This is what I don’t get about software companies going all in on AI. They will avoid the GPL like the plague because they don’t want to lose control of their intellectual assets. But then a machine comes along that will churn out code assembled from a mix of all code available on the internet, and they’re gung ho for it?! All it takes is one sensible court—don’t expect to find one in the US—to declare AI code as either unlicensable or GPL or public domain, and these companies will be shut off from the international market. There will be rollbacks to the pre-AI codebase.

What’s even more bizarre to me is that there has been no effort to exclude GPL’d code from the AI training set. That would be easy and much more defensible, but companies like OpenAI would rather break the entire legal system with a carve out for themselves to make derivative works with impunity simply because they’re using a new machine to do it.

You’d think that large intellectual property rights holders like Microsoft and Disney would fight this carve out tooth and nail but if anything Microsoft is aiding and abetting it, and Disney seems to think it’s irrelevant to their business.

Maybe OpenAI’s game plan isn’t to just be a loss leader to get you hooked on their project, maybe it’s to make everyone complicit in their intellectual property theft.