On Mon, Sep 22, 2025 at 1:47 PM Peter Maydell <[email protected]> wrote: > > On the other hand, AI tools can be used as a natural language refactoring > > engine for simple tasks such as modifying all callers of a given function > > or even less simple ones such as adding Python type annotations. > > These tasks have a very low risk of introducing training material in > > the code base, and can provide noticeable time savings because they are > > easily tested and reviewed; for the lack of a better term, I will call > > these "tasks with limited or non-existing creative content". > > Does anybody know how to demonstrate "limited or non-existing > creative content", which I assume is a standin here for > "not copyrightable" ?
The way *I* would demonstrate it is "there is exactly (or pretty much) one way to do this change". Any way to do that change (sed, coccinelle, AI or by hand) would result in the same modification to the code, with no real freedom to pick an algorithm, a data structure, or even a way to organize the code. I wouldn't say however that this is equivalent to non copyrightable. It's more that the creativity lies in "deciding to do it" rather than in "coming up with the code to do it". This is also why I mention having prompts in the commit message; the prompt tells you whether the AI is making design decisions or just executing a mechanical transformation. There's still a substantial amount of grey and I'm okay with treating anything grey as a "no". If something like "convert this script from bash to Python" comes up, I'd not try to claim it as "limited creative content". It may be a boring task with limited variability in output; but it's still creative and has substantially more copyright infringement risk. Paolo
