Copyright is based on laws, and laws can be changed or clarified. Given the amount of overinvestment in AI, I expect them to change. The EU is already making moves in this direction: https://noyb.eu/en/ai-eu-member-states-approve-digital-expro...

I expect the overall copyright regime to be weakened over time due to the effects of AI. It’s clear that the intent is to replace copyright gatekeeping with model/compute gatekeeping. This is a battle between two groups I greatly dislike, and I don’t really side with either, but there may be a small benefit for the average person who just wants to “download a car”.

It could be, but:

- For now the laws are in force, and I don't even know of discussions to change them (that EU proposal only wants to allow training on personal data)

- changing intellectual property rights law would typically require changing international treaties

- however much companies are in love with AI now, I'm not sure they'd support abolishing legal protections on which their business relies

> The prospect of being sued because the LLM outputted training code you're not allowed to use, or to relicense, is exciting?

The problem with this is that if someone sues you for this they have to somehow prove that you actually infringed. They can't just point to the code and say "See, mah, infringement!" The legal system does recognize that it is very possible for two people, completely independently, to arrive at a nearly identical solution.

How many cases of an LLM outputting training code have you heard of? let alone training code that you are not allowed to use or relicense?

Why are proprietary software developers entirely unbothered by this?

> Why are proprietary software developers entirely unbothered by this?

Because the chance of someone auditing the actual source code is near zero, but for open source software it's near 100% that someone or, worse something aka an AI bot looking for a revenue stream, will have a look at your code. And EVEN IF you get caught stealing by whatever random incident (say, your code repository being 0wned) - it's a matter of a settlement payment. If you are not a company, but an individual person... well, just look at what happened to Aaron Swartz RIP.

And for the WINE/ReactOS/console homebrew folks, it's vital to be able to claim no code contributor ever got exposed, even indirectly, to proprietary code.

On the other hand it could be very expensive if caught. It could be very difficult to remove the code too.

Your point about being caught is valid, but it depends on AIs producing identifiable chunks of code, and that is incompatible with your license. AI training is going to lean towards open source, because its available to train on.

I also think the widespread use of AI will mean accidental copying will become more acceptable. Even as it is, its going to be regarded as an accident.

They did in 2023 and the AI thieves built logic to rephrase the plagiarism so it isn't immediately detectable.

Proprietary developers don't care because their code wasn't trained on. Is that a trick question?

They do care now that reverse engineering is possible.

Can you explain further? What was the code affected?