[prmph]

Technically how will vibe code be identified? And how does one determine the level of human involvement that would make code copyrightable? What of the prompts? Are those copyrightable? What about the architectural and tactical design of the code if I do those myself?

I don't vibe code; I am firmly in charge of the architecture and code style of my projects, and i frequently give detailed instructions to AI tools I use. But, to me, this is leading to a weird place. Why would the result of using a tool to create something new not be copyrightable simply due to the specific tool used?

I think this whole hullabaloo is self inflicted. Code or an other creative work should stand on its merits. There is no issue with copyright and no issue with the ship of Theseus. The current copyright approach is still applicable: code (or any other creative work) that appears to be lifted verbatim from another work could be a copyright violation. Work that is sufficiently original (irrespective of how it was created) is likely not a copyright violation.

[marcus_holmes]

It's the courts' opinions that count. And they say that copyright only attaches to human creative work, and that does not include LLM output.

I can see there's going to be some huge court fights over this in the next ten years - there's no way some of the big media companies are going to be OK with their content being public domain, and no way are they going to just miss out on being able to produce it so cheaply with an LLM.