Good in principle, hard to enforce.
I believe that the AGPL is the most correct license for LLM-generated software.
Good news! It is! It’s actually public domain. If you get ahold of some AI generated code, you can do whatever you want with it.
I’m a lawyer that specializes in this area of IP law. It is true that code generated by an LLM lacks a human author and is therefore not copyright eligible material. However, there are a few nuances that technically make your statement somewhat incorrect.
One, the code can still be sold or licensed as personal property. However, once somebody gets their hands on that code, there few things stopping them from re-releasing it for free and entering it into the public domain. Even a contract prohibiting such transfer will likely fail due to a small provision in US copyright law.
Two, this code can still be protected as a trade secret, so don’t think you can create code at work and just freely distribute it if your employer has asked you to keep it confidential.
There are a number of other possible nuances, but those are two that I see come up most often in my practice.
OK, but shouldn’t any code descended from GNU GPL code also be GNU GPL? Therefore if a model was trained on any GPL code, any output that it generates should also be GPL.
And from what I understand, LLMs are known to reproduce some text verbatim. That original text was made by a real human being, and thus would still be protected under copyright.
All code should be open source, period.
(Not a lawyer) Everything AI made is stolen, therefore contracts, and so copyright, are void. Right?
Contracts that are at all unlawful are unenforceable and therefore void. But what about copyright?
If, in the middle of the night, you break into a McDonald’s and then call it McFelfs, and in the same night, steal everything out of a Starbucks and sell food and coffee with scratched out logos out of your McFelfs, does it become legally yours?
Public, proprietary code will increasingly become scarce as everything is reverse engineered.
and in many jurisdictions, it probably is if the source code has been published at all; the article correctly explains that copyright requires human authorship and creativity
Make it open source, publish it on public sites, and allow the next generation of LLMs to be trained on it.
