(the person you originally replied to is also me, tl;dr: I think engineers don't think they're authoring, but companies do)
The core feature of generative AI is the human isn't the author of the output. Authoring something and generating something with generative AI aren't equivalent processes; you know this because if you try and get a person who's fully on board w/ generative AI to not use it, they will argue the old process isn't the same as the new process and they don't want to go back. The actual output is irrelevant; authorship is a process.
But, to your point, I think you're right: companies super think their engineers have the rights to the output they assign to them. If it wasn't clear before it's clear now: engineers shouldn't be passing off generated output as authored output. They have to have the right to assign the totality of their output to their employer (same as using MIT code or whatever), so that it ultimately belongs to them or they have a valid license to use it. If they break that agreement, they break their contract with the company.
(oops, I didn't check the usernames properly, sorry about that)
I still don't think this is fully accurate.
The view I'm noticing is that people consider that they have a right to the programs they produce, regardless of whether they are writing them by hand or by prompting an LLM in the right ways to produce that output. And this remains true both for work produced as an employee/company owner, and for code contributed to an OSS project.
Also, as an employee, the relationship is very different. I am hired to produce solutions to problems my company wants resolved. This may imply writing code, finding OSS code, finding commercial code that we can acquire, or generating code. As part of my contract, I relinquish any rights I may have to any of this code to the company, and of course I commit to not use any code without a valid license. However, if some of the code I produce for the company is not copyrightable at all, that is not in any way in breach of my contract - as long as the company is aware of how the code is produced and I'm not trying to deceive them, of course.
In practice, at least in my company, there has been a legal analysis and the company has vetted a certain suite of AI tools for use for code generation. Using any other AI tools is not allowed, and would be a breach of contract, but using the approved ones is 100% allowed. And I can guarantee you that our lawyers would assert copyright to any of the code generated in this way if I was to try to publish it or anything of the kind.
Every contract I've seen has some clause where the employee affirms they have the right to assign the rights to their output (code, etc) to the company.
I'm not really convinced; I think if I vibe code an app, and you vibe code an app that's very, very similar, and we're both AI believers, we probably both go "yup, AI is amazing; copyright is useless." You know this because people are actively trying to essentially un-GPL things with vibe coding. That's not authoring, that's laundering, and people only barely argue about it. See: this chardet situation, where the guy was like "I'm intimately familiar with the codebase, I guided the LLM, and I used GPL code (tests and API definitions, which are all under copyright) to ensure the new implementation behaved very similarly to the old one." Anything in the new codebase is either GPL'd or LLM generated, which according to the copyright office, isn't copyrightable. If he's right, nothing prevents me from doing the exact same thing to make a new public domain chardet. It's facially absurd.
The core feature of generative AI is the human isn't the author of the output. Authoring something and generating something with generative AI aren't equivalent processes; you know this because if you try and get a person who's fully on board w/ generative AI to not use it, they will argue the old process isn't the same as the new process and they don't want to go back. The actual output is irrelevant; authorship is a process.
But, to your point, I think you're right: companies super think their engineers have the rights to the output they assign to them. If it wasn't clear before it's clear now: engineers shouldn't be passing off generated output as authored output. They have to have the right to assign the totality of their output to their employer (same as using MIT code or whatever), so that it ultimately belongs to them or they have a valid license to use it. If they break that agreement, they break their contract with the company.