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That's about where I'm settled on this right now. I feel like authors who select the GPL have made a robust statement about their intent. It may be legal for me to copyright-launder their library (maybe using the trick where one LLM turns their code into a spec and another turns that spec into fresh code) but I wouldn't do that because it would subvert the spirit of the license.

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Would it be a problem if you maintained the GPL license and released your code as open source?

Good point, that might actually be fine (especially if you kept copyright for the original authors too.)

Can a human even put GPL on bot written code since it relies on copyright to protect it? Is that like museums adding copyright to scans of public domain paintings in their holdings? Which was fought about in courts for years.

Probably a human could put a copyright on a prompt (that would be the "source" and the LLM would be a compiler or interpreter) and the generated code would be derivative of the prompt and any inputs.

It would probably get into whether the prompt itself is considered copyrightable. There is some threshold for that since I have heard some patches are considered insignificant and uncopyrightable.

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