So what? Anti progressive luddites, it makes my blood boil.
When OSS code gets ripped off and people are mad: "Anti progressive luddites". When closed source code leaks: "Copyright infringement by criminals". What's the difference? There's plenty the world could learn from the source code of Windows or GTA6 and having access to the source of these large projects would move society forward faster. So why are OSS contributors protecting their rights "Anti progressive luddites",…
You're assuming the person you replied to holds both those opinions.
Nah, you're definitely the few. Its not a random sample, but an informal survey of my coworkers found no one who would care and generally positive sentiment. The people who comment on something are disproportionately those who care a great deal.
My point was not that those critical of CoPilot are in a majority, it is that our perspective is important because our labour is what makes copilot possible.
our labour is what makes copilot possible
What proportion of its capability is derived from the labor of people who don't like it? I get your point about feeling like an unwilling contributor while github/MS harvests revenue from people who like it. But there's an implication here of being in a critical majority, which I am not convinced is the case.
There are lots of comments arguing for or against Copilot on a value judgment, and having an opinion on it being ethical or legal, etc isn't going to be the same for everyone. But I think regardless of where you stand, there should be some sort of legal ruling to clarify the gray areas that Butterick breaks down.
Agreed, but I also hate how so much of our substantive law basically has to be created by the courts because (a) many of our legislatures, especially at the federal level, have become more and more non-functional, and (b) IMO legislatures are especially bad at implementing technical legislation. I think there is a good, fundamental legal/societal question of how copyright should apply to AI output. I just don't think…
There are lots of comments arguing for or against Copilot on a value judgment, and having an opinion on it being ethical or legal, etc isn't going to be the same for everyone. But I think regardless of where you stand, there should be some sort of legal ruling to clarify the gray areas that Butterick breaks down.
Butterick sneakily asserts over and over that Copilot is simply retrieving code from Github ("Copilot's whizzy code-retrieval methods", "Copilot is merely a convenient alternative interface to a large corpus of open-source code", "our work is stashed in a big code library in the sky called Copilot"). This verbiage seems specifically chosen to present a misleading picture of what Copilot is and does. Copilot is a set…
Correct. He's written a great opening argument, as long as you're the sort of person who likes speeches. To me it was full of tricks to prime the reader into accepting his premises as axiomatic, from nuanced rhetoric to pull quotes with attractive color gradients. In my view his actual motivation is the typical 30% cut of any class action settlement that goes to the lawyers, and he sees a lucrative opportunity to combine two skillsets.
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…
Nothing is in the publics hands; they have taken the public data and given back nothing but a blackbox that you pay money for. They don't even trust the thing to train it on their own code, yet their boss is over here telling us they are "learning". It's a damned insult.
I won't shed any tears for Microsoft if people liberate or reverse engineer the model weights.
> It is learning from it just as a human reader would I don't see how that invalidates the copyright/license argument. So, instead of just a straight up license violation it's a license violation via plagiarism. That argument wouldn't hold up even if it was a human that caused the violation. You can't just paraphrase someones licensed work and then lie about looking at and pretend you made it yourself, which is basic…
> You can't just paraphrase someones licensed work Yes you can. That's exactly why you paraphrased it instead of copying verbatim. At the fringes, your transformation may not be enough to overcome the requirements, but that's an exception. Nearly all paraphrasing is legal by default.
Totally disagree. Training is fair use. It is akin to learning. Code licenses do not restrict you from reading or learning. ML training needs to be fair use of copyrighted works, or most machine learning and AI projects will be impossible.
You are assuming that "training" and "learning" in ML means exactly the same thing as "training" and "learning" in humans. It doesn't. The processes are completely different, with only an apparent resemblance.
But the real question is why should fair use include both human and machine type of learning?
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 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…
Seems like 'learning' and 'producing something with that learned information' are two different things. I can 'learn' all day long from copyrighted materials. I'm not violating anything, because I've not produced a copy that would be distributed or used. First/knee-jerk reaction to that above - no doubt there's more nuance buried someplace.