Earlier quoted context omitted.
At that point, can we all just agree IP is the stupidest concept to ever be layered on top of math (which programming is) and move on with non-copyrightable code?
Only if you agree that copyleft licenses are also stupid; without copyright, there's no way to prevent companies from making closed-source forks of code you wrote and intended to stay open.
All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot
571–580 of 734 posts
Re: All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot
#572I am really confused by HN's response to copilot. It seems like before the twitter thread on it went viral, the only people who cared about programmers copying (verbatim!) short snippets of code like this would be lawyers and executives. Suddenly everyone is coming out of the woodworks as copyright maximalists? I know HN loves a good "well actually" and Microsoft is always suspect, but let's leave the idea of code la…
I am really confused by HN's response to copilot. If you're asking about the moral reaction here, I think it depends on how one views Copilot. Does Copilot create basically original code that just happens to include a few small snippets? Or does Copilot actually generate a large portion of lightly changed code when it's not spitting out verbatim copies of the code? I mean, if you tell Copilot, "make me a QT compatibl…
Still, some of the moral outrage here has to do with it coming from Github, and thus Microsoft. Software startup Kite has largely gone under the radar so far, but they launched this back in 2016. Github's late to the game. But look at the difference (and similarities) in responses to their product launch posts here.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11497111 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19018037
Re: All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot
#573To me, the particular use case and whether it is fair use or not, is of minor interest. A far more pressing matter is at hand: AI centralization and monopolization. Take Google as an example, running Google Photos for free for several years. And now that this has sucked in a trillion photos, the AI job is done, and they likely have the best image recognition AI in existence. Which is of course still peanuts compared…
Re: All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot
#574To me, the particular use case and whether it is fair use or not, is of minor interest. A far more pressing matter is at hand: AI centralization and monopolization. Take Google as an example, running Google Photos for free for several years. And now that this has sucked in a trillion photos, the AI job is done, and they likely have the best image recognition AI in existence. Which is of course still peanuts compared…
If Google makes an amazing model that no-one can beat it will only be dominate as long as others get access to it freely. But if there are restrictions on access or if it's too expensive, other options will appear and even if they're not as perfect, they'll still be very usable. Imagine a coalition of companies all feeding data, that could compete just as well.
Re: All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot
#575To me, the particular use case and whether it is fair use or not, is of minor interest. A far more pressing matter is at hand: AI centralization and monopolization. Take Google as an example, running Google Photos for free for several years. And now that this has sucked in a trillion photos, the AI job is done, and they likely have the best image recognition AI in existence. Which is of course still peanuts compared…
If there were offline image recognition we could train on our own data privately, could the results of those trainings be merged to come up with better recognition on average than any one person could do themselves with their own photos?
In other words, would it be possible for us to share the results of training, and build better models, without sharing the photos themselves?
Re: All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot
#576To me, the particular use case and whether it is fair use or not, is of minor interest. A far more pressing matter is at hand: AI centralization and monopolization. Take Google as an example, running Google Photos for free for several years. And now that this has sucked in a trillion photos, the AI job is done, and they likely have the best image recognition AI in existence. Which is of course still peanuts compared…
Re: All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot
#577If the training set contains verbatim (A)GPL code does this mean that Copilot also should be distributed by Microsoft under GPL? Because without it Copilot (as it is distributed by Microsoft) couldn't be built, wouldn't it make it a derivative work of GPL'd code (and obviously every other license)? I see a lot of people comparing human learning to machine learning in the comments, but there is a huge difference - we…
No, see Authors Guild v. Google. Even without a license or permission, fair use permits the mass scanning of books, the storage of the content of those books, and rendering verbatim snippets of those books. The Google Books site is not a derivative work of the millions of authors they copied from, and if they did copy any coincidentally GPL, AGPL, or creative commons copyleft work, the fair use exception applies befo…
Re: All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot
#578ML novice question: is this atypical when training models? Wasn't GPT-3 trained on a lot of copyrighted data? My gut instinct, which is based on very low-information, is that it would be pretty hard to train models if you could only use open-licensed material.
It would be pretty concerning if people used GPT-3 while they were writing a novel, and it assisted them in plagiarizing a Steven King novel. We already have examples of copilot blatantly plagiarizing code
Re: All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot
#579Earlier quoted context omitted.
When the recent Github v. youtube-dl fiasco happened, I remember reading similarly strongly-worded but dismissive comments regarding fair use, stating how it is quite obvious that youtube-dl's test code could never be fair use and how fair use itself is a vague, shaky, underspecified provision of the copyright law which cannot ever be relied on. To me, seeing youtube-dl's case as fair use is so much easier than using…
How would you feel about a paid-for search engine using hundreds of millios of web pages without permission in order to build a proprietary product ?
Re: All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot
#580I think it’s pretty easy to defeat MS in court. We just need to bring the music industry into this! For example: Let’s train a network on Beatles music to generate new Beatles songs. I’m pretty sure music lawyers will find a way to prove that the trained network is violating the label’s copyright, as they always manage to do that. And then we just need to use the precedent and argue that music is the same thing as co…
(Maybe bring oracle into this :D)