TL;DR: The advent of AI based, LLM coding applications like Anthropic’s Claude and ChatGPT have prompted maintainers to experiment with integrating LLM contributions into open source codebases.
This is a fast path to open source irrelevancy, since the US copyright office has deemed LLM outputs to be uncopyrightable. This means that as more uncopyrightable LLM outputs are integrated into nominally open source codebases, value leaks out of the project, since the open source licences are not operative on public domain code.
That means that the public domain, AI generated code can be reused without attribution, and in the case of copyleft licences - can even be used in closed source projects.
Ok, but it’s not like everyone is documenting exactly which parts are generated, curated, or human written.
Say someone incorporates GPL code without attribution, and gets sued for doing so. They try to make the argument in court that the source material they used is not copyrighted, because of AI. Won’t they have to prove that the parts they used were actually AI output for this defense to work? It isn’t like people are going around ignoring the copyright on things in general if they look like they were probably generated with AI, that isn’t enough to be safe from prosecution, because you usually can’t know the exact breakdown. It seems like preventing this loophole from being used would be as simple as keeping it ambiguous and not allowing submissions that positively affirm being entirely AI generated.
I don’t really think we need to go down the copyfraud path to see that AI code damages copyleft projects no matter what - we know that some projects are already accepting AI generated code, and they don’t ask you to hide it - it is all in the open.