r/AskComputerScience • u/Rusty_Chest • 2d ago
Shouldn't Most Websites Refuse Vibe-coded apps/recompiles?
If LLMs are all trained off stolen data and open source repositories, this means they're essentially laundering a large amount of open source code without the proper dues paid to the licensing requirements, such as CC-4.0 for example which would explicitly require credit from original sources.
This would in turn make any vibe-coded app illegal based off licensing requirements, if one were to find a 1:1 copy of their code within an open-source vibecoded app, no?
I know that's a kind of hard legal requirement to reach, since there's only a finite way of doing things within a language's framework and therefore blindly accusing everyone who ever does the same function as you as a vibecoder would be painful to say the least.
But there's an increasing amount of people who believe the "spirit" of FOSS/FLOSS is preserved when vibecoding if they make their code source-available as well, completely disregarding the legal frameworks around GPL/LGPL/CC-4.0 etc.
Posting this here but idk if I would be best served in a legal subreddit.
Edit: To clarify, I'm not entirely against the use of AI/LLMs, I'm just curious about what the line is legally speaking when people say "I made this app!" and it's 4 different FOSS projects stapled together without credit.
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u/T_Thriller_T 2d ago
It is currently discussed in multiple court cases if training something is the same as using it under a license or even similar.
Which is one of the issues here.
Otherwise e.g. pictures would likely also need to pay some kind of commissions.
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u/Clear_Evidence9218 2d ago
By your standard, every human programmer is a thief because we also study and learn from open-source software.
But in reality, just as with humans, AI training on a repository doesn't establish that a model's subsequent output contains copyright-protected expression from that repository, nor does it establish that the output is a derivative work.
You acknowledge that there are only a finite number of reasonable ways to implement certain functions, yet seem to overlook that functional similarity is not, by itself, proof of copyright infringement, regardless of how the software was written.
You also seem to misunderstand how AI models learn from training data, leading you to use the word "stolen" rather carelessly.
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u/Rusty_Chest 2d ago
I don't think my standard covers human programmers.
Stolen would imply there's something to steal without an agreement.
A human can look at a repo, copy code from it and then license it accordingly, an LLM with several sub-agents and a prompt cannot accept any licenses or was it ever considered they should need to.
Anthropic/OpenAI/XAI have run through your Github repos and taken everything they can without anything in return or any sort of license negotation regardless of what your repo may say.
That is a robbery in my opinion, different from a human looking at the repo and learning from it.
I don't think I misunderstand how LLMs train their weights on copyrighted content and how rampant infringement is when it comes to that - but I do get your point about it not being too different from two people reaching the same solution to a problem.
Functional similarity isn't a proof of copyright infringement but straight bytecode might be, no?
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u/Clear_Evidence9218 2d ago
Not all code is copyrightable, whether it comes from an open-source or closed-source repository.
Just because I examine code from a licensed repository and incorporate what I've learned doesn't automatically mean I'm subject to that repository's licensing requirements. Those obligations depend on what was actually copied, how it's used or distributed, and the specific license involved. Merely studying code and applying what you've learned doesn't trigger those obligations.
I'm beginning to suspect you haven't actually read many of the software licenses you're discussing.
Fortunately, your rather narrow personal definition of "stealing" isn't how copyright law works.
Have you actually looked into copyright infringement cases and examined the legal reasoning behind their outcomes? I think you'd be surprised by how many disputes turn on technical distinctions about copyrightability, substantial similarity, licensing, and permitted uses rather than anything resembling your characterization of "robbery."
Also copyright infringement and theft aren't interchangeable concepts, and treating them as such doesn't make your argument any stronger.
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u/Rusty_Chest 2d ago
All code is copyrightable if you author it, what?
I'm not sure what you're trying to do by introducing doubt about my ability to read through a license or differentiate within copyright terms.
Anything produced at all by a human can be licensed, that's just a fact isn't it?
