this post was submitted on 08 Apr 2026
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AI Code is Hollowing Out Open Source, and Maintainers are Looking the Other Way (www.quippd.com)
submitted 1 month ago by yoasif@fedia.io to c/linux@programming.dev
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TL;DR: The advent of AI based, LLM coding applications like Anthropic’s Claude and ChatGPT have prompted maintainers to experiment with integrating LLM contributions into open source codebases.

This is a fast path to open source irrelevancy, since the US copyright office has deemed LLM outputs to be uncopyrightable. This means that as more uncopyrightable LLM outputs are integrated into nominally open source codebases, value leaks out of the project, since the open source licences are not operative on public domain code.

That means that the public domain, AI generated code can be reused without attribution, and in the case of copyleft licences - can even be used in closed source projects.

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[–] definitemaybe@lemmy.ca 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

This argument fundamentally misunderstands AI and copyright.

Straight dumps of AI output can't be copyrighted, but as soon as it's modified by a human in nontrivial ways, it's copyrightable again. If open source projects are using straight dumps of AI output without modifications, then the project will be irrelevant before copyright matters, lol.

[–] yoasif@fedia.io 1 points 1 month ago

as soon as it's modified by a human in nontrivial ways

is doing a lot of heavy lifting here.

We know that people are using coding LLMs as slot machines - pull the handle and see if it solves your problem. Where is the human modifying anything? That is a "straight dump" of AI output without modifications.