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this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2026
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Fuck AI
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A place for all those who loathe AI to discuss things, post articles, and ridicule the AI hype. Proud supporter of working people. And proud booer of SXSW 2024.
AI, in this case, refers to LLMs, GPT technology, and anything listed as "AI" meant to increase market valuations.
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Hi, I'm a software engineer.
I've also been trained on copyrighted material, because every codebase I've worked on for money has been proprietary.
Does that mean I can't touch open source code? I could accidentally use a snippet I've written before in some other setting.
The real licensing issue of AI use shouldn't even apply to Linux because it's already GPL. GPL infects anything it touches so if you use GPL-trained AI on an MIT project and it spits out something resembling the GPL code it was trained on, that would make that MIT project a GPL project. It would also make your proprietary projects GPL projects.
So funny you should mention that, I worked at a company that dealt with Linux and third-party proprietary code. They kept the software developers highly segregated because they feared accidental copyright infringement. They thought at the time that even a human learning and accidentally reproducing something they remembered from working on proprietary code too risky.
The practical difference is that the third-parties were likely to sue, but the corpus of trained data is pretty much open source projects that may have a right to sue but in practice everyone knows they aren't going to be able to chase down violations due to lack of resource.
Whole thing is a nightmare and I hate it. Luckily nothing I do for work is open source so even if my code accidentally resembles some other codebase I've worked on, nobody will find out lol
You're unlikely to spit out code from your corpus verbatim, so the answer to your first question is a resounding no. If you did copy from your previous job's, you'd be liable.