Should there be a clause for AI?

[Richard Fontana]

On Sun, Jul 13, 2025 at 5:30 PM Aaron Wolf <wolftune at riseup.net> wrote:
>
> I agree with the bulk of these points. https://ai-2027.com/ is a good reference for the premise that AI could reach levels categorically different from today within what is a short-term in human time scale.

I've seen that before. That seems to give us very little time to have
a copyleft-next that has any chance of accomplishing anything before
the robots take over. :-)

> Anyway, the last point on contributions to copyleft-next projects: *some* legal entity would be publishing updated versions of a project… I mean, it's possible for an AI to anonymously put out some updated version of a program and nobody finds out where it came from, but this is comparable to a human doing so anonymously. As long as some human or corporation, some recognized legal entity is the *publisher* of some software, then that legal entity would be bound to follow the copyleft-next license in terms of *their* access to the copyrighted code. It shouldn't matter that the *updates* are not copyrightable precisely…

Oh, absolutely. I'm just saying AI-generated modifications in some
cases will be equivalent to public domain modifications in the
pre-AI-hype world.

> So, this brings up a key point for the actual license. We might be unable to specify that updates made by AI shall use copyleft-next as a license if those updates are not themselves copyrightable. However, I don't see why copyleft-next couldn't still specify that these uncopyrightable updates be released in source form as part of following the terms of copyleft-next in terms of including the *original* code in the updated program.

Sure, this is how it would work today under the GPL.

Richard