I never said you're subject to a repository's license if you read from it. You are subject to it if you fork it or contribute to it mostly, no one can monitor your clipboard for snippets you take from it in an unlicensed manner (which I would call stealing but you have a problem with this term, I think?).
I unfortunately do know a bit about licensing, mostly because I've been a victim of plagiarism and theft in the past, which caused me to relicense from GPLv3 to CC-4.0 to keep source availability but force attribution and disallow people from re-selling my code.
Unsure what that question was supposed to lead to.
Copyright infringement isn't inherently theft, but if I infringe on your copyright explicitly to make money or derive benefit from it, it is often considered criminal :D
I know the copyright system in the US stinks to high hell, and I know you're trying to let me know in the nicest way possible that there will never be a black/white solution to my current question since it all relies on vagueness and one-off applications of a very inconsistent set of laws, and I appreciate it.
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u/Clear_Evidence9218 2d ago
No, whatever gave you that impression?
Not all code is copyrightable simply because a human authored it. Copyright protects original expression, not ideas, algorithms, mathematical principles, functionality, or trivial implementations. Just because you wrote something doesn't automatically mean every part of it qualifies for copyright protection.
Interestingly, you mention relicensing your work from GPLv3 to CC BY 4.0 to prevent others from reselling it. But CC BY 4.0 explicitly permits commercial redistribution, including resale, provided its conditions are satisfied. Creative Commons even recommends against using its licenses for software. GPLv3 also permits commercial redistribution, so neither license accomplishes what you're describing.
I'm not disputing that plagiarism and copyright infringement happen, or that you've personally experienced them. I'm disputing your assumption that training on copyrighted code inherently constitutes theft or makes subsequent AI-generated software an infringing derivative work.
Your original argument rests on that assumption, but you still haven't established the connection. Demonstrating that a particular AI output reproduces protected code is one thing. Claiming that AI-generated software generally inherits licensing obligations from everything in its training data is something entirely different.
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u/Rusty_Chest 2d ago
I can appreciate that you're more intelligent than I am.
I will try to collect my thoughts adequately in this response though I'm not sure we're going to go anywhere productive with this discussion.
My issue with my situation where code / work was stolen from me was a lack of credit not a lack of payment, passing off my work as someone else's and selling it is a line beyond just selling it and crediting me for it.
I think we've reached a point in this argument where it's reasonably exposed that my issue isn't inherently legal or technical but rather ethical (company vs human, rather than legal vs illegal).
My argument was originally based off the fact that if I take an entire repository with a license, copy it into a Qwen/Gemma etc window disregarding the entire licensing behind it and task an AI with refactoring it - it counts as infringement of the licensing that repository may have as it's a copy and therefore entering into the licensing contract.
I do think this thread has sort of reached a limit to how much we can talk about this without going in circles considering I'm not as well equipped as I thought, but I did learn from it so I appreciate the time you spent talking to me.
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u/panderingPenguin 2d ago
All code is copyrightable if you author it, what?
printf("Hello, World!");
Probably the most famous line of code in the world. Not copyrightable. IANAL and there are plenty of technicalities but code has to be sufficiently non-obvious and involve some amount of choice in how to express your ideas in order for it to be copyrightable.
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u/Rusty_Chest 2d ago
You can copyright hello world, that's how publishing a programming tutorial would work, no?
it's all about what surrounds it as context and what you do with it, I can't copyright 2+2=4 but I can copyright a lesson on addition/subtraction
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u/panderingPenguin 2d ago
You cannot copyright hello world in the same way you cannot copyright 2+2=4. Yes, you could potentially copyright your tutorial that includes hello world, but not hello world itself. I don't want to get into the minutia of what is and isn't copyrightable, nor am I qualified to do so. But suffice it to say that there are many fragments of code, and even entire programs (of which hello world is one), that are not copyrightable. Just because you write some code doesn't make it copyrightable.
