111–120 of 209 posts
> We already know that Copilot as it stands is unacceptable and unjust [...]. Activists wonder if there isn't something fundamentally unfair about a proprietary software company building a service off their work. > We will read the submitted white papers, and we will publish ones that we think help elucidate the problem . Doesn't give me hope they're aiming for unbiased opinion. I would be very surprised if any of th…
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> My explanation will not be popular here on HN How is this better than ’bring on the downvotes’? Moving on, I’ll put this to you: you claim training a ML model against copyrighted text is in violation of the ‘permission’ granted by the rights holder. However, flip this on its head for a moment – that’s basically all human brains do. Clearly, the greatest writers of our time haven’t written their works in a vacuum. R…
I don't agree to your premise. Humans can consume creative works and be influenced, this is not in question. Unless one is an impressionist, they aren't going to try to recreate exactly the works done by the artists they have been influenced by. Even if an artist does something inspired/influenced by, they have pretty much stated that. Musicians cite prior bands, as do writers, painters, etc all credit those influenc…
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Copilot was trained on leaked internal Microsoft code that's on github at the moment. Anyway, everyone seems perfectly ok with training langauge models on copyright text.
If a trained language model exactly reproduces copyrighted text, is there any question about whether copyright still applies?
The ignorance in this comment section is already giving me an aneurysm. Software licenses matter. Copyright matters. If megacorps like Microsoft can sue people into oblivion for violating their copyright terms, people can sue Microsoft into oblivion for violating theirs. I don't use MS Github, I have no skin in the game, but I hope there is at-least a $1000 award to every instance of AGPL and GPL license violation be…
If anyone thinks they don't, ask why Microsoft didn't train Copilot on their Windows, Office, or Azure source repositories.
This is the FSF that put Richard Stallman back on the board? No thanks.
Ahh someone who can't read for themselves, eh? go away
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My explanation will not be popular here on HN, but I'm never one to shy away. Especially when asked directly. Buying a book, buying an audio CD, or buying a DVD/Blu-ray is granting the holder permission to read,listen,view that product as a single instance. You can lend them out, but that's all you're really allowed to do with them. The text,audio/video is not owned by you to do with as you please. People obviously d…
> My explanation will not be popular here on HN How is this better than ’bring on the downvotes’? Moving on, I’ll put this to you: you claim training a ML model against copyrighted text is in violation of the ‘permission’ granted by the rights holder. However, flip this on its head for a moment – that’s basically all human brains do. Clearly, the greatest writers of our time haven’t written their works in a vacuum. R…
Also, you're taking the machine learning metaphor literally. AI models do not "learn", they're just statistical models, they don't understand anything. There is no comparison to human learning that isn't superficial or metaphorical.
The real question is how Copilot is any different than a compiler, or lossy encoding or compression.
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If a trained language model exactly reproduces copyrighted text, is there any question about whether copyright still applies?
This is a useless hypothetical, no language models do that
[1] https://twitter.com/mitsuhiko/status/1410886329924194309
> It requires running software that is not free/libre (Visual Studio, or parts of Visual Studio Code) A little nitpicky, but the only proprietary part it requires is the plugin itself, not the IDE—Copilot runs just fine with the Free build of VS Code compiled from source from GitHub, after flipping a switch to enable WIP APIs.
I think you are wrong: https://vscodium.com/
I did it two days ago, installing the Copilot plugin in a Free build of VS Code provided by my distro.
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> The big GPLv3 push and development - plenty of attacks on folks actually shipping product on GPLv2 and building communities around that model (which keeps software free but allows users of the software to do what they want with it pretty much including putting in devices that are locked down - cars / tivo's etc). The users of the software are the owners of the devices. The distributors are the ones locking down the…
GPL used to be targeted at DEVELOPERS of software - the share and share alike model. These developers would in some cases use the GPL'ed software in locked down devices (many / most android devices are pretty locked down - but developers contribute to a GPL kernel). So yes, FSF created GPLv3 to focus on USERS freedoms, but the users are not writing the software - so it remains the devs who pick licenses.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Free_Software_Definition#T...