Copyleft doesn’t mean it’s not copyrighted. Copyleft is not a legal term. “Copyleft” licenses are enforced through copyright ownership.
Did you read the quotes from the copyright office I linked to? I am going to go ahead and trust the copyright office over you on issues of copyrightability.
Unless the code the AI generated is a copy of copyrighted code, of course. Then it would be copyright infringement.
I can cause the AI to spit out code that I own the copyright to, because it was trained on my code too. If someone used that code without including attribution to me (the requirement of the license I release my code under), that would be copyright infringement. Do you understand what I mean?
That would be true even if they didn’t use AI to reproduce it.
The problem being addressed by the Linux foundation isn’t the use of copyrighted work in developer contribution, it’s the assumption that the code was authored by them at all just because it’s submitted in their name and tagged as verified.
Yes, that makes sense. People have always been able to intentionally commit copyright infringement. However, it has historically been fairly difficult to unintentionally commit copyright infringement. That’s no longer the case. AI makes it very easy to unintentionally commit copyright infringement. That’s a good reason to ban it outright.
The risk of that is relatively low for kernel contributions, though. Most of the work being done is porting existing protocols/firmware into the latest Linux kernel, not creating novel features.
The larger risk is instability caused by bad, hallucinated code because it was submitted under the assumption of human authorship. In both cases, further review by the Linux team can be done if they understand where that code is coming from.
Banning AI does nothing, because theres no way of knowing who uses it without proper disclosure, which wouldnt happen if it were banned. To use an example from the article, it would be like banning code written with the use of a specific brand of keyboard.
Better to have it properly disclosed than to make it illicit
Wow, what an atrocious analogy. So, you just can’t determine what brand of keyboard someone uses, period. When someone uses an AI, there will be certain patterns that are somewhat more common in their code. Their code will also look different than their previous code. It also tends to produce very large commits. You can also ask them why they did certain things and see how they answer. So you might not be 100% accurate, but there are ways to tell when someone is using AI.
Copyleft doesn’t mean it’s not copyrighted. Copyleft is not a legal term. “Copyleft” licenses are enforced through copyright ownership.
Did you read the quotes from the copyright office I linked to? I am going to go ahead and trust the copyright office over you on issues of copyrightability.
Even if this were true, it would only mean that the GNU license is unenforceable, not that the Linux kernel itself is infringing copyright
Unless the code the AI generated is a copy of copyrighted code, of course. Then it would be copyright infringement.
I can cause the AI to spit out code that I own the copyright to, because it was trained on my code too. If someone used that code without including attribution to me (the requirement of the license I release my code under), that would be copyright infringement. Do you understand what I mean?
That would be true even if they didn’t use AI to reproduce it.
The problem being addressed by the Linux foundation isn’t the use of copyrighted work in developer contribution, it’s the assumption that the code was authored by them at all just because it’s submitted in their name and tagged as verified.
Does that make sense?
Yes, that makes sense. People have always been able to intentionally commit copyright infringement. However, it has historically been fairly difficult to unintentionally commit copyright infringement. That’s no longer the case. AI makes it very easy to unintentionally commit copyright infringement. That’s a good reason to ban it outright.
The risk of that is relatively low for kernel contributions, though. Most of the work being done is porting existing protocols/firmware into the latest Linux kernel, not creating novel features.
The larger risk is instability caused by bad, hallucinated code because it was submitted under the assumption of human authorship. In both cases, further review by the Linux team can be done if they understand where that code is coming from.
Banning AI does nothing, because theres no way of knowing who uses it without proper disclosure, which wouldnt happen if it were banned. To use an example from the article, it would be like banning code written with the use of a specific brand of keyboard.
Better to have it properly disclosed than to make it illicit
Wow, what an atrocious analogy. So, you just can’t determine what brand of keyboard someone uses, period. When someone uses an AI, there will be certain patterns that are somewhat more common in their code. Their code will also look different than their previous code. It also tends to produce very large commits. You can also ask them why they did certain things and see how they answer. So you might not be 100% accurate, but there are ways to tell when someone is using AI.