That's not the status quo. The biggest concern is that AI can sometimes generate code from the training set verbatim, in which case that code has the copyright of the original training set - which might be GPL or proprietary or whatever else.
Not just verbatim: AI-generated code is arguably a derivative work of code in the training set even if it doesn't generate verbatim copies of training data, in the same way that any code can be a derivative work even if it doesn't contain bitwise-identical lines.
If you take a piece of Python code, and translate it to C code, without a single line being copied verbatim, the resulting C code is still almost certainly a derivative work of the Python code.
Just out curiosity, what makes the code you write, more original than an LLMs who’s training set is way bigger than yours and likely will more variance in how to achieve same goal.
I’m not trying to be facetious but rather stoke the philosophical idea of the reality that humans aren’t as special and unique as we think we are.
Also, there's the possibility that all things creative are the human form of peacocks' tails, and if that's the case then the cost and difficulty matters more than the outcome, and any discussion based on capitalist incentives is fundamentally flawed.
https://kitsunesoftware.wordpress.com/2022/10/09/an-end-to-c...
(I wrote this 52 days before ChatGPT came out, the reference to GPT-3 is based on the stuff OpenAI released before the chat interface).
I don’t even think it’s factually true.
Along the way, you’ve experienced trauma which nudged you a direction, you’ve been inspired by other people which left an impression in your mind, you’ve had people teach you 1 skill and another person teach you a different skill, and you combined them, life experiences that changed your outlook etc.
It’s less about the specific teachers and more about every single person and event that has happened to you is your own ‘training set’. But sometimes we can definitely point to a specific event or person who influenced us to where we are at today and I like to think of that just like model weights in current LLMs.
Indeed in many ways LLM code is more original than mine, as I limit myself to calling only functions that exist and producing code that will compile, unlike LLMs which have no such limitations. /s
That would be like assuming every piece of code you’ve ever written compiled perfectly on every run. Do you hold yourself to the same standard? Or do you give yourself some leeway because you walk through it, talk through, think through it and then come to a solution?
Someone wrote the first murder mystery. It wasn't something we inherited from amoebas.
Someone wrote the first Regency romance. In fact, we know who it was - Georgette Heyer.
Someone invented calculus. We didn't get that passed down from the cave men via oral history or tribal knowledge.
We've dreamed of flying for millenia, but someone invented the first practical airplane - someone specific. Yes, they built on previous knowledge. But their step was still original. It had never been done before.
And so on, for idea after idea and original creation after original creation. They all originated at some time, with someone.
So at what point do we stop attributing the previous innovations that led to our current innovations? And why do we stop there? Would Mr. Caveman be the only special human to ever figure that out or could the argument be made that eventually someone else would have figured out how to make tools and therefore attribution is just pointless?
What I am trying to get at is, everything you do or create, is because of work the all of humanity has done. So pertaining to copyright, why should 1 single person claim an idea as solely theirs when that idea was not created in a vacuum.
I should also say, I am not discounting anyone’s work, but rather if the monetary reasons for creating became secondary, would the need for copyright even exist?
While I also think there is a good chance that what you are claiming (that any output is a derived work of the training set), this is definitely not settled, and will require someone going to court over it. I expect the proceedings over something like this to take a long time, and very likely reach to the supreme court. So, we won't know if you're right or not for quite a while.
A good argument against the idea that any output is a derived work of (all) data in the training set is exactly that verbatim copies of snippets from the Linux kernel can't be a derived work of snippets from GCC, even if GCC was also in the training set. So it is arguable that someone intending to claim copyright infringement for a piece of code generated by an LLM has to identify which particular work of theirs from the training set it infringes on, it can't be a blanket finding.
It won't be over when the first top-level court decides.
https://www.reuters.com/legal/ai-created-images-lose-us-copy...
so it may not be "public domain", but if you can't get copyright protection in the US I don't see a difference.