I actually asked my dad (and he did) to take me to the Windows XP Tablet PC Edition launch event in LA for my 14th birthday.

Good lord. That dude’s packing a fire hose.

You replied to me, man. xD

Ah, ok. This is a conversation about Linux, so that doesn’t apply. Linux is open source, so it wouldn’t matter if someone wanted to enforce a EULA, anyone else could just take the source and do what they want with it.

Linux is open source.

Generating code costs a lot of money, as does the expertise to review the code. People aren’t going to want to spend the many millions of dollars to do that when they could use a GPL kernel. Of course if the kernel is not only free, but basically public domain, it solves all of their problems. They can modify it and keep those modifications closed source, the complete antithesis of what the GPL stands for.

Sure, but if it’s open source, I can just take that code without agreeing to your contract. Since it’s public domain, I can do whatever I want with it. You can only enforce a contract if I agree to it.

So what happens thirty years from now when 95% of the kernel code is AI generated? It’ll be a lot easier to rewrite the parts that aren’t, and have a fully closed source kernel that you can use without following the GPL.

I mean, yeah, you can make the argument that owning the copyrights to all of the code in your project isn’t important. I don’t agree, but that’s certainly a valid stance. Apparently the Linux maintainers are on your side. That makes me sad. Copyright ownership of the things I produce is very important to me.

Pretty diabolical, huh?

I think those two jets are kissing, though.

Leviticus 18:22 ~ You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination.

Leviticus 20:13 ~ If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination; they shall surely be put to death; their blood is upon them.

You just gotta use a different position than you do with women.

What is going on here?

And, imagine this, minimum wage is exactly the same.

Wow, what an atrocious analogy. So, you just can’t determine what brand of keyboard someone uses, period. When someone uses an AI, there will be certain patterns that are somewhat more common in their code. Their code will also look different than their previous code. It also tends to produce very large commits. You can also ask them why they did certain things and see how they answer. So you might not be 100% accurate, but there are ways to tell when someone is using AI.

Do you want to explain to me what, in those two paragraphs, means that the use of spell checkers and LLMs is equivalent with regard to copyrightability? It seems like those paragraphs make it clear that the use of spell checkers is not the same as LLMs.

The policy I use bans “generative AI model” output. Generative AI is a pretty well defined term:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_AI

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/generative AI

If you have trouble determining whether something is a generative AI model, you can usually just look up how it is described in the promotional materials or on Wikipedia.

Type: Large language model, Generative pre-trained transformer

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_(language_model)

I never said it violates GPL to include public domain code. I’m not sure where you got that from. What I said is that public domain code can’t really be released under the GPL. You can try, but it’s not enforceable. As in, you can release it under that license, but I can still do whatever I want with it, license be damned, because it’s public domain.

I did that with this vibe coded project:

https://github.com/hperrin/gnata

I just took it and rereleased it as pubic domain, because that’s what it is anyway.

So why invite them to?

Nobody can verify that the output of an LLM isn’t from its training data except those with access to its training data.

If a work’s traditional elements of authorship were produced by a machine, the work lacks human authorship and the Office will not register it For example, when an AI technology receives solely a prompt from a human and produces complex written, visual, or musical works in response, the “traditional elements of authorship” are determined and executed by the technology—not the human user. Based on the Office’s understanding of the generative AI technologies currently available, users do not exercise ultimate creative control over how such systems interpret prompts and generate material. Instead, these prompts function more like instructions to a commissioned artist—they identify what the prompter wishes to have depicted, but the machine determines how those instructions are implemented in its output. For example, if a user instructs a text-generating technology to “write a poem about copyright law in the style of William Shakespeare,” she can expect the system to generate text that is recognizable as a poem, mentions copyright, and resembles Shakespeare’s style. But the technology will decide the rhyming pattern, the words in each line, and the structure of the text. When an AI technology determines the expressive elements of its output, the generated material is not the product of human authorship. As a result, that material is not protected by copyright and must be disclaimed in a registration application.

That seems very clear to me. Generative AI output is not human authored, and therefore not copyrighted.

The policy I use also makes very clear the definition of AI generated material:

https://sciactive.com/human-contribution-policy/#Definitions

I’m not exactly sure how you can possibly think there is an equivalence between a tool like a spelling and grammar checker and a generative AI, but there’s a reason the copyright office will register works that have been authored using spelling and grammar checkers, but not works that have been authored using LLMs.

Yes, that makes sense. People have always been able to intentionally commit copyright infringement. However, it has historically been fairly difficult to unintentionally commit copyright infringement. That’s no longer the case. AI makes it very easy to unintentionally commit copyright infringement. That’s a good reason to ban it outright.