What's the point holding copyright on a new technical solution, to a problem that can be solved by anyone asking an existing AI, trained on last year's internet, independently of your new copyright?

All sorts of stuff containing no original ideas is copyrighted. It legally belongs to someone and they can license it to others, etc.

E.g. pop songs with no original chord progressions or melodies, and hackneyed lyrics are still copyrighted.

Plagiarized and uncopyrightable code is radioactive; it can't be pulled into FOSS or commercial codebases alike.

Someone raised the point in another recent HN LLM thread that the primary productivity benefit of LLMs in programing is the copyright laundering.

The argument went that the main reason the now-ancient push for code reuse failed to deliver anything close to its hypothetical maximum benefit was because copyright got in the way. Result: tons and tons of wheel-reinvention, like, to the point that most of what programmers do day to day is reinvent wheels.

LLMs essentially provide fine-grained contextual search of existing code, while also stripping copyright from whatever they find. Ta-da! Problem solved.

There is one very specific risk worth mentioning: AI code is a potentially existential crisis for Open Source.

An ecosystem that depends on copyright can't exist if its codebase is overrun by un-copyrightable code.

It's not an existential crisis. You just don't merge radioactive contributions.

If it sneaks in under your watchful radar, the damage control won't be fun though.