Comment on Indie Game Awards Disqualifies Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 Due To Gen AI Usage
petrol_sniff_king@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 days agoMate, you were asked if code that was written for you was in fact your code and you’re talking about copyright. You’re off in the woods. You are so deep in the poisonous bog, I don’t think it’s possible to pull you out.
I think you get regular briefings at work on how to be, like, a business narcissist. Much like Tommy Tallarico, the inventor of music in video games.
lepinkainen@lemmy.world 2 days ago
But what is “my code”?
If I solve a problem but it turns out later I had read a solution to this problem somewhere and inadvertently copied it. Is it my code?
If I use a Jetbrains provided built in template for a function and just fill in the variables, is it my code?
What if I just accept it as is, still my code?
If I copy a solution verbatim from Stack Overflow or a book, is it my code?
If I iplement a well known algorithm, is it my code if it looks exactly the same as a billion other implementations of the same thing? Can you tell whether I wrote it or just copied someone elses code?
What if Intellisense autocompletes a full function, is it my code?
What if the autocomplete is powered by a LLM, is it my code?
Can anything except a full clean-room implementation on a computer with no internet access be “my code”?
Please tell me, as you seem to have this thing nailed down. I work with this stuff every day and I’m mostly in the dark about where the line between “my code” and “too much autogenerated, no copyright or even copyright ifringement” goes.
petrol_sniff_king@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 day ago
Plagiarism covers this.
Are you claiming you wrote the template? I think plagiarism might cover that.
Absolutely not.
If you… saw a solution somewhere. And then you copied it letter for letter. And then you told people, “this is mine, I wrote this,” … is that plagiarism?
This is for sure a difficult one, super hard, but I will give you a chance to think about it. It’s good to consider all the possibilities.
lepinkainen@lemmy.world 1 day ago
So it’s plagiarism all the way down? All software ever is uncopyrightable?
petrol_sniff_king@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 day ago
I’m going to be a little less mean considering some things I’ve seen you say elsewhere.
What I’m talking about here is attribution. Colleges have their own system, I don’t believe that it’s law, for identifying and dealing with plagiarism, and that’s because where an idea came from is very important to academia. Something that trips a lot of people up because they tend to think of plagiarism as thought-stealing from other people: you can be found to have plagiarized your own work from years prior. You have to call out where your information comes from.
Software, even though chunks of code are copywrightable, as a culture, does not care about this nearly as much. Are you stealing if you borrow something from stack overflow? In a way, yeah, kinda. But nobody cares. Lawyers do care about the selected licenses on libraries and github pages, though.
But this is where talking exclusively about copywright gets in the way: if a coworker of mine borrowed a solution from a free-as-in-libre github repository, that would be fine. And the law wouldn’t care. But if they then said, “I wrote this,” maybe because they’re anxious about proving to their manager that they’re worth keeping around, I would think that was really fucking weird of them.
Attribution is not strictly a legal concept. It may or may not be possible to get my coworker there in legal trouble, but that’s really besides the point, I think they’re being anti-social. The dishonesty about where those ideas came from make me nervous about continuing to associate with them at all.