Copyright related stuff is annoying. I cant see why any one would care. If you publish something to the public domain I dont understand why you get rights to your content that you can self declare. Its completely ludicrous and only works at the corporate money level because they have liability and resources to sue. I wish people would use a little more common sense and understand the words ‘public domain’. Regardless of what people say, I can let you know that no one really cares about copyright and in terms of AI, its an unmovable mountain. Good luck wasting time on figuring out an issue that provides nothing to humanity
Microsoft will assume liability for legal copyright risks of Copilot
101–110 of 398 posts
Re: Microsoft will assume liability for legal copyright risks of Copilot
#102Yeah 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.…
I think that you are underestimating how much software engineering work is easy CRUD web development. 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,…
Uhh yeah so anyway... in the real world, the frontend is the most volatile part. You're not automating that away either so long as there exist requirements from non-coders.
As for the API side of things, CRUD only looks easy when lots of hard work has been put into it. I guess you're advocating for monolithic data, but that's not really CRUD. That's just lazy and bad.
Re: Microsoft will assume liability for legal copyright risks of Copilot
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ah, so for copyright reasons.
This isn't really copyright - more the microeconomics of losing market share/control. Specifically, I think they are less concerned with (say) specific Excel code leaking than with the knock on effects of a cheap perfect substitute.
> Specifically, I think they are less concerned with (say) specific Excel code leaking than with the knock on effects of a cheap perfect substitute.
Is there any evidence that an LLM could actually generate a perfect substitute for excel solely through prompting if only the excel source was in the training data? I hypothesize that designing a prompt for an LLM that captures all of Excel's properties would be comparable in difficulty to reimplementing the functionality without an LLM.
Re: Microsoft will assume liability for legal copyright risks of Copilot
#104Isn't this extremely gamable? Find someones IP, split the gains.
Re: Microsoft will assume liability for legal copyright risks of Copilot
#105It used to be "Embrace, extend, and extinguish": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
Now it is "Train, Task, Transform, and Transfer":
Train - Feed copyrighted works into machine learning model or similar system
Task - Machine learning model is tasked with an input prompt
Transform - Machine learning model generates hybrid output derived from copyrighted works, but usually not directly traceable to a given work in the training set
Transfer - Generated output provides the essence of the copyrighted works, but is legally untraceable to the originals
Re: Microsoft will assume liability for legal copyright risks of Copilot
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think that you are underestimating how much software engineering work is easy CRUD web development. 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,…
Uhh yeah so anyway... in the real world, the frontend is the most volatile part. You're not automating that away either so long as there exist requirements from non-coders. As for the API side of things, CRUD only looks easy when lots of hard work has been put into it. I guess you're advocating for monolithic data, but that's not really CRUD. That's just lazy and bad.
> in the real world
I've worked at FAANG companies before making the standard X00,000$ total comp on projects with millions of users. I know how development at top companies "in the real world" works.
> the frontend is the most volatile part
Ok, whatever. Fortunately there are more things out there in software dev than just the one specific usecase you brought up. And its useful for that.
> I guess you're advocating
No, I am saying that as of right now, AI is a tool that speeds up development process significantly. And I am not talking about just generating a lot of stuff at once.
There are hybrid approaches that a human can use, to use AI, as well as code themselves that are useful.
And one specific example, would be that you can instantly look up an error and take suggestions for fixing it to get ideas.
Re: Microsoft will assume liability for legal copyright risks of Copilot
#107With 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.
> It hinges on what Microsoft decides "attempting to generate infringing materials" means. No, ultimately, it hinges on what a court enforcing the commitment believes “attempting to generate infringing materials” means. (OTOH. it also means Microsoft ha an even bigger incentive to use its lobbying power to assure that the law is such that liability rarely occurs with the use of these tools.)
I think their ML teams built a decent copyright filter and now they "productise" it.
Re: Microsoft will assume liability for legal copyright risks of Copilot
#108It'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…
Will you indemnify those that follow your advice? Because 'transformative' is a pretty dangerous word to use in this context.
> Will you indemnify those that follow your advice?
I strongly feel that this is a terrible metric for comments on the internet.
First, the person you’re replying to has nothing to gain and a lot to lose by saying "yes".
Second, it invites silly corner case nitpicking. Their comment is written in reasonable plain English for other users reading plain English. It’s not a legal contract, and so leaves lots of loopholes. Sure, you could create a likely non-transformative LLM by training it on nothing but the text of Harry Potter with fitness measured by how accurately it exactly reproduces the complete text of Harry Potter, but that’s not what reasonable people are doing with LLMs.
Re: Microsoft will assume liability for legal copyright risks of Copilot
#109It'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
What if you train it only on my huge repo of GPL code? You are just remixing my code.
Now you maybe think "let me train on 2 different devs GPL code", the remixed code will probably be 50-50 and you can get away with it ?
If the 2 number is too small then tell me what the number N should be ? From how many people you need to "steal" code , mix it and the output is "original" ?
Edit: my opinion is that AI should be fair, if you train it on open source then model should also be open source and output should also be open source.
Re: Microsoft will assume liability for legal copyright risks of Copilot
#110It'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…
I just want to highlight that this a very US centric view. A user of copilot in the EU might be confronted with a totally different legal regime. (No fair use per se, no copyright transferability, ...). It seems quite a bold move as being an internationally active company if there is no small print...