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Comment by bwfan123 | Hacker News Reader

> say things like "build me a Fusion 360 alternative written in Rust

This video of a dad making a pbj sandwich based on instructions from his kids shows why this is impossible [1]. There is too much context you are assuming, and by the time you specify all the context, it becomes almost a programming language.

Communication assumes a lot of shared and hidden context. Contexts are shared world models. For us humans, our shared world models conflict as well. World-models could are determined by beliefs which in turn could be determined by variety of factors. Context could be cultural (same language different cultural backgrounds), could be genetic (men and women), etc.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-6N3bLgYyQ

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Although I agree with your general message here, to be fair: GP has a very clear specification, namely an exact duplicate of an existing product. That means that as long as the end product functions identically to the original, it is completely successful.

This does require facilitating the implementer to have full access to use the original product.

If you use software (i.e. an LLM or spiritual successor) to produce a "clone" of another piece of software, is that not a pretty cut and dry case of it being a derivative work? No creativity was exercised by human beings in that scenario, so it would seem to be akin to something like converting a photo between image formats.

People get around this via "clean room" reverse engineering where one engineer tears down the thing to be cloned and writes a detailed spec, and then a different engineer (who has never seen the internals of the thing in question, and so isn't "tainted" by that knowledge) implements it from that spec. You could do this with AI, but then all that spec writing/reading is done by a machine too, so you haven't really bought yourself anything legally.

To be clear, I'm not a lawyer. I'm just musing aloud.

Aren’t organisations like Microsoft continually saying already like 30-50% of their code is now written by AI?

This means they no longer hold copyright on their code.

That's true if you assume that any LLM-written code is not copyrightable by the entity using the LLM. Everything about reality currently suggests that this is a false assumption, and AFAIK no court has made a ruling saying that LLM-generated code isn't copyrightable. Also, there are patent and trademark considerations that are entirely separate from copyright.

My point above is just that this ("ChatGPT, make me a clone of Paint Shop Pro 4 but for modern Linux and in Rust. Here's a copy of the executable to get you started.") is a much more straightforward, old-fashioned kind of copyright infringement. I don't see why a court would treat it as different from "Let me decompile paintshoppro.exe to an IR and then recompile the IR for a Linux."

There have already been rulings on this. AI generated content is not copyrightable.

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