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Yep. The only reason it hasn't been utterly dogpiled by lawyers is that far fewer people care about code than other forms of IP. If I made an AI assistant calle
by causi 4y ago
Yep. The only reason it hasn't been utterly dogpiled by lawyers is that far fewer people care about code than other forms of IP. If I made an AI assistant called PhotoStar to help with digital art and it just attaches Big Bird's face onto a character in my children's book I'm going to get sued. "Hey now, I just hit paste, the software pressed copy by itself" is not going to hold up.
- shadowgovt 4y agoBut if you made DALL-E and it just remixes images sourced from a broad scan of the Internet, filtered through several layers of machine learning indirection, you're all good.
- causi 4y agoSure, if it's remixed to the point where most people don't go "hey that's Big Bird!" CoPilot doesn't, or at least doesn't always, like when it just copied Quake's fast inverse square code with the verbatim comments including profanity. Using CoPilot to create commercial code opens the coder to significant liability if there's enough money at stake.
- bastardoperator 4y agoOr the fact that you grant GitHub an implicit license as outlined in the ToS.
- eropple 4y agoGitHub has never asked for representation to provide an unlimited-rights license to GitHub themselves for any purpose. Further, the person posting GPLed code to GitHub is not necessarily the only or sole copyright holder, and GitHub has never represented that there was a problem with this.
- causi 4y agoGitHub isn't liable. That's been established in court with regards to training AIs. Who is liable is you who may or may not have the legal right to use the code CoPilot spits out for you.
- visarga 4y agoThis has been explained many times - you can check word for word the output is original. All it takes is a bloom filter trained on the Copilot training set and an ngram extractor.
- causi 4y agoYes, and you'll be fine if you do. The problem is you might not bother.
- omginternets 4y agoAlpha-equivalence be damned!
- bee_rider 4y agoIt seems like this space will open up all sorts of interesting novel legal questions. It is possible to provide CoPilot with a sequence of inputs that produces some of the input, which was copyrighted. Let's say you want to help people violate copyright, so you as a third party distribute a script that provides that sequence of inputs. Who's violating the copyright there? Alternatively -- it is apparently legal to produce a clean-room implementation that duplicates a copyright implementation. Supposing you were to use a tool like CoPilot, which has just been trained on that copyright implementation. Is your room still clean? You might even be able to get it to spit out identical functions! Or, if you have a ML algorithm which has been trained on leaked closed source code, and it is sufficiently over-fitted as to just provide the source code given the filename or the original binary, who is violating copyright when this tool is used? If it is just the end user, then this seems like a really convenient way to launder leaked closed source code.
- rasz 4y agohttps://i.postimg.cc/0QhH9bS8/dallemini-2022-6-22-0-48-28.png https://i.postimg.cc/0QhH9bS8/dallemini-2022-6-22-0-48-28.pn...
- twic 4y agoFortunately, it can also generate high-quality completely novel characters, every bit as lovable and unthreatening as Big Bird: https://imgur.com/a/ppeclPL https://imgur.com/a/ppeclPL