You don't if you are creating an entirely new work of art based solely on the knowledge and patterns you've learned from looking at other code, ie. a human learning to code by looking at millions of pages of code on GitHub; whether or not AI can learn in this way is the point of contention for AI art/code/chat generators.
If the AI "independently" comes up with a 1:1 copy of some piece of copyrighted code, would this be a copyright violation or not?
There's a reason why some programmers don't even look at proprietary source code leaks as to not accidentally introduce copyright violations into their own code.
It would be. When a human does this, does it invalidate the human's ability to create any new work at all? Should we chain up anyone who violated copyright by perfectly recalling someone's art in memory and re-drawing it from heart, since we cannot trust them to ever create an original work again?
Copyright is (mostly) not about copying for your own use, but about commercial exploitation. This topic has been discussed to death since at least the Sony Walkman. Nothing of this is new or different just because an algorithm is now involved.
If you copy for your own use only, that's totally fine - or at most a legal greyzone, in the end nobody will care about such personal use copies. If you use AI to generate pretty pictures to hang up in your home, totally fine too.
As soon as you start making money with this stuff though it becomes an actual problem.
It's really as simple as that.
Even the 'generative art aspect' has already been settled long ago when music sampling became popular and required a legal framework.
The trick here is to implicitly personify the AI (a program) by comparing it to a human. Because they are both “learning”.
There’s no reason why we should have the same standards for programs and humans based on metaphors.
If I log in to a website three times a day, I am simply using a website. If a program logs in to a website three thousand times in the span of a second from multiple IP addresses, that’s probably a DOS attempt.
Human minds can commit copyright infringement without realizing by it if they regurgitate parts of something someone has already created. Google “George Harrison.”
The `human learning` argument comes a lot in every discussion about copilot, but it's a completely different thing, and misleading.
`Human learning` involves understanding beyond the words and sentences, copilot doesn't know anything about our world.
