[petcat]

Curious how people and companies like this are approaching matters of intellectual property now that the courts have ruled that basically no part of AI generated content or code is copyrightable and is therefore impossible to claim ownership of.

Are people just not going to open source anything anymore since licenses don't matter? Might as well just keep the code secret, right?

[SpicyLemonZest]

It was always a bit weird how heavily software companies leaned on copyright, and I think you could basically replicate the same intuitions and dynamics on top of trade secret law if you had to. KFC didn't go out of business when a Chicago Tribune reporter found what's most likely the secret recipe.

I'm also not sure that the current precedent on the matter is _quite_ as strong as you're thinking. The high-profile case you're most likely thinking of was from a guy Stephen Thaler, who was seeking not just to claim copyright on AI-generated content but to specify the AI as the sole author. (IIUC, he planned to still own the copyright on the theory that it was a work-for-hire.)

[measurablefunc]

There are no secrets when you are using AI providers. They track all interactions b/c that's valuable information for improving their models.

[petcat]

I'm talking about sharing things publicly that you are trying to claim as your own

[measurablefunc]

It doesn't matter. If someone has the same idea then they can use AI the same way you did to recreate it. Keeping it a secret benefits no one other than the AI providers b/c now they can charge money for giving someone else "your" code. The AI providers don't care about license restrictions so it's the perfect way to launder code. If you want credit for something then you'll have to claim it publicly b/c the AI providers sure as hell are not going to give you any credit.

[throw_m239339]

strange downvotes, not only these services allow anyone with money to copy their competitors if they use the same services, but on the long run, Anthropic could very well be the competition, trained on corporations that use Claude. Why would this startup be any different from Google or Microsoft on the long run? People can't seem to learn their lesson.

[measurablefunc]

People are very naive about how technology companies operate.

[EnPissant]

Not true.

https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/guides/your-data

[heavyset_go]

Even if you believe the "we don't train on your data" claim/lie, that leaves a whole lot of things they can do with it besides training directly on it.

Analytics can be run on it, they can run it through their own models, synthetic training data can be derived from it, it can be used to build profiles on you/your business, they could harvest trade/literal secrets from it, they could store derivatives of your data to one day sell to competitors/compete themselves, they can use it to gauge just how dependent you've made yourself/business on their LLMs and price accordingly, etc.

[EnPissant]

No. Your data or any derivative of it does not leave RAM unless you are detected as doing something that qualifies as abuse, then it is retained for 30 days.

[heavyset_go]

Even the process of deciding what "qualifies as abuse" does what I'm talking about: they're analyzing your data with their own models and doing whatever they want with the results, including storing it and using it to ban you from the product you paid for, and call the police on you.

Either way, I don't believe it.

[EnPissant]

You are a Star Wars Rebel fighting Darth Vader. Good job!

[measurablefunc]

That's about the API. It doesn't say anything about their other products like Codex. Moreover, even in the API it says you have to qualify for zero retention policies. They retain the data for however long each jurisdiction requires data retention & they are always improving their abuse detection using the retained data.

> Our use of content. We may use Content to provide, maintain, develop, and improve our Services, comply with applicable law, enforce our terms and policies, and keep our Services safe. If you're using ChatGPT through Apple's integrations, see this Help Center article (opens in a new window) for how we handle your Content.

> Opt out. If you do not want us to use your Content to train our models, you can opt out by following the instructions in this article . Please note that in some cases this may limit the ability of our Services to better address your specific use case.

https://openai.com/policies/row-terms-of-use/ https://openai.com/policies/how-your-data-is-used-to-improve...

[EnPissant]

Codex just talks to the responses API with store=false. So unless the model detects you are doing something that qualifies as abuse, nothing is retained.

[measurablefunc]

Alright, good luck to you. I'm not really interested in talking to people who think they're lawyers for AI providers. If you think they don't keep any of the data & don't use it for training then you are welcome to continue believing that. It makes no difference to me either way.

[EnPissant]

> Alright, good luck to you. I'm not really interested in talking to people who think they're lawyers for AI providers.

Codex is open source, you can inspect it yourself, but let's not let facts ruin your David vs Goliath fantasy.

[throw_m239339]

And you believe them?

[EnPissant]

Yes. That's the rational position.

[nradov]

There is no such court ruling.

[petcat]

Courts ruled that AI works can't be copyrighted

https://fairuse.stanford.edu/case/thaler-v-perlmutter/

[hmry]

Please read the link you're citing

> The court held that the Copyright Act requires all eligible works to be authored by a human being. Since Dr. Thaler listed the Creativity Machine, a non-human entity, as the sole author, the application was correctly denied. The court did not address the argument that the Constitution requires human authorship, nor did it consider Dr. Thaler’s claim that he is the author by virtue of creating and using the Creativity Machine, as this argument was waived before the agency.

Or in other words: They ruled you can't register copyright with an AI listed as the author on the application. They made no comment on whether a human can be listed as the author if an AI did the work.

[heavyset_go]

An earlier attempt at registering AI creations without AI attribution was rejected by the Copyright Office[1], saying that person in particular needed to make an AI attribution, which they were originally not doing.

In this case, the court is saying AI attribution is not okay, either. There is no way to register copyrights for AI creations.

It's consistent with the Copyright Office's interpretation of copyright law where it holds that it only applies to human creations and doesn't apply to non-human creations, which is what they say AI creations fall under:

> The Copyright Office affirms that existing principles of copyright law are flexible enough to apply to this new technology, as they have applied to technological innovations in the past. It concludes that the outputs of generative AI can be protected by copyright only where a human author has determined sufficient expressive elements. This can include situations where a human-authored work is perceptible in an AI output, or a human makes creative arrangements or modifications of the output, but not the mere provision of prompts.

[1] https://www.copyright.gov/rulings-filings/review-board/docs/...

[2] https://newsroom.loc.gov/news/copyright-office-releases-part...

[nradov]

Bullshit. Did you even read the court's opinion in that case? The Dunning-Kruger effect strikes again.

[appcustodian2]

You think people open sourced things mostly because of license obligations?