"The IOCCC has a rich history of remarkable winning entries created by authors who skillfully employed various techniques (often their own tools) to develop their code."
Also, the reverse is interesting: how well can they guess the function of the obfuscated code?
All the big labs have plenty of proprietary (i. e. paying PhD holders good money for writing stuff) and synthetic training data now compensating for the lack of "naturally occuring" SUBLEQ and similar stuff.
I think it's great that IOCCC accepts code that might have been built with machine assistance, because it makes the purely handcrafted winners seem even more valuable.
https://www.ioccc.org/2025/rules.html
It seems to refer to custom code generators. Why would they mean AI if they explicitly talk about a "rich history" (when AI wasn't available)?
The long tradition refers to the use of tooling in general, and could mean that, since past tools were accepted, recent tools like LLMs can be fair game as well.
But, since there can be doubts about this interpretation, them saying explicitly if LLMs are permitted or not could be beneficial. But then again, maybe they don't want to commit to an hard rule and have more freedom to decide on a case by case basis, or just don't advertise that LLMs are welcome to prevent a flood of vibe-coded submissions.
In both cases you cannot get permission.
On the “stolen” side, so far the courts have not generally agreed with that perspective except in cases where there is actually an existing copyrighted work that the LLM output is substantially similar to.
On the not-copyrightable side, the direct output of an LLM is generally legally seen as not copyrightable, but significant human modification or editing/reworking/steering/compilation (as in compiling a bunch of LLM-generated fragments into a functional whole) is still likely to be copyrightable.