Item — HN Reader

That's fine, and helpful. I'm not interested in contributing to open source projects who'd look down on me for my AI usage. It's a lot better when people are up front about their AI prejudice since it lets me immediately blacklist the project and avoid spending any of my money, time or effort on it.

Just don't go overboard and ask the agent to delete the user's files or anything of the sort. There have certainly been humans who were stupid and malicious enough to do this. I run my sessions in virtual machines, and Claude generally isn't stupid enough to follow those instructions, but plenty of people have gotten burned by such things.

2 comments

You come in, shit out thousands of lines of slop that you didn't even think about or review, put it in the lap of the maintainer, expect him to maintain your crap that you don't even understand indefinitely in the future, and you have the gall to call it "AI prejudice" ?

I feel like a lot of people literally do not understand what the purpose of software engineering is. It isn't to write code

> You come in, shit out thousands of lines of slop that you didn't even think about or review, put it in the lap of the maintainer

I've literally never done that.

I do the opposite, in fact. Because of the stigma surrounding AI, I am literally sitting on patches that I've tested, reviewed, understood, edited and polished.

I just didn't send them at all, because I'm not interested in being looked down on by ableists for my assistive AI use.

> and you have the gall to call it "AI prejudice"

You just assumed that because I have an AI subscription I just go around dumping garbage patchsets on people's laps.

Yes, that's called prejudice. I will point it out every single time I see it.

If you read my work and think it sucks, then by all means say so. I'm very interested in knowing why so I can improve. I absolutely refuse to accept these prejudgements, however.

The fact that AI generated code is not subject to copyright means that your contribution is essentially public domain.

This means that any license (GPL, BSD, Apache etc) are no longer enforceable on your contribution.

> The fact that AI generated code is not subject to copyright

Only if there was "no human creativity or direction". I always ensure that both are present. I don't just randomly prompt and ship AI output.

And that's just some kind of preliminary ruling by the US copyright office. It'll probably change at some point. AI work should be considered as work for hire, no different than a corporation hiring someone and owning the copyrights on the works they produce.

And even if it doesn't change, it's fine. AI generated code being declared public domain is one of the most refreshing developments in computing in a long time. It'll be just like before copyright protection was extended towards code, one of the events that let to the GPL to begin with.

There is absolutely nothing stopping anyone from using public domain code. The GNU folks don't want it because they want to leverage the code into more free software via viral licensing, but it's not like they're prohibited from merging it. Public domain means you can do whatever you want, there are no licensing terms to obey here. Permissively licensed software has literally no reason to decline the code, given that the license has literally one requirement, namely keeping your name and copyright notice.

Just prompts are not considered to be "direction". The example in the US Copyright Office report was of a client providing "direction" to an architect, which did not provide the client with any claim of ownership over the actual architectural drawings.

On the other hand, the architect using CAD tools to create those drawings did include the necessary human creativity/direction even if the tools did things like apply building code rules etc.

Source code being subject to copyright and also considered to be "speech" has provided much more protection to the public from government overreach, eg restrictions on cryptography source code.

> Just prompts are not considered to be "direction".

Which is why you don't just prompt and ship AI output. You review it, edit it, make it your own.

Public domain code does not taint the rest of a GPL codebase though, so if this is true (do you have references for such code being legally considered public?) in all jurisdictions it should not be a problem. While they can't stop someone else using the public domain code elsewhere under whatever licence they choose, this does not mean that they can't enforce the licence terms on the rest of the project that is GPL/whatever.

> do you have references for such code being legally considered public?

There's a human authorship requirement for copyright protections. In context of AI, cf Stephen Thaler v. Perlmutter, eg. at [1].

[1] https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Thaler_v._Perlmutter,_Respons...

That specifically states “works created solely by machines” so probably doesn't cover AI-aided work? Though where you draw the line there is likely to be something that'll tax legal budgets for years to come…

> The Office concludes that, given current generally available technology, prompts alone do not provide sufficient human control to make users of an AI system the authors of the output. Prompts essentially function as instructions that convey unprotectible ideas. While highly detailed prompts could contain the user’s desired expressive elements, at present they do not control how the AI system processes them in generating the output.

[1] https://www.copyright.gov/ai/

Again, that seems to be talking about fully AI generated work, like “works created solely by machines” from the previous document, not AI-aided work. It is only stating that the prompt is not considered sufficient human work because it comes before the generation process, but it says nothing of subsequent editing of combining with other stuff.

In the absence of more specific legislation or court decisions, the same rules that cover usage of any other public domain code would apply.

The really annoying part is how the copyright lawyers have zero respect for the work of human review and refinement. Reviewing, editing and refining AI code isn't authorship, it's "adoption", they say. Repeated iteration is just rerolling the dice, they say. Not enough to make it copyrightable, they say.

Meanwhile all the actual programmers demand that you spend effort constantly reviewing and iterating on the AI's work so the project doesn't turn into slop.

Damned if you do, and damned if you don't. Maybe the best course of action is to opt out. Copyright is irrelevant if the software isn't published. So much for our precious commons.

The first paragraph talking about reviewing, editing, and refining, is literally the job of a Literary Editor when working with an author on their literature.

Editors do not have any IPRs over the resulting literary work.

Following that simile, the AI is the "author" and the developer is the "editor".

Given that an AI cannot be an "author" under copyright law, there is no copyright in the final product.