81–90 of 398 posts
Having dealt with Microsoft for 30 years as both a power user and developer, "we believe in standing behind our customers when they use our products" , is a lie.
I would never want to be in a business partnership with Microsoft (as you are as a developer). I wouldn't want to be a competitor. I wouldn't want to be a lot of things.
But as a customer? Can you name specific issues you've seen which impact corporate customers?
What is the financial upside Microsoft is seeing to this that no one else seems to see?
Many businesses have not adopted Copilot because of potential legal issues.
If any of the generated code / content is copyrighted, it could result in negative impacts to the business.
For example, if Copilot generated code that is identical to code that it was trained on that was licensed under the GPL and a company included the generated code in a proprietary commercial product, then the company's product could be subject to the terms of the GPL and the company sued in court.
Assuming liability for the generated code means that Microsoft is making Copilot more attractive for businesses to adopt. More Copilot adoption means more profits for Microsoft.
Yeah is it becoming clear enough to some people yet that you can't replace software engineers, let alone really help them, with AI? This is only going to get worse, not better. Copilot is such a flawed product from the start. It's not even a matter of its ability to write "good" code. The concept is just dumb. Code is necessarily consumed by people first before it's executed by a computer in a production environment.…
For stuff like that, a lot of code can be automated. Sure it may not work right out of the box. But doing a prompt for generally what you want can speed up the process significantly.
Even beyond just generating code, there are a lot of general things that AI helps with.
Things like how if you code runs into an error, you can just ask AI what the error means as well as a possible fix. Or other questions like "What does this code do" or "where in the code case is code that manages this concept".
I've replaced most of my coding with AI, using a new IDE called Cursor AI, and I don't think I could ever go back. Mere github co-pilot is actually the old tech from 2 years ago. The new stuff is way better.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"people on this site" consists of thousands of people, including you, with a variety of opinions, and not everyone comments on every subject. You're basically complaining that not everyone believes the same thing.
While that's true, voted comments are a decent indicator of general opinions and trends. There is a reason voting works (in this context, and otherwise), you can't always give up after declaring that people have differing opinions.
It's likely that generative AI in general will be deemed fair use, due to its (generally) transformative nature. Sure, if you really coax it, you can get code or images out that look similar to existing ones, but the courts might see that generally speaking, it produces new content that has not been seen before, especially in the case of images. Google Books literally copied and pasted books to add to their online da…
> Sure, if you really coax it, you can get code or images out that look similar to existing one I'd say it is possible to produce exact data as well. Try "Provide quote from King James' Bible Genesis :1-25" with chatgpt. You'll get a verbatim text. You can get the same with things like Moby Dick, but when I typed "Provide the first five sentences of the book A Game Of Thrones" I got: Certainly! Here are the first fiv…
It's still surreal that this is considered Fair Use, and even defended relatively recently (2013). It's hard to say where the ruling will land ultimately, but there seems to be an argument that verbatim reproduction doesn't matter.
This is the key bit:
"Specifically, if a third party sues a commercial customer for copyright infringement for using Microsoft’s Copilots or the output they generate, we will defend the customer and pay the amount of any adverse judgments or settlements that result from the lawsuit, as long as the customer used the guardrails and content filters we have built into our products."
The 'we will defend' is one important part, I assume that means that you will be using their lawyers rather than your own (which they have in house and so are cheaper to use than the ones that bill you, the would be defendant by the hour).
The second part that matters is that there are conditions on how you are supposed to use the product and crucially: you will have to document that this is how you used it.
But: interesting development, clearly enterprise customers are a bit wary of accidentally engaging in copyright infringement by using the tool and that may well have slowed down adoption.
With a big asterik-- "customers... must not attempt to generate infringing materials..." It hinges on what *Microsoft* decides "attempting to generate infringing materials" means. You'd like it to mean that it only excludes use when you're doing something you know would infringe copyright, like "reproduce the entire half life 2 source code." But who knows.
If you’re using an LLM to answer questions from your company documents it may inadvertently generate pre-trained copyright material.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because now every copyright claim for GPL SW will hit the wall of Microsoft's lawyers.
People being able to get around copyright violations sounds like something that promotes the sharing of code not extinguishing it.
Copilot is a useful tool for "license-washing" code.
This is a very clever move by Microsoft. In essence they are painting a giant bullseye on their back to any lawsuits that may arise. The idea being that they have the resources to challenge them (they aren't wrong). The way AI is going I'm sure we'll see some landmark cases very soon. It is very much in Microsoft's interest to grow this market as fast as possible and be at the center of it. This removes one of the ke…
They also have money so they’re worth suing.
So this is an indemnification for damages, not a protection against being sued.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know why it is just GPL people talk about. MPL, Apache, MIT licenses all have additional terms beyond a basic public domain equivalent license. None of those terms are being respected.
If you upload it to github, you give microsoft extra rights above the license you choose. I'm not sure they are bound by the license.