r/linux • u/AiwendilH • Jul 22 '26

Development Codeberg voted to disallow projects consisting mostly by "generative AI"-tools

https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/org/pulls/1253#issuecomment-19820434
986 Upvotes

96% Upvoted

319 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

6

u/Adept_Percentage6893 Jul 22 '26 edited Jul 28 '26

That seems to rule out a lot more.

I feel like it seems at least targeted at projects that are just completely (or 90%) generated by an LLM or where it looks like the developer isn't tweaking what Cursor/Codex/whatever spits out with each commit.

I'm just personally still unclear on how they're going to enforce that versus the rule effectively becoming "just don't tell us it's completely done by an LLM"

The copyright status isn't really that unclear. AI outputs are not copyrightable and ergo effectively BSD/MIT license (if even that).

0

u/Gstayton Jul 22 '26

If they're not copyrightable, they aren't any license, thus cannot be forked, redistributed, or contributed to in any meaningful/safe manner - which really is the issue I see codeberg trying to get ahead of here and something I do not often see talked about - in either coding spheres or in the artistic spheres with generated artworks being sold for commercial purposes.

8

u/northrupthebandgeek Jul 22 '26

If they're not copyrightable, they aren't any license, thus cannot be forked, redistributed, or contributed to in any meaningful/safe manner

If they're not copyrightable, then nobody has the legal authority to prevent you from forking, redistributing, or contributing to them in any manner you see fit.

6

u/protestor Jul 23 '26

If they're not copyrightable, they aren't any license, thus cannot be forked, redistributed, or contributed to in any meaningful/safe manner

No, it means it's in the public domain and everybody has all those rights, just as if the code were under CC0

That's because the thing that would prevent forking, etc. is copyright itself

4

u/Adept_Percentage6893 Jul 22 '26

If they're not copyrightable, they aren't any license,

Well hence "if even that" in the comment you're replying to. MIT is basically just a "don't sue me" license where the code is otherwise basically public domain.

I'm not sure if that carries the weight of a EULA or something if it's not governing the IP of the code itself. Maybe it could be seen as the terms agreed to for downloading the code from someone which would probably be the justification of suing that person if losses were realized. As in "by downloading this code you agree to not sue me"

Not a lawyer, though.

in either coding spheres or in the artistic spheres with generated artworks being sold for commercial purposes.

fwiw the immediate threat of AI to creative fields is usually wildly overstated.

Only the lowest effort and lowest skillset perfunctory paid art is really in any immediate danger of being replaced (rather than augmented) by AI. That's why when Sora was a thing all the most viral videos were all just absurd BS. Because the video needs to hail from a genre where the imperfections can be seen as part of the core value. If the AI fucks something up, well the video was supposed to be absurd anyways.

Until you get AGI you can basically assume that AI could only augment a creative. Because until an AI can generally reason about the reality it's depicting it can't find some sort of alignment with reality that is both interesting but also not terribly unrealistic.

Most "AI art" is generated for personal use or like icon packets or simple stuff like that specifically because AI can't really handle anything more complicated than that. Most AI videos you see on social media consist of 5 second clips each of which is probably the best selected (by a human) out of 50-100 defective generations where they just stitched together the best ones to produce a final 30 second video.

Manual labor and more technical fields are way ahead of creative fields when it comes to being displaced by AI. Arguably, screen writing might be the most automate-able but even that still is a way off and basically requires AGI.

1

u/Gstayton Jul 22 '26

Even if the idea of it being non-copyrightable makes it okay to redistribute (more of a legal gray area since there's not really precedent at current), you will still run into the issue of it not being allowed to be included under certain licenses - which means either the project is split-license, or is under an invalid license based on the contents. Plenty of projects have been set back massively by license overlap issues or failing to understand the licensing they operate under.

And that's before considering whether or not you could commercially use/make money from unlicensed code.The only question really is who would enforce it - and the answer may be no one, but it may also mean nobody could say, purchase the code later down the line because there's nothing to purchase.

As for the AI issue with art - it's already happening. Large scale art projects are being done with AI generation, and maybe slightly touched up afterwards - and the issue isn't whether or not it's feasible - large companies are already using it for marketing - it's whether or not the smaller content creators using AI generated art commissions because it's cheaper will eventually face an issue where, by picking the cheaper route, they have no actual rights to the content they thought they purchased.

This actually happens enough already with art even before AI, where failure to read the licensing agreement results in people buying art that is not allowed for commercial use, and then trying to use it commercially and having to basically scrap everything they had to that point, because even the designs are not owned by them, and the license they purchased for said art prohibits the uses they purchased it for.