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this post was submitted on 09 Aug 2023
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Technology
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AI is a marketing term, not a technical one. You can call anything "AI", but it's usually predictive models that get called that.
For example if the powers that be decided to say licenses don't apply once you feed material through an "AI", and failed to define AI, you could say you wrote this awesome OS using an AI that you trained exclusively using Microsoft proprietary code. Their licenses and copyright and stuff doesn't apply to AI training data so you could sell that new code your AI just created.
It doesn't even have to be 100% identical to Windows source code. What if it's just 80%? 50%? 20%? 5%? Where is the bar where the author can claim "that's my code!"?
Just to compare, the guys who set out to reimplement Win32 APIs for use in Linux (the thing that made it into MacOS as well now) deliberately would not accept help from anyone who ever saw any Microsoft source code for fear of being sued. The bar was that high when it was a small FOSS organization doing it. It was 0%, proven beyond a doubt.
Now that Microsoft is the author, it's not a problem when Github Copilot spits out GPL code word for word, ironically together with its license.
The reverse, actually. Artificial intelligence is a field of research that includes things like machine learning, as well as lots of even more mundane applications. It's pop culture that has hijacked it to mean "a thing exactly as capable as a human brain, but in computer form."
Once again, it doesn't matter what you "feed code through." Copyright applies to the tangible result. If the output from the AI matches closely to something that's already copyrighted then that copyright applies to it. If it doesn't match closely then that copyright doesn't apply to it. The actual process by which the code was produced doesn't matter one whit. If I took a Harry Potter book, put its pages through a shredder, randomly glued the particles of paper back together and it just so happened to closely replicate Lord of the Rings then the Tolkien estate has a case against me but the Rowling estate does not.