Re: GCC AI Policy Announcement

> That is one of the clearer points right now - LLM-generated code cannot
> be copyrighted.
> 
> If somebody significantly modifies LLM-generated code, then that person
> gains copyright (which would also be fine).

Yes to both.

I want to point out that there has been and still is a long discussion
on gnu-prog-discuss about this topic that's spanned many hundreds of
messages.  I suggest that we not repeat that discussion here.

The jist of that discussion is that there's concern that because
LLM-generated code isn't copyrightable, there might become an issue
where the GPL no longer applies because there's not enough
copyrightable content.  The other side of that is the belief that there's
a significant amount of human interaction in editing the resulting code,
choosing the prompts, and deciding what to put where and that amount is
enough to preserve copyrightability.

The key problem, though, is that there's no legal precedents here and
won't be for many years.  All court decisions even remotely related to
this issue were decades before LLMs existed.  The US Copyright office
has issued guidelines for AI in art, but not software, and with the
overturning of Chevron, it's not clear that their guidance would have
much legal authority anyway.

So nobody, not even an attorney specializing in this field, can state
with certainty which way this will go.  All anybody can do is
speculate, based both on legal and political/business theories.  And
that's an uncomfortable place to be.