That you can't copyright the AI's output (in the US, at least), doesn't imply it doesn't contain copyrighted material. If you generate an image of a Disney character, Disney still owns the copyright to that character.

IANAL; this is what my limited understanding of the matter is. With that caveat: it is easy to forget that copyright is on output- verbatim or exact reproductions and derivatives of a covered work are already covered under copyright.

So if the AI outputs Starry Night or Starry Night in different color theme, that's likely infringement without permission from van Gogh, who would have recourse against someone, either the user or the AI provider.

But a starry-night style picture of an aquarium might not be infringing at all.

>For small contributions to the Linux kernel it would be hard to argue that a passing resemblance of say a for loop in the contribution to some for loop in somebody else's code base would be anything else than coincidence or fair use.

I would argue that if it was a verbatim reproduction of a copyrighted piece of software, that would likely be infringing. But if it was similar only in style, with different function names and structure, probably not infringing.

Folks will argue that some things might be too small to do any different, for example a tiny snippet like python print("hello") or 1+1=2 or a for loop in your example. In that case it's too lacking in original expression to qualify for copyright protection anyway.

>AIs are not human and therefore their output is a human authored contribution and only human authored things are covered by copyright.

That is a non sequitur. Also, I'm not sure if copyright applies to humans, or persons (not that I have encountered particularly creative corporations, but Taranaki Maunga has been known for large scale decorative works)

Didn't a court in the US declare that AI generated content cannot be copyrighted? I think that could be a problem for AI generated code. Fine for projects with an MIT/BSD license I suppose, but GPL relies on copyright.

However, if the code has been slightly changed by a human, it can be copyrighted again. I think.

In certain law cases plagiarization can be influenced by the fact if person is exposed to the copyrighted work. AI models are exposed to very large corpus of works..

As opposed to an irregular person?

LLMs are not persons, not even legal ones (which itself is a massive hack causing massive issues such as using corporate finances for political gain).

A human has moral value a text model does not. A human has limitations in both time and memory available, a model of text does not. I don't see why comparisons to humans have any relevance. Just because a human can do something does not mean machines run by corporations should be able to do it en-masse.

The rules of copyright allow humans to do certain things because:

- Learning enriches the human.

- Once a human consumes information, he can't willingly forget it.

- It is impossible to prove how much a human-created intellectual work is based on others.

With LLMs:

- Training (let's not anthropomorphize: lossily-compressing input data by detecting and extracting patterns) enriches only the corporation which owns it.

- It's perfectly possible to create a model based only on content with specific licenses or only public domain.

- It's possible to trace every single output byte to quantifiable influences from every single input byte. It's just not an interesting line of inquiry for the corporations benefiting from the legal gray area.

How could you do that though? You can’t guarantee that there aren’t chunks of copied code that infringes.

Makes sense to me. But so anybody can take Public Domain code and place it under GNU Public License (by dropping it into a Linux source-code file) ?

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

This ruling is IMO/IANAL based on lawyers and judges not understanding how LLMs work internally, falling for the marketing campaign calling them "AI" and not understanding the full implications.

LLM-creation ("training") involves detecting/compressing patterns of the input. Inference generates statistically probable based on similarities of patterns to those found in the "training" input. Computers don't learn or have ideas, they always operate on representations, it's nothing more than any other mechanical transformation. It should not erase copyright any more than synonym substitution.