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u/HasFiveVowels 2d ago
That’s not how any of this works
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u/Rusty_Chest 2d ago
Care to elaborate?
GPL/LGPL/CC-4.0 etc. all explicitly require you either redistribute your modifications or full source code + credit to the original work it's based off
If I make a repo that's 2+2=4 and an LLM copies that entire repo bit for bit and embeds it into your app, and I can prove it's my code that's both a violation from the LLM and the operator of the LLM - I believe.
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u/HasFiveVowels 2d ago
LLMs don’t copy like that. What they do is much closer to me reading their code and then writing my own version of it. LLMs don’t retain a copy, neither in part nor in full, of that code.
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u/Rusty_Chest 2d ago
Right, I can't patent 2+2=4 nor do I retain an exclusive license towards solving that math problem open source or otherwise.
I get what you're saying in the sense that if you "inspire" yourself by my solution and it's transformative or w/e it's not something I can go after you legally for.
But a good chunk of LLMs I've seen aren't afraid of copy-pasting code from github repos verbatim, surely that's an exception to "LLMs don't retain a copy neither in part nor in full of that code"
I know how diffusion and transformer models work in that they interpolate between training weights to generate something from scratch but programming/code can and is sometimes packed straight into the weights.
You can see this by the blatant benchmark poisoning/tweaking these LLMs do on Leetcode/LLMArena where they're pre-trained for certain responses and have little deviation
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u/HasFiveVowels 2d ago
I have never seen an LLM copy and paste code from a repo. Not sure what you’re talking about
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u/Rusty_Chest 2d ago
I have seen it, and you can actually command them to in any way you want. Not just a git clone (this isn't akin to stealing code) but you can straight up goad or directly make an LLM into what we would classify as copyright infringement of a licensed bit of code.
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u/HasFiveVowels 2d ago
Of course you can! I can "make" my keyboard copy and paste code as well. You’re in here talking about any LLM generated code is legally questionable because the author could use it to perform copy & paste? This really doesn’t feel like a good faith argument
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u/Rusty_Chest 2d ago
I don't think my argument is necessarily in bad faith but it isn't truly neutral either, sure.
If you publish a research article with a license that forbids redistribution, and I set an LLM loose on it to copy the entire article word-for-word and republish it with my own license, would you not consider that legally questionable?
It's technically transformative under DMCA if I change enough of it that it's different but it's still not necessarily... good.
I will admit like I did up above in another chain of comments, that my issue isn't as legal or technical as I frame it but more of an ethical situation which doesn't have a clear black/white but I'm trying to explore different branches of the arguments.
Apologies if it comes off as me being willfully ignorant or malicious, I'm not trying to be, just trying to learn.
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u/HasFiveVowels 2d ago
The issue is that it’s clear that you’re deciding your opinion and then looking for evidence to support it. You keep using terms like "copy and paste" and "verbatim" but, when pressed on the topic, you fall back to "well you could get an LLM to do such a thing, right?". You’re basically assuming that LLMs contain what, to you, is equivalent to a database. It’s not. Ask an LLM, without internet access, to reproduce the source code for git and see what you end up with. Your opinion regarding the ethics of this technology is not fact-based.
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u/Rusty_Chest 2d ago
What?
My opinion is fact-based in the sense that there was a large pillaging of human content to create the training weights for models.
There is a large set of evidence showing models can reproduce a certain output consistently over time, it's done to tweak benchmarks.
It's called "Data Contamination". If you don't want to reply to me that's fine but accusing me of trying to weasel out of an argument when you yourself have not been able to dissect it is arguably more dishonest with the ad-hom hurled at the end there.
You can condition LLMs to repeat "good" code, and to "repeat" said "good" code you rely on weights, weights that may or may not contain someone's full source code for a project they wrote.
If you cannot handle hypotheticals in a field you don't understand it's fine, you can just stop replying.
An LLM without internet access still has weights and data, lol.
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u/Rusty_Chest 2d ago
Also I want to reiterate, I do not personally dislike LLMs.
