this post was submitted on 01 Oct 2023
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First of all, this isn't a settled issue. Some people would argue Zarya of the Dawn is owned by everyone who created a copyrighted work that was used to train Midjourney. I hope these people are wrong, but it's a legal grey area right now.
The copyright office is not an authoritative source on legal issues. For that you need to find a criminal copyright infringement court case where someone with good lawyers enters a not guilty plea and the case goes all the way through to a final verdict.
Second - if your code is so simple that you can just ask an LLM to write the entire thing for you... then who cares if it's copyrighted? Anyone else in the world can just ask the LLM to write it separately for them. Why would they risk a lawsuit by copying your work? They'll get a better end product by using the latest version of the LLM anyway.
We never got a final verdict on that. They settled out of court.
It went backwards and forward on appeals/etc with some judges ruling in Google's favor and some ruling in Oracle's favor.
I listened to a lot of podcasts by IP lawyers throughout the court case and they were often quite confused by a lot of the rulings that were made, which, I guess, is why both corporations had so much success appealing previous rulings. Ultimately we just don't know.
But yes - in general it is a fact that source code often isn't protected by copyright. Patents should be the "right" tool for protecting source code. Unfortunately patents are even more of a mess than copyright. I'm not a lawyer but I'm 90% sure the answer to "can you patent something created by an AI" is "yes, as long as nobody else has patented it first".
I expect it will basically be the same as GPT-4:pretty much useless for writing code. It can only output a few hundred lines at the most, and you can't give it enough input as context to ask it to incrementally write an entire project a few hundred lines at a time.
It's great at "how do I do X?" but pretty close to worthless at "write real code I'm going to use to do X". Anything more complex than a 50 line shell script and GPT-4 falls over.
CoPilot is what you want for real code in large projects, it does the work to summarise your context (other code you've already written) into just the things that are likely to be relevant. However, it can't write a few hundred lines of code. It will often only output half a line of code, and you need to write the rest. Sometimes it might give you a dozen lines, but only if your code is very predictable and repetitive.
Think of GPT-4.5 as stack overflow which can answer almost any question you ask, in a second or two, and without deleting it as a duplicate of someone else who asked a completely different question.
Think of CoPilot as really good auto-complete.
Neither one is replacing a human programmer. But both are very useful tools for certain tasks.