the movies, would I get away with that? I don't think so.
Consequently, how much distance does there need to be between illegal activity and the company/person facilitate that activity?