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Comment by mikehollinger | Hacker News Reader

The issue to me here is that code is a literary work. Literary works are copywritable. Except that AI generated works without human authorship aren’t per this.

Interestingly this came up when copilot was announced and one comment or another was “this will be an interesting bit of case law.”

Well now we have to see who wants to go first and establish precedent for the next half-century. :-)

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If I look at how the law is written, I get an impression that technically you might even say that copyright law doesn't exclude non-human authored works - they fit the clause of types of protected work, a machine might be considered an author, etc, HOWEVER, when all that is said and done, a machine can't have any rights or standing in court; i.e. even if someone would assert that a machine is the author of some work and has an exclusive right to reproduce it, then that right is unenforceable because the human society and its courts simply will ignore any violations of a machine's rights.

> The issue to me here is that code is a literary work.

Code (or anything else) is not a “work” without the required element of human creative input.

It isn't AI, it's a glorified Xerox machine.

That form of AI has already been invented long ago, it's called simply Copy & Paste.

GPT combines prompt, context and knowledge, it selects and adapts code. It even does problem solving: above average human rating on easy problems and 20% over humans on medium level problems. When did the xerox or parrot for that matter do that?

If you think copy and paste is artificial intelligence then there probably isn't much of a discussion to be had here.

Yes, very smart and talented people have released ground breaking and amazing tools leveraging massively trained ML models. The model is not problem solving or intelligent in any sense of the word (take it from oai: https://openai.com/blog/chatgpt)

"ChatGPT sometimes writes plausible-sounding but incorrect or nonsensical answers..."

To be back on topic, I don't think some sweaty dude from the internet should be issued a copyright for typing "Minnie Mouse wearing a pikachu t-shirt!" into DALL-E and submitting the resulting image.

At the same time, I read a post like this one: https://andys.page/posts/how-to-draw and I have really no objection to copyright being assigned. I think the difference is the human authorship, and I think the Copyright Office has made a pretty good first swag.

A bit more like a sampler than a xerox machine... but sampling laws got clarified eventually too!

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