441–450 of 545 posts
Then they came for the warehouse and shipping jobs, but I did not care because I wasn't in a warehouse.
Then they came for the call center jobs, but I did not care, because I did not work in a call center.
I was safe, because they could never automate programming.
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I’d argue that this new use case is very interesting to open source and how it relates to the various licenses, and not necessarily “the point of open source”. I can imagine people being OK with their code being used as-is, and/or being modified, but not used completely out of context to train some corporate AI to inject code into commercial code based.
You can't give out something for free without limitations and then complain when someone uses it for something you didn't expect. Well you can complain but no one has to listen. Githubs use seems very in the spirit of open data and code. Using open source to help others.
I thought this was a pretty good thread (by an ex-Wikipedia lawyer) on Twitter about the IP meaning of Copilot. https://twitter.com/luis_in_brief/status/1410242882523459585... And this is a longer article about how IP and AI interact: https://ilr.law.uiowa.edu/print/volume-101-issue-2/copyright... I am not a lawyer, but I am capable of summarizing the thoughts of lawyers, so my take is that in general, fair use allow…
The issue isn't an AI reading copyrighted code, the issue is an AI regurgitating the lines of copyrighted code verbatim. To be clear, humans aren't allowed to do this either. And sure, nobody cares about your stupid binary tree, but do they care about GNU and the Linux kernel? Imagine someone trained an AI to specifically output Linux code, and used it to reproduce a working OS. Is that fair?
But the execution went wrong... They used raw data from repositories for training, without any kind of pre-processing.
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as far as I have seen it that is exactly how people are using it, which is why the last thread about it was (rightfully) full of people pointing out what a bad idea it is of copying half-cooked code snippets into your own codebase. Why does it get a lot of upvotes? Because it's an AI product that makes things appear on your screen and that's the threshold for hype in our current age. Of course the number of upvotes o…
It sounds like you think most people upvoted it because it is a shiny toy and the bar is very low when it comes to impressing tech industry workers. And also you don't believe upvotes have a positive correlation with innovation on HN, because the mRNA vaccine posts don't have as many upvotes as you think they should. Does that about sum it up?
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Agreed. I am considering relicensing all of my permissively licensed code because of this. The fundamental assumptions I had when releasing that code under a permissive license have been violated.
When you use a permissive license, it’s best you stop thinking of it as your code. You’ve set it free for everyone, and while you may retain copyright in some abstract sense, it really no longer belongs to you. That’s a good thing.
I never hosted--with quite some prejudice, even--any of my projects on GitHub (for a number of reasons that are off topic right now)... it didn't matter, though: people take your code and upload it to GitHub themselves (which is their right); so you can't avoid Copilot by simply self-hosting your repositories.
Has Github confirmed anywhere that copilot is only trained with projects on Github? The OpenAI people seem to grab any bit of data they can get their hands on, regardless of the source. I don't see why they'd limit themselves to Github for something like this.
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> I can use your code to power my business, and I'm under no obligation to hire you. Make sure you read those licenses. Just because something is open source doesn't mean that you're free to use it for whatever you want. There are some projects that are open source and free for non-commercial use only.
> open source and free for non-commercial use only That's not open source: https://opensource.org/osd
Regardless: Copilot doesn't only pick up "open source" code... it picks up any code that has been published under any reason including the large amounts of code that is on GitHub without any license at all or which was literally stolen and leaked onto GitHub.
Meanwhile, even open source licenses have restrictions, whether they be "you can't use my work without agreeing to contribute back your work to the collective", various forms of automatic patent grants and associated retaliation clauses, or merely "you have to credit me", a simple limitation almost all open source software comes with which Copilot launders away.
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The license you have chosen requires attribution. You may not care[1] but the other party still most likely will be in violation if Copilot reproduces a significant chunk of your code. [1] I also MIT license my public code on Github, and also wouldn’t care that much.
I don't care about attribution. The only reason I use MIT, is so some knucklehead doesn't try to sue me, because they cheezed up my code.
This huge revolt is interesting but I doubt it makes github very scared. They'll just come out with some new version of it which they'll show takes into account licenses (or uses a 10k or something dataset with hand checked licenses) and that'll be that and we'll forget about all this the week after.
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This. You realize it doesn’t make any sense. All ideas are shared creations, by definition. If you’ve created something that has meaning for other people, the meaning comes from the ideas you are incorporating into your own tree. There is no defending copyright. It is indefensible from first principles. It makes no logical sense. Though it sure has proven to be a profitable con.
I recognise your comments from several different threads, and I'm wondering if you might not be working against your own ideals. The GPL license is intended to persuade other sources to share their contributions when building on top, which I assume is what you would like to see happen. If everything is GPL then everything is open source, everyone can use anything, including training AI methods, etc. The problem posed…