GitHub is sued, and we may learn something about Creative Commons licensing

As I see it, the only leg GitHub can possibly stand on is the “fair use” exemption of copyright law—that the license is irrelevant, because they weren’t using it under that license.

So then you get to the last paragraph of the article, and the “fair use” claim is finally mentioned—as something the plaintiffs seem to be seeking to avoid bringing into it because that would make things messy. But… GitHub’s defence must be “fair use”, I can see no other response. Yes, the plaintiffs “chose to focus on something that is beyond factual dispute”, but how are GitHub ever going to do anything other than bring fair use into it? So I don’t see how they could expect it to “still provide the same damages” without bringing fair use into it. (And I can’t imagine GitHub will settle for anything other that total vindication here—even settlement would doom Copilot.)

Returning to the title: I cannot imagine any way that We May Learn Something About Creative Commons Licensing from this suit. About the interactions between copyright law and machine learning, maybe. But about CC-*, GPL, Apache-2.0, MIT, whatever? Nah, there’s nothing interesting about them in the suit, because if they were involved, it’d be cut and dried.

Yes, when you train on a human generated corpus you're going to get an interpolative AI. But when you train on a dataset generated by AI, you can surpass human level.

AlphaZero started, as the name says, from zero. No examples of how we play the game. In just three days of self-play it surpassed the best human. How was that possible? We got a 2000 year head start, larger brains, and many players, not just one model. AlphaZero did it by creating its own training data.

Here is an example of using code language models for this kind of dataset-creation by play.

> Evolution through Large Models

https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.08896

By the way, GPT-3 and chatGPT are not simple interpolative language models. They have also been trained on many tasks, problems, and codes, which is the kind of data that will awaken the skills of the model to a whole new level. What I am saying is that we can auto-generate more problem data and increase their skills.

The fact that Microsoft is wary of providing it with things like the Windows source code says all we need to know about how much it can be trusted.

I mean in essence Github is a library; they did have a license to a point to do with the code as they pleased, but they then started to create a derivative work in the form of an AI, without correctly crediting the source materials.

I mean I think they made a gamble on it; as far as I'm aware, AI training sets were yet unchallenged in a court of law, so legally not fully defined yet. These lawsuits - and the ones (if any) aimed at the image generators, using CC artwork from e.g. artstation - will lay the legal groundwork for future AI / ML development.