"at maximum, the spectre of AI contribution might virally taint the entire film" - which would also mean that anyone who used GitHub Copilot would not be able to copyright their software code.
I hadn't thought of that -- but yes, it very well might be the case.
Let's say there's a 50% (extremely generous!) limit on AI contribution.
An efficient company will operate close to that line, say, targeting a 49% AI contrib. (Remember how inexpensive AI contribution is in comparsion to human contribution. Market pressure will push people towards tenths of percentage points.)
That means that Joey, your new intern, might accidentally commit enough SLOC to make the whole codebase uncopyrightable.
Even if Joey didn't do that, the possibility of Joey doing that will have a strong deterrent effect on hiring Joey, especially if he's WFH.
The only mitigation would be to record everything Joey does, so that if there's ever any question, they can whip out the recordings of Joey picking his nose or whatever.
Something I've begun thinking about after playing with GPT-4 is that I could see within a year or so any of my new software development projects being a "no code" setup using comments to define functions and correct problem areas but leaving all actual code to the generative AI.
In many ways software projects for years now have this issue.
A decade ago when ruby on rails scaffolded out a project - is the result copyrightable according to the new guidance?
Separating out copyrighting software design at a comment level from software implementation is going to be the direction this all goes as the tools rapidly get significantly better.
Which is also going to be great, as imagine how a codebase designed this way might be able to be switched to a new language or switch out the 3rd party API being used or database being run on.
People are worried about protecting their busy work rather than evolving with the technology to establish their value above and beyond the busywork parts.
My value in software engineering isn't in typing up the loop, and less even in knowing that I'll need one. It's in knowing how to manage complexity across a broader cross integration of concerns. The way I'm doing that will change as technology advances, but it will still be some time before that part is automated too.
1attice|3 years ago
Let's say there's a 50% (extremely generous!) limit on AI contribution.
An efficient company will operate close to that line, say, targeting a 49% AI contrib. (Remember how inexpensive AI contribution is in comparsion to human contribution. Market pressure will push people towards tenths of percentage points.)
That means that Joey, your new intern, might accidentally commit enough SLOC to make the whole codebase uncopyrightable.
Even if Joey didn't do that, the possibility of Joey doing that will have a strong deterrent effect on hiring Joey, especially if he's WFH.
The only mitigation would be to record everything Joey does, so that if there's ever any question, they can whip out the recordings of Joey picking his nose or whatever.
kromem|3 years ago
In many ways software projects for years now have this issue.
A decade ago when ruby on rails scaffolded out a project - is the result copyrightable according to the new guidance?
Separating out copyrighting software design at a comment level from software implementation is going to be the direction this all goes as the tools rapidly get significantly better.
Which is also going to be great, as imagine how a codebase designed this way might be able to be switched to a new language or switch out the 3rd party API being used or database being run on.
People are worried about protecting their busy work rather than evolving with the technology to establish their value above and beyond the busywork parts.
My value in software engineering isn't in typing up the loop, and less even in knowing that I'll need one. It's in knowing how to manage complexity across a broader cross integration of concerns. The way I'm doing that will change as technology advances, but it will still be some time before that part is automated too.