> The ownership void: If the code is truly a “new” work created by a machine, it might technically be in the public domain the moment it’s generated, rendering the MIT license moot.

How would that work? We still have no legal conclusion on whether AI model generated code, that is trained on all publicly available source (irrespective of type of license), is legal or not. IANAL but IMHO it is totally illegal as no permission was sought from authors of source code the models were trained on. So there is no way to just release the code created by a machine into public domain without knowing how the model was inspired to come up with the generated code in the first place. Pretty sure it would be considered in the scope of "reverse engineering" and that is not specific only to humans. You can extend it to machines as well.

EDIT: I would go so far as to say the most restrictive license that the model is trained on should be applied to all model generated code. And a licensing model with original authors (all Github users who contributed code in some form) should be setup to be reimbursed by AI companies. In other words, a % of profits must flow back to community as a whole every time code-related tokens are generated. Even if everyone receives pennies it doesn't matter. That is fair. Also should extend to artists whose art was used for training.

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kouteiheika 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> I would go so far as to say the most restrictive license that the model is trained on should be applied to all model generated code.

There are research models out there which are trained on only permissively licensed data (i.e. no "All Rights Reserved" data), but they're, colloquially speaking, dumb as bricks when compared to state-of-art.

But I guess the funniest consequence of the "model outputs are a derivative work of their training data" would be that it'd essentially wipe out (or at very least force a revert to a pre-AI era commit) every open source project which may have included any AI-generated or AI-assisted code, which currently pretty much includes every major open source project out there. And it would also make it impossible to legally train any new models whose training data isn't strictly pre-AI, since otherwise you wouldn't know whether your training data is contaminated or not.

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progval 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> There are research models out there which are trained on only permissively licensed data

Models whose authors tried to train only on permissively licensed data.

For example https://huggingface.co/bigcode/starcoder2-15b tried to be a permissively licensed dataset, but it filtered only on repository-level license, not file-level. So when searching for "under the terms of the GNU General Public License" on https://huggingface.co/spaces/bigcode/search-v2 back when it was working, you would find it was trained on many files with a GPL header.

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foota 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I don't know how far it would get, but I imagine that a FAANG will be able to get the farthest here by virtue of having mountains of corporate data that they have complete ownership over.

	▲	msdz 10 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		They’d probably get the farthest, but they won’t pursue that because they don’t want to end up leaking the original data from training. It is possible in regular language/text subsets of models to reconstruct massive consecutive parts of the training data [1], so it ought to be possible for their internal code, too. [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.02671

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kshri24 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I agree with your assessment. Which is why I was proposing a middle-ground where an agreement is setup between the model training company and the collective of developers/artists et all and come up with a license agreement where they are rewarded for their original work for perpetuity. A tiny % of the profits can be shared, which would be a form of UBI. This is fair not only because companies are using AI generated output but developers themselves are also paying and using AI generated output that is trained on other developer's input. I would feel good (in my conscience) that I am not "stealing" someone else's effort and they are being paid for it.

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adrianN 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

We‘ll have to wait until the technology progresses sufficiently that AI cuts into Disney’s profit.

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thedevilslawyer 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

That's unpractical enough that you might as well wish for UBI and world peace rather than this.

	▲	kshri24 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Why is it impractical? Github already has a sponsor system. Also this can be a form of UBI.