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Like it or not, it seems like: * most people here are unhappy * most laywers will say it's fine (it very probably passed MS ones) I can understand that. Copy

Like it or not, it seems like: * most people here are unhappy * most laywers will say it's fine (it very probably passed MS ones) I can understand that. Copyright was not created with AI/ML in mind, even as a random stray thought. Those were not even words at the time. So the question is: If we change the law and require trained algorithms to only work on licenses that permit this, and to output the "minimum common license" somehow, what are the repercussion on other application of copyright? Because the consensus here seems to be that this looks a lot like a de-licensor with extra steps

mrh0057 5y ago
There is nothing intelligent about this. What they did is a context aware search and trying to claim that not what this is. If it was just used as a search engine and people weren’t using the results or following the license of the original source, then it would fine. There has been so much of a hype of machine learning people likely have a false impression of what it is.
- Ajedi32 5y ago
  I've seen this claim that Copilot is "just a search engine" repeated in multiple places now. It's wrong; as anyone familiar with any of the GPT variants or other similar autoregressive language models can attest. Copilot isn't a search engine any more than any other language model is. It can sometimes output data from the training set verbatim as most AI models do from time to time, but that is the exception not the rule. Whether modern autoregressive language models can be called "inteligent" is debatable, but they're certainly far beyond what you'd get from a simple search engine.
  - mrh0057 5y ago
    First off I said it was a context aware search which it is. It uses past training data to predict what you would type next based on the context ie the code around it. It’s no more intelligent than alpha go. Intelligent AI is considered to be a general ai which no one is even close to building yet. Since neural networks are pattern matching based on the training input it is a derivative work of the training set. It says it right in first thing that comes up in auto regressive language models use the training input plus context to predict what the next word would be. Now here where the fun begins if they try this in court. If you claim it’s generating new work then who owns the copyright? You may not realize how big of a deal this is but there was a court case you can lookup where a monkey took a selfy and the person who camera the monkey used tried to claim copyright and lost.
nonameiguess 5y ago
Standard caveat that I'm not a lawyer by any stretch, but this seems settled by the existence of text-generation assistants trained on the full corpus of human writing ever digitized, much of which is also copyrighted or licensed in some way. That is clearly fine, as training text generation programs on existing text has been standard for decades. Selling a product based on GPT-3 is fine and the law has not come after anyone trying to do that. The more questionable line is if someone happens to inadvertently reproduce entire paragraphs of Twilight: Breaking Dawn word-for-word using GPT-3 and then sells it, that might be a violation even if they didn't realize they were doing it. Copilot is the same thing. Creating a product that makes suggestions that it learned from reading other people's work is fine. Now if you write code using Copilot and happen to reproduce some part of glibc down to the variable names, and don't release it under GPL, you might be in trouble. But Copilot won't be.
- dlisboa 5y ago
  I don't know if even copying small pieces of code verbatim should mean anything. Another example is the photo generation ML algorithms that exist. They generate photos of random "people" (imaginary AI-generated people) by using actual photos of real people. If one eye or nose is verbatim copied from the actual photo to the generated photo, is the entire output now illegal or plagiarism? One might argue it's just an eye, the rest of the picture is completely different, the original photographer doesn't need to grant permission for that use. Any analogies we make with this, be it text generation, image generation, even video generation, seems like it falls under the same conclusion: so far we've thought all of this was perfectly fine. I don't see why code-generation is any different. A function is just a tiny part of a project. It's not necessarily more important than the composition of a photograph, or a phrase in a book. We as programmers assign meaning to it, we know it takes time to craft it and it might be unique, but likewise a novelist may have spent weeks on a specific 10 word phrase that was reproduced verbatim, in a text of 500 pages. The more I look at this the more it seems copyright, and IP law in general, is the main problem. Copyleft and OS licenses wouldn't be needed if it wasn't for the aggressive nature of IP law. I don't see the need to defend far more strict interpretations of it because it has now touched our field.

mrh0057 5y ago

There is nothing intelligent about this. What they did is a context aware search and trying to claim that not what this is. If it was just used as a search engine and people weren’t using the results or following the license of the original source, then it would fine. There has been so much of a hype of machine learning people likely have a false impression of what it is.

Ajedi32 5y ago
I've seen this claim that Copilot is "just a search engine" repeated in multiple places now. It's wrong; as anyone familiar with any of the GPT variants or other similar autoregressive language models can attest. Copilot isn't a search engine any more than any other language model is. It can sometimes output data from the training set verbatim as most AI models do from time to time, but that is the exception not the rule. Whether modern autoregressive language models can be called "inteligent" is debatable, but they're certainly far beyond what you'd get from a simple search engine.
- mrh0057 5y ago
  First off I said it was a context aware search which it is. It uses past training data to predict what you would type next based on the context ie the code around it. It’s no more intelligent than alpha go. Intelligent AI is considered to be a general ai which no one is even close to building yet. Since neural networks are pattern matching based on the training input it is a derivative work of the training set. It says it right in first thing that comes up in auto regressive language models use the training input plus context to predict what the next word would be. Now here where the fun begins if they try this in court. If you claim it’s generating new work then who owns the copyright? You may not realize how big of a deal this is but there was a court case you can lookup where a monkey took a selfy and the person who camera the monkey used tried to claim copyright and lost.

nonameiguess 5y ago

Standard caveat that I'm not a lawyer by any stretch, but this seems settled by the existence of text-generation assistants trained on the full corpus of human writing ever digitized, much of which is also copyrighted or licensed in some way. That is clearly fine, as training text generation programs on existing text has been standard for decades. Selling a product based on GPT-3 is fine and the law has not come after anyone trying to do that. The more questionable line is if someone happens to inadvertently reproduce entire paragraphs of Twilight: Breaking Dawn word-for-word using GPT-3 and then sells it, that might be a violation even if they didn't realize they were doing it. Copilot is the same thing. Creating a product that makes suggestions that it learned from reading other people's work is fine. Now if you write code using Copilot and happen to reproduce some part of glibc down to the variable names, and don't release it under GPL, you might be in trouble. But Copilot won't be.

dlisboa 5y ago
I don't know if even copying small pieces of code verbatim should mean anything. Another example is the photo generation ML algorithms that exist. They generate photos of random "people" (imaginary AI-generated people) by using actual photos of real people. If one eye or nose is verbatim copied from the actual photo to the generated photo, is the entire output now illegal or plagiarism? One might argue it's just an eye, the rest of the picture is completely different, the original photographer doesn't need to grant permission for that use. Any analogies we make with this, be it text generation, image generation, even video generation, seems like it falls under the same conclusion: so far we've thought all of this was perfectly fine. I don't see why code-generation is any different. A function is just a tiny part of a project. It's not necessarily more important than the composition of a photograph, or a phrase in a book. We as programmers assign meaning to it, we know it takes time to craft it and it might be unique, but likewise a novelist may have spent weeks on a specific 10 word phrase that was reproduced verbatim, in a text of 500 pages. The more I look at this the more it seems copyright, and IP law in general, is the main problem. Copyleft and OS licenses wouldn't be needed if it wasn't for the aggressive nature of IP law. I don't see the need to defend far more strict interpretations of it because it has now touched our field.