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Comment by tim-projects | original | All AI-generated code should be Open Source
[−]tim-projects · 2026-11-15 Sun 17:01 UTC · link
When a carpenter crafts a chair, the tree first had to make effort to generate the wood.

Because chairs are in effect an open source design, does that mean carpenters shouldn't get paid?

Its nonsensical.

I think that people who believe these arguments have bought into ai hype too much and genuinely are fooled into thinking pressing a button to spit out boiler plate code somehow equates to a genuine saleable product. It doesn't and it won't. And that stuff shouldn't be open source because it's a waste of everyone's time to consume.

[−]g-b-r · 2026-11-15 Sun 17:13 UTC · link
Yes, what you wrote is definitely nonsensical.

Chairs can be covered by design protection.

And however hard a carpenter might work on a chair, if he copies a protected design he can't sell the chair.

However much work you might add on top of other people's copyrighted code, you don't get to sell it and use it however you want if you don't have the permission of the original authors.

[−]lelanthran · 2026-11-15 Sun 18:39 UTC · link
> However much work you might add on top of other people's copyrighted code, you don't get to sell it and use it however you want if you don't have the permission of the original authors.

It gets even more hilarious when you realise that the GP (tim) does not consider that, if you make the output of AI that was trained on copyrighted material legal to re-copyright, then it applies to him as well - all that hard work he did can be used chucked into an LLM either as context, or via LoRA, or even via simple explorative usage via tool calls, and then regenerated from that LLM, taking away whatever copyright the product had by generating a competing clone.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50509402

[−]dmitrygr · 2026-11-15 Sun 17:15 UTC · link
The difference between the input to the carpenter and the output of the carpenter is significantly greater than the input from you to the LLM, and the output of LLM. Majority of the alterations to the wood by the carpenter produced the chair. The words you typed into an LLM are less than 0.000000001% of the total inputs that it took to create its output (because training data counts, and it’s a lot bigger than anything you may have typed)