AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

There is also IP taint when using "AI". We're just pretending that there's not.

If someone came to you and said "good news: I memorized the code of all the open source projects in this space, and can regurgitate it on command", you would be smart to ban them from working on code at your company.

But with "AI", we make up a bunch of rationalizations. ("I'm doing AI agentic generative AI workflow boilerplate 10x gettin it done AI did I say AI yet!")

And we pretend the person never said that they're just loosely laundering GPL and other code in a way that rightly would be existentially toxic to an IP-based company.

Courts (at least in the US) have already ruled that use of ingested data for training is transformative. There’s lots of details to figure, but the genie is out of the bottle.

Sure it’s a big hill to climb in rethinking IP laws to align with a societal desire that generating IP continue to be a viable economic work product, but that is what’s necessary.

> Sure it’s a big hill to climb in rethinking IP laws to align with a societal desire that generating IP continue to be a viable economic work product, but that is what’s necessary.

Well, AI can perhaps solve the problem it created here: generated IP with AI is much cheaper than with humans, so it will be viable even at lower payoffs.

Less cynical: you can use trade secrets to protect your IP. You can host your software and only let customers interact with it remotely, like what Google (mostly) does.

Of course, this is a very software-centric view. You can't 'protect' eg books or music in this way.

In the US you can not generate copyrightable IP without substantial human contribution to the process.

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

Eh, they figured out how to copyright photographs, where the human only provides a few bits (setting up the scene, deciding when to pull the trigger etc); so stretching a few bits of human input to cover the whole output of an AI should also be doable with sufficiently well paid lawyers.