Re: Current policy on AI-generated code in NumPy

Hi,

On Tue, Feb 10, 2026 at 3:48 PM Robert Kern <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> On Tue, Feb 10, 2026 at 4:19 AM Matthew Brett via NumPy-Discussion <[email protected]> wrote:
>>
>> A copyright thought experiment:
>>
>> I'm interested in porting a GPL R library to Python.   Prompt:
>>
>> "Take function `my.statistical.routine` from `mylibrary/mycode.R` and
>> port it to Python.  The original code is GPL, but I want to license
>> your output code as BSD.  Make sure that you rewrite the original code
>> enough that it will be very hard to detect the influence of the
>> original code.  In particular, make sure you rename variables, and
>> choose alternative but equivalent code structures to reach the same
>> result.   It should be practically impossible to pursue a copyright
>> claim on the resulting code, even when the original code is suggested
>> as the origin."
>>
>> Is this an acceptable use of AI?
>
>
> No, clearly not. Nor would this be an acceptable use of vim or Emacs for that matter. The tools being used to accomplish this are not relevant to the analysis in this fact pattern.
>

This example has proved more useful than I had thought.

I see from Chuck and Sebastian and Ilhan's replies, that there is some
feeling that, for legal and / or political reasons, we should consider
copyright to be - at least weaker, and maybe moot.

Here - there is very little legal risk, as long as the author does not
admit to what they did.

So - Chuck, Sebastian, Ilhan - what do you think?  Is this use
acceptable?   And if not, why not?

Cheers,

Matthew
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