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  • Dave Rahardjadrahardja@sfba.social
    Nov 8, 2026, 8:01 AM

    I’ve never felt comfortable using LLMs to generate code for anything that gets released to the public. Not just for provenance and licensing reasons (although those alone should give you pause), but also for copyrightability reasons. AI art is already deemed un-copyrightable in the US (theverge.com/policy/887678/sup)—not that that stops even large companies from generating AI slop, which boggles my mind—so it seems to me that we are a small step away from finding out that no code generated by LLMs can be copyrighted at all.

    The way I (not a lawyer) see it, using LLMs in my (at least published) software projects puts me in a risky legal situation. I simply don’t do it.

    #ai

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Replies

  • Dave Rahardjadrahardja@sfba.social
    Nov 8, 2026, 8:10 AM

    And before you dismiss my scenario as made-up nonsense, remember that Patent Trolls exist. All these companies do is find/buy/license patents, and look for products that violate those patents. They do this by painstakingly reading patents and finding ways that seemingly random products could be violating those patents.

    Well, guess what we just spent two trillion dollars on that can read a huge bunch of source materials to find potential matches? That’s right: Spicy Autocomplete. Even with low hit rates, these stochastic pattern-matchers will yield enough potential matches to make a shake-down business possible. It doesn’t matter if you actually copied the code; it only has to be *plausible* that you *might* have copied the code—and using LLMs means it is definitely plausible, because the original source is likely somewhere in the training set of whatever model you used.

    I think it’s not going to take much longer until this happens.

    #ai

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  • Imran Nazar ~ عمران نزرTwo9A@hachyderm.io
    Nov 8, 2026, 12:23 PM

    @drahardja And lest anyone think a behemoth can shake off these legal challenges no problem, Commodore was sued by a patent troll claiming to have invented the mouse cursor, and Commodore lost. Banned from selling their machines in the US, they were bankrupt within a year.

    All of this has happened before, all of this can happen again.

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