I have been working for several days in a small package that could be useful for developers as it is useful for me.
The problem is that the package uses some obscure built-in API that I asked a coding AI to help me with and I worked on top of that. The structure is being the same, but I changed the internal behavior (think of a callback system having all the internal code re-implemented by me).
Could I release the project as open source? What would be a good license? Would it be ethical? How much different needs the code to be from the one that was outputted by the AI tool? What do you do in this cases?
1. The Copyright Office requires human authorship for a work to be protected by copyright. So in theory, someone else could copy the parts of your project that were LLM-generated without obeying your license's requirements (such as to give credit). Parts that you added and the work as a whole would still be protected
2. Regarding potential infringement of the training data: from progress in ongoing cases so far, copyright's requirement for substantial similarity has been upheld[0] for model output. So if your code doesn't resemble some protected work (and I think common coding LLM services have some attempts at preventing this) you should be in the clear there
So I don't see anything against using whatever open-source license you normally would.
[0]: E.G: in Stable Diffusion case, Judge William H. Orrick agreed with the defendants that "plaintiffs cannot plausibly allege the Output Images are substantially similar or re-present protected aspects of copyrighted Training Images, especially in light of plaintiffs' admission that Output Images are unlikely to look like the Training Images"