I assume any LLM contributions are uncopyrightable at best or copyright infringement at worst. Either way, I don't own the copyright.
In order to avoid a potential future where I lose the copyright due to being unable to show a substantial portion is human authored, I try to keep track of what is AI authored and what is human authored.
From a copyright perspective, right now accepting LLM contributions feels like playing with fire, at least for closed source projects.
Copyright in the context of LLM's is kind of weird. It doesn't explicitly copy others code but it does lean heavily on the structure of it. Is it evidence of copying prior work or is it fair use? Alas, we don't really have any legal bearing that can handle this yet.
If it is copying prior work, then you are right that there would be a lot of cross licensing bleed through. The opposite is also true in that it could take proprietary code structure and liberate it into GPL 3 for instance. Again what is the legal standing on this?
Years back there was a source code leak of Microsoft Office. Immediately the Libre office team put up restrictions to ensure that contributors didn't even look at it for fear that it would end up into their project and become a leverage point against the whole project. Now with LLM's it can be difficult to know where anything comes from.
We don’t know if it is weird yet, right? It is just a big question mark.
I guess as some point there will be a massive lawsuit. But, so much of the economy is wrapped up in this stuff nowadays, the folks paying for Justice System Premium Edition probably prefer not to have anything solid yet.
I completely agree, but it seems that our industry has decided to turn a blind eye to it. They might even get away with it -- the recent rulings around fair use with regard to Facebook and Anthropic's unrepentant copyright violations[1] was particularly galling to me.
Almost all of the projects I work on require you to sign the Developer Certificate of Origin[2] (which attempts to protect projects from people submitting code that they know cannot be licensed under the project's license), and in my view LLM code you submit does not fulfill the requirements of the DCO. Unfortunately, it seems nobody actually cares about this either.
