That's like saying a plumber just sells parts that other people made
Except that a plumber buys them first. For money.
Copilot sells code other people wrote
81–90 of 838 posts
Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
So when you google a problem and it leads you to a code snippet that solves it that just happens to be OSS, you immediately scrub your brain and pretend you never saw it and instead instead come up with your own completely independent solution after the fact?
Google usage is outright forbidden for work in institutions that care about intellectual property rights, so the brain scrub issue is just arguing at the wrong level. If you're googling solutions around you're already not taking intellectual property seriously enough to care about what happens after you lift ideas around.
This is interesting. Is the internet completely cut off? Do they have internal libraries of documentation for third party stuff they are using (paper? digital?) Do you have any example institutions, or what domain they are working in? Thanks.
Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem may not be boring. Typing boilerplate code is. I work on games as hobby. Sometimes I implement mechanics requiring vector math. Working on mechanics is interesting. Writing down math is not. Copilot helps with later.
Then another hypothesis: you probably haven't found the right tools for it yet. I find myself writing biolerplate mostly around some obscure system framework calls (iOS/macOS), but that's rather rare. But even OS API's and frameworks do evolve over time into requiring less boilerplate. Just take the evolution of CoreAudio, the modern Swift interface is so much better. So at the end of the day it's about the tools and…
Maybe github copilot is the right tool.
Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote
#84Github Copilot is selling code other people wrote as much as the author of this thread is profiting from words other people invented.
Absolute nonsense.
Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote
#85Pretty soon the world is going to come to realize art/creation is just blending, incrementing and repurposing prior art. No book, painting, codebase, sonnet, design is theft-less. The art is the space reduction, otherwise we’d just bruteforce away.
This idea has been around for a while - why... "pretty soon"? And I'm sure I couldn't disagree with you more. Or are 'influence' and 'theft' the same now?
The idea has been around a while, but the legal system doesn't reflect it.
I don't think it will any time soon though.
Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote
#86>Hector Martin: If you use Copilot, you are basically playing Russian Roulette that the random mashup of existing, copyrighted, hegerogenously licensed code that you get out of it qualifies as an original work, mostly by chance. Or that nobody will ever sue you otherwise.
Well, that's already the case with Stack Overflow copypasta enterprise code. If anything, use of Copilot would be an improvement...
Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote
#87I guess the question is where you draw the line between a derivative work and "learnt by an AI algorithm"
If the media copyright industries and their ContentID is anything to go by, it doesn't matter. It's all derivative.
Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote
#88Isn't that what Web2 is all about? Someone creates content for free, and companies monetize it.
The real Web3 is companies sue original creator for infringement.
Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote
#89Can I suggest a hypothesis that if you find Copilot useful it means the problem you are solving is a boring one? I might be wrong of course.
I disagree. Most large projects, software or otherwise, use existing parts. If you design an innovative device you'll still use some standard components like chips, memory modules etc.
There's already a way to quickly solve the boring parts in development - libraries which were built and licensed around that purpose. But Copilot passes you code of unknown origin, with unknown license terms and no information about how close it is to an existing codebase. It's like a person trying to sell you Macbooks for a hundred bucks per unit but you don't know where they came from and who made the holiday photos stored on the harddrive.
Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote
#90I mean, if it's autocompleting a fairly simple line, and can do that because it's analysed a lot of lines, I don't really see that as "stealing anything". If you are using it to write whole complex functions thatare the same as other people's, I guess that is copying. But if you do the second thing you are not a great dev, and would have probably ended up copy pasting it anyway. I think the first use case is far more…
The when Oracle won its copyright lawsuit against google it was because of a 8 line bound checking utility function.