If code generated by LLMs turns out to be effectively public domain, that could seriously water down the legal standing of copyleft licenses. Fortunately there is still enough human-authored code that long-standing projects as a whole are not at risk of losing all copyright control, but as more LLM-generated code is incorporated, and human authored code is deleted, the copyright slowly gets washed away.
Having said that, I suspect the big AI companies have enough lobbying power to influence the legal system and lawmaking in the future.
"...prompts alone do not provide sufficient human control to make users of an AI system the authors of the output." [https://www.congress.gov/crs_external_products/LSB/PDF/LSB10...]
If code generated by LLMs turns out to be effectively public domain, that could seriously water down the legal standing of copyleft licenses. Fortunately there is still enough human-authored code that long-standing projects as a whole are not at risk of losing all copyright control, but as more LLM-generated code is incorporated, and human authored code is deleted, the copyright slowly gets washed away.
Having said that, I suspect the big AI companies have enough lobbying power to influence the legal system and lawmaking in the future.