Yet they don't feed their own closed source assets to Copilot for training...why not?
[deleted]
Microsoft will assume liability for legal copyright risks of Copilot
131–140 of 398 posts
Re: Microsoft will assume liability for legal copyright risks of Copilot
#132A very relevant and recent posting: GitHub Copilot and open source laundering https://drewdevault.com/2022/06/23/Copilot-GPL-washing.html Previously on HN, in case you missed it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31848433
[deleted]
Re: Microsoft will assume liability for legal copyright risks of Copilot
#133Re: Microsoft will assume liability for legal copyright risks of Copilot
#134Yet they don't feed their own closed source assets to Copilot for training...why not?
Closed source != source available. If you put your code out there in the world it is fair game for training, because you can't stop someone from reading and understanding it. Microsoft chooses not to make its proprietary code public, hence it is not available for training.
They have the ability to feed their closed source to Copilot for training without exposing the source to everyone directly, given the relationship. They choose not to.
Re: Microsoft will assume liability for legal copyright risks of Copilot
#135Yeah 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.…
[deleted]
Re: Microsoft will assume liability for legal copyright risks of Copilot
#136> Microsoft will assume liability for legal copyright risks of Copilot Extinguish.
[deleted]
Re: Microsoft will assume liability for legal copyright risks of Copilot
#137Meanwhile they strike deals with news agencies to use their content to train on... This is of going to be a hard fight, but I really hope this ends up costing MS.
[deleted]
Re: Microsoft will assume liability for legal copyright risks of Copilot
#138It'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…
> It's likely that generative AI in general will be deemed fair use
Except that “fair use” is mostly an American thing. In many other jurisdictions (especially those with of civil law) there's such a wide principle, and there's only specific laws allowing some explicit kinds of use of copyrighted material that the law allows. In those jurisdiction, most uses of generative AI trained on copyrighted material are, more likely than not, illegal at least until the legislator actually changes the law.
Re: Microsoft will assume liability for legal copyright risks of Copilot
#139I've received a lot of flak for this answer in other communities, but, if a statistical model is producing purely derivative works using a mathematical model that's basically a next best token predictor, is it really "stealing"?
Is it "stealing" to have a working understanding of the next best token, or even simply the token that shows up the most often (e.g. on GitHub)?
I'm sure that the argument could be made that all AI should be illegal as all ideas worth having have already been had, and all text worth writing has already been written, but, where would that leave us?
(e.g. your function for converting a string from uppercase to lowercase will probably look like a function that someone else on Earth has written, and the same goes for your error handling code, your state of the art technique for centering a div, etc.)
Re: Microsoft will assume liability for legal copyright risks of Copilot
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> 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 th…
You guys aren't really getting my question. Duh, of course Microsoft makes revenue when they have more Copilot customers. But taking on such a huge external liability for a $30 subscription product just doesn't make sense. Even if it gets 1 million subscribers, it would represent 0.1% of Microsoft's overall revenue. Software lawsuits can become multi-billion dollar expenses, and targeting Microsoft instead of random…
>> Even if it gets 1 million subscribers, it would represent 0.1% of Microsoft's overall revenue.
Microsoft is going all in. They want to have hundreds of millions of subscribers. They want everyone who is using Visual Studio Code for a business to use Copilot. With enough uptake, it could be a billion dollar business.
>> Software lawsuits can become multi-billion dollar expenses
Microsoft has teams of top lawyers and they are rolling the dice that there will not be enough lawsuits to justify the risk.
>> My confusion is more over the balance of revenue and expenses than just "derp, me no understand why do companies do things to make money, derp"
If you want more precise answers, ask more precise questions.