Thaler v. Perlmutter said that an AI system cannot be listed as the sole author of a work - copyright requires a human author.

US Copyright Office guidance in 2023 said work created with the help of AI can be registered as long as there is "sufficient human creative input". I don't believe that has ever been qualified with respect to code, but my instinct is that the way most people use coding agents (especially for something like kernel development) would qualify.

> Didn't a court in the US declare that AI generated content cannot be copyrighted?

No, my understanding is that AI generated content can't be copyrighted by the AI. A human can still copyright it, however.

No, a court did not declare that. The case involved a person trying to register a work with only the AI system listed as author. The Supreme Court decided that you can't do that, you need to list a human being as author to register a work with the Copyright Office. This stems from existing precedent where someone tried to register a photograph with the monkey photographer listed as author.

I don't believe the idea that humans can or can't claim copyright over AI-authored works has been tested. The Copyright Office says your prompt doesn't count and you need some human-authored element in the final work. We'll have to see.

Copyright infringement and plagiarism are not the same or even very closely related. They're different concepts and not interchangeable. Relative to copyright infringement, cases of plagiarism are rarely a matter for courts to decide or care about at all. Plagiarism is primarily an ethical (and not civil or criminal) matter. Rather than be dealt with by the legal system, it is the subject of codes of ethics within e.g. academia, journalism, etc. which have their own extra-judicial standards and methods of enforcement.

Let me introduce you to the concept of submarine patents...

But the responsible party is still the human who added the code. Not the tool that helped do so.

> Surely the person doing so would be responsible for doing so, but are they doing anything wrong?

You're perfectly at liberty to relicense public domain code if you wish.

The only thing you can't do is enforce the new license against people who obtain the code independently - either from the same source you did, or from a different source that doesn't carry your license.

Linux code doesn't have to strictly be GPL-only, it just has to be GPL-compatible.

If your license allows others to take the code and redistribute it with extra conditions, your code can be imported into the kernel. AFAIK there are parts of the kernel that are BSD-licensed.

The core thing about licenses, in general, is that they only grant new usage. If you can already use the code because it's public domain, they don't further restrict it. The license, in that case, is irrelevant.

Remember that licenses are powered by copyright - granting a license to non-copyrighted code doesn't do anything, because there's no enforcement mechanism.

This is also why copyright reform for software engineering is so important, because code entering the public domain cuts the gordian knot of licensing issues.

Sqlite’s source code is public domain. Surely if you dropped the sqlite source code into Linux, it wouldn’t suddenly become GPL code? I’m not sure how it works

>LLM-creation ("training") involves detecting/compressing patterns of the input.

There's a pretty compelling argument that this is essentially what we do, and that what we think of as creativity is just copying, transforming, and combining ideas.

LLMs are interesting because that compression forces distilling the world down into its constituent parts and learning about the relationships between ideas. While it's absolutely possible (or even likely for certain prompts) that models can regurgitate text very similar to their inputs, that is not usually what seems to be happening.

They actually appear to be little remix engines that can fit the pieces together to solve the thing you're asking for, and we do have some evidence that the models are able to accomplish things that are not represented in their training sets.

Kirby Ferguson's video on this is pretty great: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9RYuvPCQUA

fortunately, you aren't only operating on representations, right? lemme check my Schopenhauer right quick...

I think AI bans are more common in projects where the maintainers are nice people that thoughtfully want to consider each PR and provide a reasoned response if rejected.

That’s only feasible when the people who open PRs are acting in good faith, and control both the quality and volume of PRs to something that the maintainers can realistically (and ought to) review in their 2-3 hours of weekly free time.

Linux is a bit different. Your code can be rejected, or not even looked at in the first place, if it’s not a high quality and desired contribution.

Also, it’s not just about PR quality, but also volume. It’s possible for contributions to be a net benefit in isolation. But most open source maintainers only have an hour or so a week to review PRs and need to prioritize aggressively. People who code with AI agents would benefit themselves to ask “does this PR align with the priorities and time availability of the maintainer?”

For instance, I’m sure we could point AI at many open source projects and tell it to optimize performance. And the agent would produce a bunch of high quality PRs that are a good idea in isolation. But what if performance optimization isn’t a good use of time for a given maintainer’s weekly code review quota?

Sure, maintainers can simply close the PR without a reason if they don’t have time.

But I fear we are taking advantage of nice people, who want to give a reasoned response to every contribution, but simply can’t keep up with the volume that agents can produce.

Volume - things take time to review. If you’re inundated with so many PRs then it’s harder to curate in general

> it's a human making the PR

Is it? Remember when that agent wrote a hit piece about the maintainer because he wouldn't merge it's PR?

You are treating humans as reasonable actors. They very often are not. On easy to access platforms like github you can have humans just working as intermediaries between LLM and the github. Not actually checking or understanding what they put in a pull request. Banning these people outright with clear rules is much faster and easier than trying to argue with them.

Linux is somewhat harder to contribute to and they already have sufficient barriers in place so they can rely on more reasonable human actors.

Because they aren’t accountable - after it is merged only I am. And why would I want to go back and forth with an LLM through PR comments when I could just talk to the agent myself in real time? Anytime I want to work through a pile of slop I can ask for one, but I don’t work that way. I create plans first and refine them, and the author of a PR who couldn’t do that adds nothing.

Because you don't want to deal with people who can't write their own code. If they can, the rule will do nothing to stop them from contributing. It'll only matter if they simply couldn't make their contribution without LLMs.

If your doctor told you he used an ouija board to find your diagnosis, would you care about the origin of the diagnosis or just trust that he'll be accountable for it?

That’s just it though it’s not just your head. The liability could very likely also fall on the Linux foundation.

You can’t say “you can do this thing that we know will cause problems that you have no way to mitigate, but if it does we’re not liable”. The infringement was a foreseeable consequence of the policy.

Yeah, but that's not a useful thing to do because not everybody thinks about that or considers it a problem. If somebody's careless and contributes copyrighted code, that's a problem for linux too, not only the author.

For comparison, you wouldn't say, "you're free to use a pair of dice to decide what material to build the bridge out of, as long as you take responsibility if it falls down", because then of course somebody would be careless enough to build a bridge that falls down.

Preventing the problem from the beginning is better than ensuring you have somebody to blame for the problem when it happens.

I wouldn't but I can see why some people would.

I can't point out where I draw the line clearly but here's one different I notice:

A recommendation can be both a thing and an action. A piece of text is a recommendation and it does not matter how it was created.

Assistance implies some parity in capabilities and cooperative work. Also it can pretty much only be an action, you cannot say "here is some assistance" and point to a thing.