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stronglikedantoday at 5:35 PM1 replyview on HN

Should Word set itself as my coauthor when it autocompletes some sentences for me? If I use Claude/Word to write something, then I am the only author, since Claude/Word is not a person, and Claude/Word did nothing without my direction. It's not unethical to not disclose the tools I use to produce my work. They're just tools, smdh.


Replies

spacechild1today at 6:46 PM

With Word autocomplete you're still actively writing your text. Wouldn't it be more fair to compare this with autocompletion in IDEs?

IANAL so I appreciate any legal experts to correct me here. In my understanding, there have been court decisions that LLM output itself is not copyrightable. You can only claim authorship (and therefore copyright) if you have significantly transformed the output.

If you are truely vibing coding to the point where you don't even look at the generated code, how exactly are you transforming the LLM output?

Also, what if the LLM reproduces existing copyrighted code? There has been a court decision last year in Germany that says that OpenAI violates German copyright law because ChatGPT may recreate existing song lyrics (that are licensed by GEMA) or create very similar variations.