671–680 of 1001 posts
Is there a license that explicitly forbids corporations from ingesting my code and making a billion dollars off of my work for free? The AGPL? I've been using the MIT license for more than a decade, but it's time to change that.
Can someone help me to imagine a reality in which these points are viable concerns?
> …how will you feel if Copilot erases your open-source community?
> …Copilot will become not just a substitute for open-source code on GitHub, but open-source code everywhere.
> …Copilot is merely a convenient alternative interface to a large corpus of open-source code.
> With Copilot, open-source users never have to know who made their software. They never have to interact with a community. They never have to contribute.
Is the author suggesting that Copilot will be used in place of `npm install next react react-dom` or `cargo add tokio --features full` or `raco pkg install pollen` — that developers will be content to use augmented autosuggest in place of large, well-tested, well-documented open source libraries?
Does he see Copilot's final form as some kind of AI package manager that drops a library of untested unattributed undocumented files into our projects?
Or is it more that he thinks those libraries won't exist because open source contributors will grow to feel more abused than they already do, perhaps quitting the scene or developing in private, like certain artists have already done in response to the AI art movement?
There is already such a huge disparity between paid package consumers and unpaid package contributors. I haven't seen that change since Copilot launched in beta or under general availability. I see the same ratio of help/feature requests compared to code and documentation contributions that I always have. And package usage has not declined so far for the open source things I work with.
It would be nice to learn more about the “Copilot will lead to the death of open source communities” line of reasoning — what is the author's perceived timeline to open source's decline and fall as a result of Copilot's current path?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I see this basic logic in almost AI ethics threads, and it starts with a big assumption: "humans learn from copyrighted source material without copyright violation". This then gets tenuously extended to "ai also learns, so it must not be in violation of copyright law". The first assumption is highly flawed though. Humans routinely do violate copyright law. Plagiarism is a huge problem in many sectors; un-cited direct…
The law does not concern itself with trifles.[0] Programmers tend to think of copyright as a Boolean valued function. Either something is infringement or it isn’t. Judges think of copyright infringement as a real-valued function of many arguments corresponding to the circumstances of the parties (e.g. what actual damage was done?). A human quoting a human without attribution, without any profit made or identifiable d…
I absolutely agree with you that copyright is not a boolean, but I don't buy the idea that a judge will just shrug and allow infringement to continue just because there was no commercial harm.
I also think your example is just irrelevant to the case at hand. Sure, someone "performing" someone else's copyrighted words once may not be a big thing. But if Copilot is actually found to be infringing, these infringements will keep happening, over and over and over.
Bottom line is that none of this has been tested in court. I think it's great that someone is working on doing just that. Maybe the end result will be that Microsoft's use is indeed fair use, and that Copilot users have no further obligations. But I'd like to hear a court decide that, not a bunch of armchair non-lawyers (myself included) on a random web forum.
Here are a few thoughts I haven't formulated before: It seems clear enough to me that training AIs on copyrighted works is typically or commonly a fair use under existing law, because the AIs can and commonly do learn non-copyrightable elements and aspects of those works. It's very obvious from enormous numbers of examples that current AI systems are capable of learning much more abstract features of human culture (g…
> Here are a few thoughts I haven't formulated before: > It seems clear enough to me that training AIs on copyrighted works is typically or commonly a fair use under existing law, because the AIs can and commonly do learn non-copyrightable elements and aspects of those works. It's very obvious from enormous numbers of examples that current AI systems are capable of learning much more abstract features of human cultur…
I mean sure, maybe humans aren't "just" doing sophisticated pattern matching, but there are good reasons to suspect this is some part of what we are doing. (Even if its not implemented with back-prop).
e.g) consider the work of people like Anil Seth, who propose that our brain is basically a generative model of the world, which aims to minimize the likelihood of perceptual data. (see also: Karl Friston's free energy principle). What's up for debate is how it is structured, what priors are built in, what is the learning algorithm etc.
Anyway, for all their limitations, it seems clear that current artificial generative models can: 1. learn hierarchies of abstractions, which 2. explain the observed data in the fewest possible number of bits, and 3. generate new, novel data based on the patterns that have been learned
If you want to describe this as "just sophisticated pattern matching".. then sure I guess? But I think there's a clear qualitative difference between this and searching for code in a discrete database (which imo would not be okay).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Here are a few thoughts I haven't formulated before: > It seems clear enough to me that training AIs on copyrighted works is typically or commonly a fair use under existing law, because the AIs can and commonly do learn non-copyrightable elements and aspects of those works. It's very obvious from enormous numbers of examples that current AI systems are capable of learning much more abstract features of human cultur…
AI copyright drama is my favorite gossip these days because it can’t be reconciled until we accept that intelligence is created and held by societies, not individuals. Recent AI is a new way to exercise that intelligence, but it presents a major conflict with capitalism.
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Get Stable Diffusion to output Micky Mouse and see how far you can use that commercially without Disney stomping down on you hard . Outputting copyrighted material is a violation of copyright, period. Whether that violation is enforceable depends on your means though.
And why is Micky Mouse not in the public domain as of 2022? There lies in the root of all these questions. The system is not designed to benefit people, but rent-seeking.
It's hilarious how when I express displeasure about AI image generators looking likely to take a huge bite out of my profession of "artist" and playing extremely fast and loose with fair use, I get told that it's completely inevitable now and I should either retrain as a prompt engineer or go join the buggy whip manufacturers, but now that this is clearly violating programmer copyrights, you folks are starting to get…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It seems pretty clear to me, training an AI on copyrighted materials is not fair use. I'm not sure why you seem to think it is fair use
And it seems pretty clear to me that it is fair use, because it's not merely reproducing or creating a derivative work, but actually extracting patterns and modeling the works in a way that is intended to be used to create new and unrelated works. The fact that an occasional piece of code here and there might be reproduced verbatim is no different than e.g. Cliffs Notes occasionally quoting a passage, and Cliffs Note…
Also, it's pointless to say "But X does Y" in copyright discussions. You never know if they license the content properly or if they infringe the rights. In the Cliffs Notes case, they might not need fair use at all, because the old works are already in public domain.
Here are a few thoughts I haven't formulated before: It seems clear enough to me that training AIs on copyrighted works is typically or commonly a fair use under existing law, because the AIs can and commonly do learn non-copyrightable elements and aspects of those works. It's very obvious from enormous numbers of examples that current AI systems are capable of learning much more abstract features of human culture (g…
I really appreciated the argument in the book "The New Breed," which is that we should adapt ideas around the governance of animals to governance of ML: You can train your dog to attack random passersby, but if you do, you're a monster and ultimately responsible for the dog's actions. Likewise, you can tell Copilot to crank out code specific algorithms written by specific people, but if you do so, you're still creati…
Your argument just disallows discussing the problem while doing absolutely nothing about it.
If you train your dog to NOT attack random passersby and it still does, that dog is euthanized no matter your intentions.