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AI Code is Hollowing Out Open Source, and Maintainers are Looking the Other Way (www.quippd.com)

submitted 1 day ago by yoasif@fedia.io to c/foss@beehaw.org

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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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[–] t3rmit3@beehaw.org 1 points 10 hours ago* (last edited 10 hours ago)

Perhaps you should have titled the post "AI Code Hollowing Out Copyleft Ecosystem", then, unless you're intentionally trying to conflate Open Source with Copyleft (you are, based on your other blog posts). But I remember seeing your post about the "social contract" of OSS last December, and you are in fact exactly who my comment is about:

Copyleft is a reactionary movement from people who turned into the beast they hated in trying to fight it. "Permissive" licenses are FOSS. Copyleft is certainly maybe OSS, but it's not "Free" (as in either "libre" or "gratis") if some other person can mandate both that you do something, and what you do. If usage of something is contingent on payment (including payment via feel-good attribution), it's not free.

I'll add here: FOSS is also not about some one-sided "covenant" where a creator believes the users of said freely-given software owe them something (money, gratitude, or even just 'reciprocity' and attribution). If you're in OSS for the fuzzy feeling you get when someone forks your repo, or the conviction that OSS contribs are intrinsically good in some nebulous way, it's no wonder you're hung up on seeing a transactional return on your labor instead of just knowing it's out there maybe helping someone, somewhere.