Re: [gentoo-dev] RFC: banning "AI"-backed (LLM/GPT/whatever) contributions to Gentoo

[Rich Freeman <rich0@gentoo.org>]

On Wed, Feb 28, 2024 at 1:50 PM Arthur Zamarin <arthurzam@gentoo.org> wrote:
>
> I know that GitHub Copilot can be limited to licenses, and even to just
> the current repository. Even though, I'm not sure that the copyright can
> be attributed to "me" and not the "AI" - so still gray area.

So, AI copyright is a bit of a poorly defined area simply due to a
lack of case law.  I'm not all that confident that courts won't make
an even bigger mess of it.

There are half a dozen different directions I think a court might rule
on the matter of authorship and derived works, but I think it is VERY
unlikely that a court will rule that the copyright will be attributed
to the AI itself, or that the AI itself ever was an author or held any
legal rights to the work at any point in time.  An AI is not a legal
entity. The company that provides the service, its
employees/developers, the end user, and the authors and copyright
holders of works used to train the AI are all entities a court is
likely to consider as having some kind of a role.

That said, we live in a world where it isn't even clear if APIs can be
copyrighted, though in practice enforcing such a copyright might be
impossible.  It could be a while before AI copyright concerns are
firmly settled.  When they are, I suspect it will be done in a way
that frustrates just about everybody on every side...

IMO the main risk to an organization (especially a transparent one
like ours) from AI code isn't even whether it is copyrightable or not,
but rather getting pulled into arguments and debates and possibly
litigation over what is likely to be boilerplate code that needs a lot
of cleanup anyway.  Even if you "win" in court or the court of public
opinion, the victory can be pyrrhic.

--
Rich