271–280 of 806 posts
If the code is public, my guess is that someone else stole it and added it to an open source repo without authorization. Microsoft may have then picked it up from there.
This just means that if you use Copilot for work, you're exposing yourself and/or your employer to unknown legal liability. =)
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That code block is neither "simple like FizzBuzz" nor is it in a lawsuit. I feel like we're speaking past each other at this point.
What makes it not simple like FizzBuzz? You will not be able to come up with a reason why this one single function is copyrightable, but a FizzBuzz function isn’t. It’s one function in 15 lines of code. Get 1,000,000 developers to implement that function and you’re not going to have anywhere near 1,000,000 substantially different implementations.
Other than the legality of this code being copied almost verbatim - who is the person who would use it? A person who would use it could also write it. If they cannot write it, why would they ever use this very specific code that magically appeared?
There is absolutely zero doubt in my mind that copilot et al will lead to the absolute proliferation of half baked code even more than all the other mundane ways to copy&paste do.
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I don’t know of any examples of images being wholly recreated, but it’s certainly possible to use the name of some living artists to get work in their style. In those cases, it seems like not such a leap to say that the AI has obviously seen that artist’s work and that the output is a derivative work. (The obvious counterargument is that this is the same as a human looking at an artist’s work and aping the style.)
https://alexanderwales.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/image.... Left: “Girl with a Pearl Earring, by Johannes Vermeer” by Stable Diffusion Right: Girl with a Pearl Earring by Johannes Vermeer This specific one is not copyright violation as it is old enough for copyright to expire. But the same may happen with other images. from https://alexanderwales.com/the-ai-art-apocalypse/ and https://alexanderwales.com/addendum-…
Even that if done by a person as far as I understand it would not constitute a copyright infringement. It's a separate work mimicking Vermeer's original. The closest real world equivalent I can think of is probably the Obama Hope case by AP vs Shepard Fairy but that settled out of court so we don't really know what the status of that kind of reproduction is legally. On top of that though the SD image isn't just a recoloring with some additions like Fairy's was so it's not quite as close to the original as that case is.
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I think copilot is a clearer copyright violation than any of the stable diffusion projects though because code has a much narrower band of expression than images. It's really easy to look at the output of CoPilot and match it back to the original source and say these are the same. With stable diffusion it's much closer to someone remixing and aping the images than it is reproducing originals. I haven't been following…
> I haven't been following super closely but I don't know of any claims or examples where input images were recreated to a significant degree by stable diffusion. I think that the argument being made by some artists is that the training process itself violates copyright just by using the training data. That’s quite different from arguing that the output violates copyright, which is what the tweet in this case was abo…
I’ve noticed that people tend to disapprove of AI trained on their profession’s data, but are usually indifferent or positive about other applications of AI. For example, I know artists who are vehemently against DALL-E, Stable Diffusion, etc. and regard it as stealing, but they view Copilot and GPT-3 as merely useful tools. I also know software devs who are extremely excited about AI art and GPT-3 but are outraged b…
I think the distinction is that only one of those classes tends to produce exact copies of work. Programmers get very upset at DALL-E and Stable Diffusion producing exact (and near-exact) copies of artwork too. In contrast to exact copying, production of imitations (not exact copies, but "X in the style of Y") is something that artists have been doing for centuries, and is widely thought of as part of arts education.…
I’ve noticed that people tend to disapprove of AI trained on their profession’s data, but are usually indifferent or positive about other applications of AI. For example, I know artists who are vehemently against DALL-E, Stable Diffusion, etc. and regard it as stealing, but they view Copilot and GPT-3 as merely useful tools. I also know software devs who are extremely excited about AI art and GPT-3 but are outraged b…
Neither GPT nor Dall-e produces content that anyone can point to and say “they are laundering MY work”.
The closest we’ve been to that point is the image generators spitting out copyright watermarks, but they are not clearly attributable to any one single image (afaik).
As some other commenters have noted, it seems like the copyrighted code is being copied and pasted into many other codebases (shadowgovt says they found 32,000 hits), which are then (illegally) representing an incorrect license. So obviously the source of the error is one or more third parties, not Microsoft, and it's obviously impossible for Microsoft to be responsible in advance for what other people claim to licen…
> So obviously the source of the error is one or more third parties, not Microsoft, and it's obviously impossible for Microsoft to be responsible in advance for what other people claim to license.
Copilot is Github's product, and Microsoft owns Github. They are responsible for how that product functions. In this case, they should be held responsible for the training data they used for the ML model. Giving them the benefit of the doubt here, at minimum they chose which random third parties to believe were honest and correct. Without giving them the benefit of the doubt, they lied about what data sets they used to train it.
To try and put it simpler, let's say a company comes along and tells the world "we're selling this cool book-writing robot, don't worry it won't ever spit out anyone else's books" and then the robot regurgitates an entire chapter from Stephen King's Pet Sematary, is that the fault of Stephen King or the person selling the robot?
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I think the is exacty the gap the gp is mentionning: to a trained artist it is clear as water that the original image has been lifted wholesale, even if for instance the colors are adjusted here and there. You put it as a remix, but remixes are credited and expressed as such.
Exactly to a programmer copilot is clear violation, to a writer gpt-3 is clear violation, to an artist dalle-2 is clear violation. The artist might love copilot, the writer might love dalle, the programmer might love gpt-3. Its all the same they just dont realize this.
I think people may be drastically over-valuing their code. If it was emitting an entire meaningful product, that would be something else. But it’s emitting nuts and bolts. If the issue is more specifically copyright infringement, then leverage the legal apparatus in place for that. Their lawyers might listen better. This is not a strongly held opinion and if you disagree I would love to hear your constructive thought…