←back to thread

AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

(github.com)
728 points freetonik | 1 comments | 21 Aug 25 18:49 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
Show context
Waterluvian ◴[21 Aug 25 19:07 UTC] No.44976790[source]▶
I’m not a big AI fan but I do see it as just another tool in your toolbox. I wouldn’t really care how someone got to the end result that is a PR.

But I also think that if a maintainer asks you to jump before submitting a PR, you politely ask, “how high?”

replies(16): >>44976860 #>>44976869 #>>44976945 #>>44977015 #>>44977025 #>>44977121 #>>44977142 #>>44977241 #>>44977503 #>>44978050 #>>44978116 #>>44978159 #>>44978240 #>>44978311 #>>44978533 #>>44979437 #
EarlKing ◴[21 Aug 25 21:20 UTC] No.44978240[source]▶
It's not just about how you got there. At least in the United States according to the Copyright Office... materials produced by artificial intelligence are not eligible for copyright. So, yeah, some people want to know for licensing purposes. I don't think that's the case here, but it is yet another reason to require that kind of disclosure... since if you fail to mention that something was made by AI as part of a compound work you could end up losing copyright over the whole thing. For more details, see [2] (which is part of the larger report on Copyright and AI at [1]).

--

[1] https://www.copyright.gov/ai/

[2] https://www.copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-Intell...

replies(2): >>44979135 #>>44979585 #
smitop ◴[21 Aug 25 23:49 UTC] No.44979585[source]▶
> if you fail to mention that something was made by AI as part of a compound work you could end up losing copyright over the whole thing

The source you linked says the opposite of that: "the inclusion of elements of AI-generated content in a larger human-authored work does not affect the copyrightability of the larger human-authored work as a whole"

replies(2): >>44982922 #>>44984701 #
1. simoncion ◴[22 Aug 25 10:45 UTC] No.44982922[source]▶
The quote you pulled suggests that if the work is majority machine-generated, then it loses copyright protection.

That is, it suggests that even if there are elements of human-generated content in a larger machine-generated work, the combined work as a whole is not eligible for copyright protection. Printed page iii of that PDF talks a bit more about that:

  * Copyright does not extend to purely AI-generated material, or material where there is insufficient human control over the expressive elements.
  * Whether human contributions to AI-generated outputs are sufficient to constitute authorship must be analyzed on a case-by-case basis.