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The outrage-bait approach in this thread detracts from it. Yes, they trained it on everything. No, it's not clear if that's legal or not (probably is) or if that is much of a problem.
Out of curiosity, how do we define license violation in that case? I, as a human being, have trained by reading code, much of which is covered by licenses that are somehow not compatible with code I'm writing. Am I violating licenses? Asking seriously. It's really unclear to me where law and/or ethics put the boundaries. Also, I'd guess it's probably country dependent.
I am not a lawyer but I am sure that any legal standard for ML has to be different than "isn't it just doing what humans do, but faster?" GitHub scanning billions of code files to build commercial software is different than you learning at human pace, even if they're both "learning" and in the end they both produce commercial software.
The human activity most like training an ML system is memorizing a text by reciting from memory, checking against the original, adjusting, and repeating until there are acceptably few mistakes.
And if a human did so for thousands of texts then publicly repeated those texts, they would be violating copyright too.
To the people arguing it's "fair use" to use this for training an ML network. Where do you draw the line? What if you train an "ML network" with one or two inputs... so that they almost always "generate" exact copies of the inputs? Five inputs..? Ten? A thousand? A million?
My simplistic view is that the following is legally equivalent:
input -> ai network -> output
input -> huffman coding -> output
So, whilst:
* compressing and decompressing a copyright work is permissible;
* output and weights are deterministic transformations of the inputs;
thus:
* not eligible for copyright (lacking creativity); and
* are derivative works of the inputs;
OP’s rhetoric, and most discussion I see, asserts that training a model on copyrighted data is a copyright violation. Personally I don’t find this to be so obviously the case. Think back to when we were listening to AI generated pop music, for instance. I don’t recall any concern in HN comments about the copyright holders’ music being used for learning.
The outrage-bait approach in this thread detracts from it. Yes, they trained it on everything. No, it's not clear if that's legal or not (probably is) or if that is much of a problem.
Indeed; the question is if copyright should apply at all . Harping on about licenses, GPL, and whatnot is a detraction from the actual issue at hand. Also, given that the author of this tweet called me a "bootlicker" last year in response to a somewhat lengthy nuanced post about GitHub, I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that they're not all that interested in a meaningful conversation on this in the first place but…
Out of curiosity, how do we define license violation in that case? I, as a human being, have trained by reading code, much of which is covered by licenses that are somehow not compatible with code I'm writing. Am I violating licenses? Asking seriously. It's really unclear to me where law and/or ethics put the boundaries. Also, I'd guess it's probably country dependent.
sometimes? it's enough of an issue that companies explicitly avoid it by having two teams.
Out of curiosity, how do we define license violation in that case? I, as a human being, have trained by reading code, much of which is covered by licenses that are somehow not compatible with code I'm writing. Am I violating licenses? Asking seriously. It's really unclear to me where law and/or ethics put the boundaries. Also, I'd guess it's probably country dependent.
Does the code even matter at all? If I start with a copy of some existing code, how much do I have to change it to no longer constitute a license violation? Can I ever reach this point or would the violation already be in the fact that I started with a copy no matter what happens later? Does intention matter? Can I unintentionally violate a license?
But I think we don't have to do all the work, I am pretty sure this has already been considered at length by philosophers and jurist.
The outrage-bait approach in this thread detracts from it. Yes, they trained it on everything. No, it's not clear if that's legal or not (probably is) or if that is much of a problem.
It's not outrage bait. The thing reproduces GPL licensed code verbatim.
>oh my gods. they literally have no shame about this.
Then continues with
>it's official, obeying copyright is only for the plebs and proles, rich people and big companies can do whatever they want
and
> GitHub, and by extension @Microsoft , knows that copyright is essentially worthless for individuals and small community projects. THAT is why they're all buddy-buddy with free software types; they never intended to respect our rights in the first place
At any rate, it's not even clear to me if me publishing code written with copilot (or even with a random tool that will wget from github) puts the blame on the toolmaker or on me. This post, however, doesn't attempt to look at that but uses language that paints GH/MS as doing something illegal (and evil) that others wouldn't even get away with but not caring about it.
At least to some first approximation irrelevant because reading code is not subject to any license. What if a human reads some restrictively licensed code and years later uses some idea he noticed in that code, maybe even no longer being aware from where this idea comes? But what if the system memorizes entire functions? What if a human does so? What if you change all the variable names? What if you rearrange the con…