I have a bias for sure but I see their utility in gruntwork under supervision, I work in IT and it's nigh impossible to complete some tasks on some interfaces without an AI guiding you along to some extent.
I did not come into this thread with an agenda, nor did I come here to "epically own the vibecoders #rekt" or something of that nature.
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u/treefaeller 2d ago
Little lesson in copyright law. Say I want to write a book about how to make lasagna (it's delicious). I know nothing about the topic. First example: I go to the library (where it is legal to read books, and the library bought the books), and read exactly one cookbook, for example "the joy of cooking". I then write my lasagna book, publish it, and make money from it. Because all my knowledge comes from "the joy of cooking", the recipe that I publish in my book will have to be a copy of the recipe from "the joy of cooking". I have committed plagiarism, the author of "the joy" can sue me for copyright violation, since I literally copied their recipe, duh, look at the word "copy" and the word "right".
Second example: I go to the library, and read all 100 cook books there. I compare the recipes for lasagna, and take notes. For example book A uses more basil, book B coats the noodles in olive oil, book C steams the noodles instead of boiling them, and so on. I then write my book using a recipe that's a hybrid, pieced together from ideas I found in the 100 books I read. This is perfectly legal, and does not violate the copyright of any of these books. Why not? Because of "fair use": If someone publishes a book, they clearly intend for people to read it, they intend to disseminate knowledge. I have not copied large swaths of text from any one book.
What an AI does is much closer to the second example: It "reads" a lot of inputs, takes little snippets from each, categorizes them, and then on request builds a text by stitching a lot of little pieces from its inputs together.
When people publish their source code (for example on GitHub), they clearly intend it to be read. The whole idea of open source is that the source is open (duh, thence the name), so people can read it and become smarter. If I wanted to write an OS, I could read the source code to Linux, BSD, Minix, Plan 9, and so on, look at the ideas, and write my own using the knowledge and skills I have gathered, and that would be both legal, and allowed under the various licenses that accompany those code bases. What I can't do is to copy a big long piece from any one of them, because that violates copyright law and their licenses. Again, whether I do this myself by hand, or whether I use an AI or a LLM to do the grunt work, makes little difference.
Let me be nasty: If the folks who wrote the original codes (or the original cook books) wanted me to not use their knowledge or work, they should simply not have published it. There is a reason the recipe for McDonalds burgers or for Coca Cola is not available to the public, nor is the source code for zOS and Solaris (mostly). By publishing these works, the authors explicitly encouraged others to read and learn. They used copyright law and specific licenses (such as the GPL or the BSD license) to make some restrictions on copying, such as: the original author must be acknowledged and the copyright notice retained. But they did not (and pretty much can not) restrict someone from reading the code and taking small pieces.
The problem here is that our legal system does not distinguish the act of a human learning from many source, versus the act of an automated system (AI/LLM) doing the same thing. It's not clear that the legal system can make that distinction.
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u/Rusty_Chest 2d ago
I see.
This is basically the idea I had in mind where it's only ethically wrong (mass-theft) but legally speaking it's just plagiarism at worst even if you can (and you mostly cannot) prove it.
The legal system like someone mentioned below is likely not going to be interested in finding the line between a human ingesting a book and a machine ingesting a book if we stay in our current "50 more billion dollars to the AI industry right now" mentality either.
Thanks for the breakdown, I appreciate the time it took for you to write this in such detail and in a civil tone :)
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u/treefaeller 2d ago
But is it even ethically wrong? If I go to the library and read 100 books about some topic, and then write a new book containing a summary and critique, that is (in our society right now) considered both great scholarship and ethically acceptable. Now one might argue that for common topics (like how to write an OS), there are already plenty of books, and writing yet another one is wasteful. But it is neither immoral nor illegal.
