Artificial Intelligence1 min read

All AI-generated code should be Open Source

By · Published by Everything Blog

In short

Modern automated programming tools rely on models trained by scraping decades of freely shared software from platforms like Stack Overflow and the GNU Project without proper attribution. Converting these outputs into closed, proprietary products essentially functions as license laundering while contradicting United States legal precedents on human authorship. Establishing standard open-access practices protects the collaborative software ecosystem that made automated coding possible in the first place. This issue grows increasingly critical as developers frequently deploy automated outputs directly into production environments without reviewing or altering them beyond their initial prompts.

Key points

  • Using machine outputs to create proprietary applications functions as license laundering…: Using machine outputs to create proprietary applications functions as license laundering against the open-source community that trained these underlying models.
  • Legal standards for machine-generated works vary globally, as demonstrated by the United…: Legal standards for machine-generated works vary globally, as demonstrated by the United Kingdom offering limited protections while the United States rejects non-human authorship.
  • Developers relying on unmodified prompt outputs should voluntarily release their software…: Developers relying on unmodified prompt outputs should voluntarily release their software under Creative Commons Zero or traditional open-source licenses.

Sources checked by our analysis pipeline: 1

This may be a hot take, but I strongly believe that all code generated by AI should be Open Source. And here's why.

First of all, AI models were trained on a massive corpus of Open Source code written since RMS announced the GNU Project and the Free Software Movement. That code was simply scraped from the internet and used without permission or proper attribution. The models were also trained on Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange sister projects, which are released under Creative Commons licenses that legally require attribution. Turning this collective knowledge into proprietary, closed-source code feels like license laundering.

The second reason is legal: purely AI-generated code is not written by a human, meaning it should not be copyrightable. The foundation for this principle in the US goes back to the famous Monkey Selfie dispute, which established that non-humans cannot hold copyrights. A precedent later cited by the U.S. Copyright Office regarding AI. Following the same logic, Wikimedia Commons requires all purely AI-generated images to be tagged as Public Domain.

However, copyright laws differ across the globe. For…

Artificial Intelligence