On Mon, 19 Jan 2026 at 21:00, Toon Moene <[email protected]> wrote: > > On 1/19/26 19:51, Richard Biener wrote: > > > On Mon, Jan 19, 2026 at 7:46 PM Ville Voutilainen > > <[email protected]> wrote: > > > The DCO, even though I think it's obvious, might also get a clarifying > > amendment that what an AI tool produced is not obviously your work > > or can be considered OK to contribute. Same holds for people > > contributing using FSF assignment - you can only assign sth you > > have rights on. > > This might seem far fetched for people who do not know how Machine > Learning works - but it is not impossible that the suggested code it > comes up with is in whole or in a very large part someone's actually > published work. > > My own brother encountered this when quotes from his text book on > air-surface interaction in boundary layer meteorology showed up in > students' work *that could be traced back* to the use of AI tools.
There's also more and more newbies who don't grok that, and work based on hearsay. "I thought LLM output isn't considered copyrightable", I heard today from a very surprising source. I did explain that it's not about someone slapping some additional copyright on a tool's output, but the tool regurgitating copyrighted material it has used as some sort of input. That explanation rang all the right bells quickly enough, but going forward, I think it wouldn't hurt to remind people about what's what more often and in more places. I also heard today from a slightly surprising source that there are places where the no-LLM policies say "doesn't apply to documentation" and I need to go and fix their misconceptions. :D
