731–740 of 1001 posts
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…
While the moral and legal discussions here are interesting and worth exploring, I find this text hyperbolic. Its premise is that the main way that people currently interact with open-source projects is by digging into their source code, copy-pasting away a snippet of code that solves a particular problem, and then of course giving the authors the required attribution. This is far from the truth. The main usage of mos…
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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
> I'm not sure why you seem to think it is fair use I think OP explains clearly, in many paragraphs, why it's fair use. That's literally what their whole post is about.
Actually, what the OP said is, "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". The rest of the eight paragraphs had nothing to do with fair use.
It's honestly a ridiculous argument to say that learning one non-copyrighted thing means that the regurgitation of another copyrighted thing, after stripping the license, will magically be fair use.
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I use Copilot all the time and I’ve never once used it to generate a whole prepackaged function that’s more than maybe three lines. So no, I don’t benefit from its reproducing other people’s code at all. Tell me you don’t use Copilot without telling me about it.
> Tell me you don’t use Copilot without telling me about it. You don't accept arguments against the use of Copilot from people unless they... use it? That's a nifty way to ignore any and all criticism of Copilot, or indeed any discussion about any ethical issue ever.
I tried telling that it requires a credit card number to try it but he didn't believe me… I guess the thought that non-microsoft employees have to pay for microsoft stuff didn't occur.
It would be sad if someone succeeded in shutting down CoPilot for this kind of copyright stuff. It is genuinely useful. I don't care that it reproduces copyrighted content. The only way you can get it to do that is to bait it with the function names of functions that have already been copy and pasted thousands of times onto GitHub without proper licenses. Luckily, someone will probably come out with a "renegade" vers…
> It would be sad if someone succeeded in shutting down CoPilot for this kind of copyright stuff. It is genuinely useful. I don't care that it reproduces copyrighted content. Sure — in the same way that hacking into a competitor's GitHub account and copying their private source code is "genuinely useful" to you. As the person benefitting from unlawfully using their source code, of course you wouldn't care that it rep…
It's always interesting to see the buzz that occurs when Copilot is brought up as a topic. This place is called "HackerNews", yet routinely people forget that a "hacker" is somebody using technology to overcome novel problems. Doesn't GitHub Copilot fall into this category? Why is there such an outcry over a technology that has been in the public's hands for less than a year? I'm almost certain that the team responsi…
At the very least add a comment in the generated snipped where the code originates from. That won't suffice in all cases but it's disingenuous to profit from others' work without any credit/permission.
It would be sad if someone succeeded in shutting down CoPilot for this kind of copyright stuff. It is genuinely useful. I don't care that it reproduces copyrighted content. The only way you can get it to do that is to bait it with the function names of functions that have already been copy and pasted thousands of times onto GitHub without proper licenses. Luckily, someone will probably come out with a "renegade" vers…
> It would be sad if someone succeeded in shutting down CoPilot for this kind of copyright stuff. It enables the large scale theft of code. It completely ignores licenses. There are plenty of open source licenses that allow code use with proper attribution yet Copilot doesn't (and probably can't) figure a way to comply with all of them. Copilot, as the article suggests, is a marketing stunt. To me it's more than that…
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Copilot wouldn't be shut down or neutered because "a few vocal people" protested against it. It would be because it's illegal and violates the licenses, desires, and intentions of the thousands of workers who wrote the code in its corpus. You act like Microsoft is trying to do a public service and people are angry about it. The reality is that they're taking billions of hours of work and using it to build a product t…
> If they re-released Copilot as FOSS, a lot of the valid criticisms would evaporate. That changes nothing at all. A FOSS license is, in a legal sense, no different then a proprietary one. If it’s illegal it’s illegal regardless of whether it’s FOSS.
It would be sad if someone succeeded in shutting down CoPilot for this kind of copyright stuff. It is genuinely useful. I don't care that it reproduces copyrighted content. The only way you can get it to do that is to bait it with the function names of functions that have already been copy and pasted thousands of times onto GitHub without proper licenses. Luckily, someone will probably come out with a "renegade" vers…
> It is genuinely useful. I don't care that it reproduces copyrighted content. Plagiarizing is already understood to be a genuinely useful practice.
Copying a passage here and there when making a new work? I don't think the courts have ever ruled that plagiarism.