Microsoft has claimed that something like 30% of the code for Windows is AI-generated. (I have not verified that they even said that, maybe that’s totally fake.) Last i checked AI-generated stuff cannot be copyrighted. Does this mean that significant portions of Windows are un-copyrightable, and MacroSlop couldn’t do a damn thing if someone leaked those parts?

And then, reservations about including slop in a software project aside, what could this mean for things like ReactOS? They’ve been careful to avoid including any MS-owned code, but nobody owns slop code.

  • Jo Miran@lemmy.ml
    1·
    1 month ago

    If you took a popular open source project, looked at the code and rewrote it by hand, the resulting code is open source. Even if you wrote it in a totally new programming language.

    I completely agree with you BUT this is the mess that is literally playing out now. We need legal clarity because the scenario I wrote is not theoretical, it is happening now.

    Also, I am sad to say that I have already seen Claude Fable 5 spit out code to spec that a mid level dev got working in less than 30 minutes by fixing a few connection assumptions the model made. Afterwards, every iteration has been done with the less powerful Claude Opus.

    I refuse to believe that the LLM designed everything from scratch and I can almost guarantee that whatever it “knows”, it pulled from open source projects. It also explains why it is so good at Java, Bash, and Python, and absolute garbage at PL-SQL.