Copilot is a new way for corporations to break copyright while enforcing it for everyone else, this will be the first big use for AI when other corpos follow.
Copilot sells code other people wrote
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Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote
#72On a side note, I do believe that short programs or functions should be copyright free by law.
Or we as a community need to create a better bsd, a cc0 for everything.
Almost everything is nontrivial, and almost everything is copyrighted, at least with the pressure to name the original author (BSD, GPL, other major permissive licenses).
Say you want to use a library, then you check for examples in the documentation, now you have to denote somewhere that the example is from the documentation (best if you put it in the source code, so you don't lure other people to copy what you copied and refer you as the author).
It is a major PITA at least for me.
Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote
#73I don't understand what's going on there. I don't use github. Can someone explain what the author means? Edit: in detail
Nice, being downvoted for asking questions. Nice asshole culture on HN.
Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote
#74Programmers are fine when their creations, pretty much all of tech, resells content that other people wrote for free, but no, not code, that one must be expensive
I also don't think it's acceptable for TurnItIn to monetize content without paying the authors. My opinion about whether students should have their work stolen and monetized by a company doesn't seem to have much impact though.
Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote
#75Pretty soon the world is going to come to realize art/creation is just blending, incrementing and repurposing prior art. No book, painting, codebase, sonnet, design is theft-less. The art is the space reduction, otherwise we’d just bruteforce away.
This idea has been around for a while - why... "pretty soon"?
And I'm sure I couldn't disagree with you more. Or are 'influence' and 'theft' the same now?
Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote
#76I mean, if it's autocompleting a fairly simple line, and can do that because it's analysed a lot of lines, I don't really see that as "stealing anything". If you are using it to write whole complex functions thatare the same as other people's, I guess that is copying. But if you do the second thing you are not a great dev, and would have probably ended up copy pasting it anyway. I think the first use case is far more…
> If you are using it to write whole complex functions thatare the same as other people's, I guess that is copying.
> But if you do the second thing you are not a great dev, and would have probably ended up copy pasting it anyway.
How would I know that the boiler plate I ask copilot to write for me is copied verbertim from a codebase, that neither I nor Microsoft has licensed to use?
Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
> But if you do the second thing you are not a great dev, and would have probably ended up copy pasting it anyway. If you do that on your own, it's your (legal) responsibility. If Copilot does it for you, it's GitHub's/Microsoft's responsibility.
Why should be GitHub's/Microsoft's responsibility? No one is forcing you to use copilot. If I use grammarly, are they responsible for what am I aiming to write?
Does Grammarly gerate pages of content for you?
Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't see why that should be the case in this particular scenario, or what benefit is gained from that. Could you elaborate?
Could you elaborate on why you think a computer program and a person should be treated the same way in this respect? We can take as self-evident that a human is capable of reading about something, conceptualising it, and then writing something completely new with the knowledge they have gained. I think it's also pretty uncontroversial that the primitive "AI" we currently have is nowhere near the level of even an aver…
I think it's best if we sidestep these big conceptual questions about what cognition or creativity really are. It's hard to find agreement, and perhaps it is not necessary to do so.
My position is that if a person hired in a company can currently use Google, Stack Overflow and GitHub to help develop their custom scripts, and no moral or copyright issues are infringed (ie, you don't try to say you came up with it on your own, and you use only enough that it is clearly fair use), then I think an AI should be able to assist in that task. There is no need to complicate things by legislating what the AI is doing and what Google is doing, as they are very similar things and in fact even use similar methods.
Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
> But if you do the second thing you are not a great dev, and would have probably ended up copy pasting it anyway. If you do that on your own, it's your (legal) responsibility. If Copilot does it for you, it's GitHub's/Microsoft's responsibility.
Why should be GitHub's/Microsoft's responsibility? No one is forcing you to use copilot. If I use grammarly, are they responsible for what am I aiming to write?
If I pay for grammarly, and it plagiarizes an existing work but represents it as an entirely new, independent work and I am unaware of the existing work that is being stolen, who is doing the stealing?
Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote
#80Can I suggest a hypothesis that if you find Copilot useful it means the problem you are solving is a boring one? I might be wrong of course.
99% of work in 100% of interesting projects is boring.