[onlyrealcuzzo]

> I would suggest to people using LLMs: you should be cautious about giving these companies data or relying on them. If you're building an AI startup, there's a very good chance they could decide to directly compete with you if your idea has traction. You're also at their mercy for API pricing etc.

LLM generated code is not copyrightable, so even if they do "steal" it - I don't think there's legal grounds to do anything about it.

It can't be stolen. You don't really own it.

You can try to lock it in a safe and hope no one ever gets a hold of it. You can lie and say you didn't use an LLM, but Anthropic and OpenAI et al probably have logs to disprove that.

But, if push comes to shove, you don't own it...

[sowbug]

This is a popular misreading of the state of the law.

Someone tried, as a bit of a stunt, to register a work for copyright with generative AI as the sole creator/author. That registration was rejected. This is quite different from a person using generative AI as a tool to create a work.

People have copyright in photos and videos they create, even if they used a camera. Same with images and code, even if they used an LLM.

I'm not your lawyer, but to the extent you have copyright in works you create, the fact that you used a tool doesn't diminish the copyright.

[overgard]

This isn't quite true: https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/LSB10922

The clearest part from the page:

> Before the proliferation of generative AI, U.S. courts did not extend copyright protection to various nonhuman authors, holding that a monkey who took photos of himself lacked standing to sue under the Copyright Act; that human authorship was required to copyright a book purportedly inspired by celestial beings; and that a living garden could not be copyrighted. The U.S. Copyright Office has also long maintained that copyrighted works must be "created by a human being" and therefore refused to register works that are "produced by a machine or mere mechanical process that operates randomly or automatically without any creative input or intervention from a human author."

I think the long story short is if you're incorporting LLM generated content into your own work, then your own work is copyrighted but if it's purely AI created and you never put any of your own work into it, it's not (so: think the slop cannons people are pointing at social media for example -- probably not copyrighted (although I don't know why you'd want to put your name on it anyway)). Granted, I don't know how you'd ever prove that something was purely LLM generated so it's kind of a technicality for coding, but for image and music I think it applies pretty clearly.

As an aside, I think socially maintaining that copyrights are for humans only is extremely important. It might be the most important legal matter around this. I see nothing good of allowing AI labs that have strip-mined the internet to claim a copyright on the things they regurgitate, and I don't think spammers deserve copyright protection either. The human-only requirement is a very good one.

[drob518]

Right, but the AI isn’t the one who would actually claim copyright here. It would be the human using AI to accelerate the coding. And the human does have standing.

[onlyrealcuzzo]

So if I write one line of code in a 1M line LLM codebase, is it mine?

[drob518]

It’s owned by whoever directed the AI to write it.

[easytiger]

> LLM generated code is not copyrightable, so even if they do "steal" it - I don't think there's legal grounds to do anything about it.

> It can't be stolen. You don't really own it.

At least in the UK computer generated code has been copyright-able for decades [1]

> (3)In the case of a literary, dramatic, musical or artistic work which is computer-generated, the author shall be taken to be the person by whom the arrangements necessary for the creation of the work are undertaken.

And the ToS of the major/minor AI providers as far as i can tell have no opinion on what you do with the code in terms of ownership.

[1] https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1988/48/section/9

[overgard]

So, code is not the only data they potentially have access to, and it might not even be the most interesting data. There's also whatever other things you plug the AI into: slack, email, internal documentation, etc.

Also, a lot of people using LLMs are using it on code bases that were written before LLMs were common for coding. So in that context, you really are allowing them to train on your code for free.

[advisedwang]

> LLM generated code is not copyrightable

[citation needed]

I've seen cases where it was determined that the LLM itself doesn't hold copyright. But where are you getting the idea that nobody holds copyright?