alt Hacker News> You can't copyright those anymore (when written using AI), but you __can__ copyright the way they are put together.
Sort of, but not really. Copyright usually applies to a specific work. You can copyright Harry Potter. But you can't copyright the general class of "Wizard boy goes to wizard school". Copyrights generally can't be applied to classes of works. Only one specific work. (Direct copies - eg made with a photocopier - are still considered the same work.)
Patterns (of all sorts) usually fall under patent law, not copyright law. Patents have some additional requirements - notably including that a patent must be novel and non-obvious. I broadly think software patents are a bad idea. Software is usually obvious. Patents stifle innovation.
Is an AI "copy" a copy like a photocopier would make? Or is it a novel work? It seems more like the latter to me. An AI copy of a program (via a spec) won't be a copy of the original code. It'll be programmed differently. Thats why "clean room reimplementations" are a thing - because doing that process means you can't just copy the code itself. But what do I know, I'm not a lawyer or a judge. I think we'll have to wait for this stuff to shake out before anyone really knows what the rules will end up being.
Weird variants of a lot of this stuff have been tested in court. Eg the Google v Oracle case from a few years ago.
You have good points regarding how copyright works.
> Software is usually obvious.
Hardware and mechanical designs are usually described in CAD programs nowadays, so it comes pretty close to software; it's just that LLMs are not the right tool to "GenAI" them but I've seen plenty of these kinds of design that I know for sure that they are often not any less obvious than a lot of software. Treating software as "obvious therefore not patentable" is not accurate and not fair and is probably not going to help the profession in the AI age. But I agree that patents are bad for innovation.
It is also not fair to claim that an AI-copy is fundamentally different from photocopying.
I mean, in both cases it is like you are picking the worst case interpretation for the field of software engineering.
> I think we'll have to wait for this stuff to shake out before anyone really knows what the rules will end up being.
Yes, but it will help if we think deeply about this stuff ourselves because what law-makers come up with may not be what the profession needs.