What if we said that generative AI output is simply not copyrightable. Anything an AI spits out would automatically be public domain, except in cases where the output directly infringes the rights of an existing work.

This would make it so relicensing with AI rewrites is essentially impossible unless your goal is to transition the work to be truly public domain.

I think this also helps somewhat with the ethical quandary of these models being trained on public data while contributing nothing of value back to the public, and disincentivize the production of slop for profit.

We did in fact say so.

https://www.carltonfields.com/insights/publications/2025/no-...

> No Copyright Protection for AI-Assisted Creations: Thaler v. Perlmutter

> A recent key judicial development on this topic occurred when the U.S. Supreme Court declined to review the case of Thaler v. Perlmutter on March 2, 2026, effectively upholding lower court rulings that AI-generated works lacking human authorship are not eligible for copyright protection under U.S. law

> This would make it so relicensing with AI rewrites is essentially impossible unless your goal is to transition the work to be truly public domain.

That's not true at all. Anyone could follow these steps:

1. Have the LLM rewrite GPL code.

2. Do not publish that public domain code. You have no obligation to.

3. Make a few tweaks to that code.

4. Publish a compiled binary/use your code to host a service under a proprietary license of your choice.