You say "50 more billion dollars". That is the superficial level of looking at the problem. The real issue is that it isn't clear that our legal system doesn't (and perhaps shouldn't) distinguish the tools that I use to perform an action. If I go read those 100 books using an LLM, and then have the LLM write my new book for me: why is that different from using pencil and paper (an intermediate and simple tool), or just my memory?
Similarly: I can kill someone by using a super-high-tech gadget, for example the phasers from Star Trek. I can use a traditional tool like a kitchen knife. I can also just strangle them with my bare hands. The legal system treats all three cases identical: murder. To the ethical and legal evaluation, the tool we use to perform an action matters much less than the intent and the situation.
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u/Tai9ch 2d ago
The legal system like someone mentioned below is likely not going to be interested in finding the line between a human ingesting a book and a machine ingesting a book if we stay in our current "50 more billion dollars to the AI industry right now" mentality either.
The significant risk here is that the legal system (or legislature) decides that copyright becoming less powerful is so dangerous that it doesn't worry about protecting the "human ingesting a book" case at all. Then you get mandatory licensing fees for everything.
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u/Rusty_Chest 2d ago
I didn't even consider that much if I'm honest.
In my mind it would have just forced people to do attribution far more minutely compared to the thousands of stock picture sites you can grab pictures from without credit and face no repercussions commercially or creatively for.
But yeah I guess it would inevitably lead to licensing fees for everything.
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u/HasFiveVowels 1d ago
Why do you assume it’s "mass theft" to any degree that goes beyond "what if a human read everything on the internet". This is the bias I was talking about elsewhere. You seem to be saying a lot of stuff that’s the stock and trade of people who try to discredit AI. It did not engage in "mass theft". It read… a lot. It didn’t "download and distribute copies". That’s a huge distinction that you are repeatedly overlooking by relegation the behavior to "mass theft". If I walk into a library and read every book in there and then leave… have I engaged in mass theft?
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u/Flowchartsman 2d ago
If you think that’s bad, wait until they start training newer models on slop generated by older ones.
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u/Rusty_Chest 2d ago
Yeah, model inbreeding is definitely going to be the next hurdle once they run out of training material.
We already have benchmark-optimized models that use answers from other models or whatever which is terrible, but I guess full power ahead 50 billion more to AI- sorry, SI development yippee
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u/dkopgerpgdolfg 2d ago edited 2d ago
You're not wrong, but you're missing something: Humanity on average, in 2026, doesn't give a f* anymore.
If/how using AI-generated things, given its training data, can be legal, is something that most countries don't have an answer for. And MS Windows, MS365 email hosting, GMail for companies, etc., are technically unambiguously illegal in a significant number of places. And so on.
And nobody stops it, people continue to use it, even defend it. It will just get worse and worse. It brings money to some, that's the only thing that matters nowadays.
(Same for politicians that technically are extreme criminals, sometimes even heads of states. Often simply nothing happens, and if it does then a tiny inconvenience that they won't even remember next week.)
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u/Rusty_Chest 2d ago
Yeah that's the main thing,
I don't consider myself a radical or anything but whenever I approach this topic of being against vibecoding from people who don't actually have knowledge to stop/correct LLMs I'm treated like some radical tree-hugging activist while people don't realize that the FOSS/FLOSS community is dying from it, the entire hardware supply chain is ruined for the foreseeable future, everything is heading to AI-powered surveillance
and getting Minecraft+Skyrim recompile mashups isn't necessarily worth that price lol
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u/Esseratecades 2d ago
You're right, but somewhere in the face of AI the rules kinda just stopped mattering to people.
On the industrial scale, there's a vested interest in enshittification. Some dress it up as progress but it's not progress.
Our legal system which has rules surrounding intellectual property is kinda just dragging it's feet with AI companies.
Nobody with the institutional power to do anything actually cares.
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u/VoidRippah 2d ago
I'll have to disappoint you but that would mean to rejected every app.. I'm having a difficult time finding a new job where I don't HAVE to vibe code. I'm a senior SWE.