Re:Ownership of AI-Generated Code Hotly Disputed
by leereeves on Friday December 30, 2022 @05:21PM
(#34190766)
Copyright requires an element of creativity and originality. The easiest code snippets for AI to reproduce are things like language syntax (loops, definitions, etc), implementations of common algorithms, and boilerplate, and an index would probably find a lot of matches for those, but are they original or creative?
Incidentally, answers on SO are licensed cc-by-sa, so it's easy to violate copyright when copying them; but no one seems to care, suggesting that small code snippets aren't an important copyright concern.
So the challenge for an index would be finding a rare case of creative, important code in a sea of trivial matches.
It’s hard to discuss unverifiable claims of “most” code. A lot of code, maybe most, or maybe not, is proprietary and kept within corporate walls, so we have no idea how much is or is not copied. SO answers are allowed to be copied, by definition. (And at least with SO answers, the code is publicly accessible, and attribution tracking after the fact is closer to possible, right?)
You do have a good point that attribution for some code could be practically impossible to track. This might get a lot worse if we allow AI to remix and republish it, that could even cause feedback loops if we’re not more careful about tracking attributions.