How much Attribution should be given to AI
Not every contributor to a project ALWAYS gets attribution.
Does Everyone get Attribution
In my office we are viewing AI in some ways as we would view another co-worker. We must train the co-worker, and for AI we must ensure re-training occurs for every session. We must oversee the co-workers work, and AI work must be reviewed and validated. We compensate the coworker based on mutually agreed terms, and there is money paid to utilize most AI models, or there is no payment required - which is a valid contract.
Just because a co-worker was invloved in a project, has no bearing on whether or not that coworker receives any attribution in a project authorship page. The same should be true of AI.
Does a Contractor get Attribution
Another parallel, perhaps even more appropriate, is a scenario where a contractor is hired to assist for a specified purpose. The contractor, having no long-term affiliation with the company, has zero expectation for attribution or ownership of intellectual property.
Ownership Claims
Most important, just because a co-worker, or a contractor, worked on a project does not offer the person any claim of ownership for the work that is actually owned by the company. If I have a subscription from Github, Anthropic or anyone else, to use their tools, then there is a contract in place that governs the use of those tools. The vendors have pre-approved the tool use for specified renumeration. Are we signing away a portion of our intellectual property rights to works just because of the tool used to complete the works? I would hope not.
AI is a Tool
Notepad is a tool. VS Code is a tool. Other IDE's are tools.
Current AI is a tool being used to assist in work. AI cannot perform work it is not tasked to perform.
If I create a skill for AI to run - that can be compared to building a macro that gets launched based on certian business cycle events or application life cycle events. Does this mean macros and other code snippets get attribution? Just because their scope of knowledge is smaller - does that make them less warranting of attribution.
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I have been involved in software development for over 40 years. I have seen the evolution of tools to aid in the creation of work products. This has not been limited to software development.
Current AI is not able to come up with new ideas, it only pulls from information it already knows about or already exists.
I suggest we all take deep breathe.... This post is attributed to Richard Hancock - thats all!