Vibe coding promises “no‑code” software development, but it also raises a hard question: if you’re not the human author, can you really slap a GPL header on the project?
Since the advent of “Generative AI” and Large Language Models like ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, and Claude, many people have extolled the virtues of vibe coding. The promise of vibe coding is that you don’t have to be a developer to create software projects. Instead, you can simply describe the project in a prompt, and the AI system will write the code for you. In a 2025 keynote, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang described vibe coding as a great equalizer.
However cool that prospect might be to some, there are some pretty big implications for open source programmers who lean too heavily on AI coding assistants. You’ve probably heard many times how open source projects that use AI to write code, or that accept contributions authored by AI, tend to “turn off” other developers. Many open source developers get “into” open source projects because they like writing code. Using an AI to write code for you is like going to the bank to watch them count other people’s money. It’s just not fun.
But instead of revisiting that issue, I’d like to address the legal implications of using AI to write code.
Why Open Source Licenses Can’t Exist Without Copyright
All open source licenses, going back to the original “Free Software” license, the GNU General Public License, rely on copyright to establish their provisions. GNU GPL version 1 refers to copyright several times, including in the preamble and body. Here are a few key instances:
“We protect your rights with two steps:
- copyright the software, and
- offer you this license which gives you legal permission to copy, distribute and/or modify the software.
…
This License Agreement applies to any program or other work which contains a notice placed by the copyright holder saying it may be distributed under the terms of this General Public License. The “Program”, below, refers to any such program or work, and a “work based on the Program” means either the Program or any work containing the Program or a portion of it, either verbatim or with modifications. Each licensee is addressed as “you”.
You may copy and distribute verbatim copies of the Program’s source code as you receive it, in any medium, provided that you conspicuously and appropriately publish on each copy an appropriate copyright notice and disclaimer of warranty; keep intact all the notices that refer to this General Public License and to the absence of any warranty; and give any other recipients of the Program a copy of this General Public License along with the Program. You may charge a fee for the physical act of transferring a copy.”
Copyright is the foundation of an open source license. It gives you, the copyright holder, the right to define how others can copy your work. If copyright did not exist, you would not be able to place your software under an open source license, such as the GNU GPL or any other.
AI-Generated Content and the Copyright Problem
US courts are increasingly finding that AI-generated content is not eligible for copyright protection, which raises issues for open source licenses. In one well-known case, an artist used AI to generate an image, “Théâtre D’opéra Spatial,” and entered it into an art contest without disclosing that it was AI-generated.
The piece won the contest, but the artist was ultimately unable to secure copyright for it. As highlighted in a 2023 public radio article, the artist applied for copyright protection and was turned down by the US Copyright Office:
The image was striking enough to win part of the Colorado State Fair’s art contest last year. But the U.S. Copyright Office on Tuesday issued a final decision that it can not be copyrighted, meaning Allen can’t get legal protections to stop others from reproducing and using the image themselves.
The federal office found that Allen is not the “author” of the piece. Instead, the office wrote, “his sole contribution to the Midjourney Image was inputting the text prompt that produced it,” and then making visual modifications afterward. The office has found previously that copyright law is meant to protect human authors, not machines.
In earlier guidance, the office wrote: “When an AI technology receives solely a prompt from a human and produces complex written, visual, or musical works in response, the ‘traditional elements of authorship’ are determined and executed by the technology—not the human user.”
The Copyright Office pointed to numerous other cases in which the courts have rejected non-human authors, including one involving a book purportedly authored by “non-human spiritual beings.” (The decision also referenced a dispute about whether a monkey’s selfie could be copyrighted.)
I encourage you to read the US Copyright Office report on Copyright and Artificial Intelligence, specifically Part 2 on “Copyrightability.” At 52 pages, this might seem like a long document, but many pages are half-filled with footnotes, so the effective page count is closer to 25 or 30.
Page 8 of the report mentions the “Théâtre D’opéra Spatial” piece and the court decision that addressed claiming copyright on AI-generated work:
In 2023, the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia became the first court to specifically address the copyrightability of AI-generated outputs. The plaintiff challenged the Office’s refusal to register an image that was described in his application as “autonomously created by a computer algorithm running on a machine.”
Affirming the Office’s refusal, the court stated that “copyright law protects only works of human creation,” and that “human authorship is a bedrock requirement of copyright.” It found that “copyright has never stretched so far [as] … to protect works generated by new forms of technology operating absent any guiding human hand.” [40] Because, by his own representation, the “plaintiff played no role in using the AI to generate the work,” the court held that it did not meet the human authorship requirement. The decision has been appealed.”
The key takeaway from the report is that there’s no hard-and-fast rule for how much AI a person can use and still claim copyright. These issues sometimes need to be determined on a case-by-case basis. The general guideline: the more decisions a human makes in the process, such as arranging the AI-generated output, the more likely that human can claim copyright. For example, the report says this on pages 10-11:
“Although an AI-generated output cannot be considered a joint work with respect to the user and AI system, joint authorship provides a helpful analogy in assessing whether a party contributed sufficient expression to be considered an author. To be a joint author, one must make a copyrightable contribution. “A person who merely describes to an author what the commissioned work should do or look like is not a joint author for purposes of the Copyright Act.”
In other words, just because you described it doesn’t mean you have any claim to the copyright. Think of it this way: if you hire an artist to paint your portrait and make specific requests like “make my nose look smaller” or “make the background look like a garden,” that doesn’t make you a “co-painter” of the piece. You simply described the end product; someone else actually did the work.
Where that Leaves Your Vibe-Coded Project
That’s the dividing line in AI-generated work, and it’s why open source developers should be mindful of how much they rely on AI in their projects. The more you lean on AI to write code for you, the less likely you are to hold copyright on the result. In the extreme case of “vibe coding,” where you only describe the end product and the AI does all the work, you may not be able to claim any copyright at all.
And because open source licenses rely on copyright, you may not be able to place a vibe coded project under an open source license, such as the GNU GPL.
Jim Hall is an open source software developer and advocate, probably best known for his work on the FreeDOS Project. At work, Jim is CEO of Hallmentum, an IT executive consulting company that provides hands-on IT Leadership training, workshops, and coaching.
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