5 ms·

It's absolutely fine to allow humans to do that while prohibiting (commercialized) AI to do the same thing.

spupe 4y ago
I don't see why that should be the case in this particular scenario, or what benefit is gained from that. Could you elaborate?
- jhugo 4y ago
  Could you elaborate on why you think a computer program and a person should be treated the same way in this respect? We can take as self-evident that a human is capable of reading about something, conceptualising it, and then writing something completely new with the knowledge they have gained. I think it's also pretty uncontroversial that the primitive "AI" we currently have is nowhere near the level of even an average human at these things, and thus we can't just blindly assume it is conceptualising rather than copying. Copilot regularly produces verbatim copies of existing code when working on non-trivial things. Forget about the "AI" label: Copilot is just a complex computer program, that takes code from other people and inserts various permutations of it into your editor, whilst ignoring the license of that code.
  - spupe 4y ago
    I think it's best if we sidestep these big conceptual questions about what cognition or creativity really are. It's hard to find agreement, and perhaps it is not necessary to do so. My position is that if a person hired in a company can currently use Google, Stack Overflow and GitHub to help develop their custom scripts, and no moral or copyright issues are infringed (ie, you don't try to say you came up with it on your own, and you use only enough that it is clearly fair use), then I think an AI should be able to assist in that task. There is no need to complicate things by legislating what the AI is doing and what Google is doing, as they are very similar things and in fact even use similar methods.
    - trention 4y ago
      You are saying that the AI should be treated the same way as a person would regarding its 'output'. I disagree. This is a conceptual disagreement and you cannot just sweep under the rug "what cognition or creativity really are". At the end, when in several (2-5) years we start seeing structural unemployment emerging because of AI deployments, this will be resolved by the legal system, most likely by some sort of partial prohibition of training/monetizing such systems.
      - spupe 4y ago
        I think I still have not understood your argument. Are you saying that you are afraid that AIs will become too powerful and cause unemployment, and therefore we should regulate them now before they do so? Many people are worried about this, which is why there is a lot of debate about minimum income programs. However, at present, what Copilot is doing is similar to what Google does, and it is certainly not going to replace devs any time soon. Personally, I think we should exploit technology to its fullest, and the only reason we can have this conversation is because in the past, we haven't given too much consideration about the mailmen, secretaries, delivery workers and everyone else who got displaced by our use of the internet and similar technologies. We merely adapted to better exploit them.
        trention 4y ago
        I am not saying (in that last comment) what should happen, I am saying what will happen. Past automation in terms of impact is nothing compared to what's coming and people and lawmakers will react accordingly - not in favor of the automators.
    - jhugo 4y ago
      I would agree with you if the AI was genuinely assisting with that task, but it isn't. It's taking inputs, ignoring their licenses, permuting them in ways that are not understandable to the user, and then outputting them. That's an entirely different task than the user reading SO or using Google and then writing their own code, because the "AI" is not capable of writing its own code at that level. Relying on this tool means ignoring the license of code that you're copying, without even knowing that you're doing it.
  - nl 4y ago
    Copilot understands concepts as well as may humans. You can see primitive versions of this in the old Word2Vec demos showing how those models understand how London:England ~= Paris:France Copilot is much more sophisticated than that, and it no more copies code than a human does. It generates on a character by character basis given the contextual probability of the next character conditioned on the previous set of tokens with the "heat" being a factor how how randomly it will choose characters. This is much more similar to how a human writes than "copying".
    - jhugo 4y ago
      "it no more copies code than a human does" < that's a very big call right there, considering how much verbatim copying has already been documented in Copilot. The primitive understanding Copilot has of what it is generating doesn't even approach that of the most average programmers. It's classic AI: impressive on the surface.
      - nl 4y ago
        This isn't true. All the "copied code" I've seen is where the person prompts it with a large amount of very unique preamble and then it fills in the exact example they are quoting from. Try it without doing that. And it's weird people think it can't understand conceptual relationships. Word2Vec demonstrated that nearly 10 years ago and that's a much weaker model in terms of both size and techniques than this is.
        jhugo 4y ago
        > And it's weird people think it can't understand conceptual relationships. Word2Vec demonstrated that nearly 10 years ago and that's a much weaker model in terms of both size and techniques than this is. Saying that Word2Vec or Copilot have "understanding" of their input requires a redefinition of the word "understanding".
        nl 4y ago
        What's your definition?

I don't see why that should be the case in this particular scenario, or what benefit is gained from that. Could you elaborate?

jhugo 4y ago
Could you elaborate on why you think a computer program and a person should be treated the same way in this respect? We can take as self-evident that a human is capable of reading about something, conceptualising it, and then writing something completely new with the knowledge they have gained. I think it's also pretty uncontroversial that the primitive "AI" we currently have is nowhere near the level of even an average human at these things, and thus we can't just blindly assume it is conceptualising rather than copying. Copilot regularly produces verbatim copies of existing code when working on non-trivial things. Forget about the "AI" label: Copilot is just a complex computer program, that takes code from other people and inserts various permutations of it into your editor, whilst ignoring the license of that code.
- spupe 4y ago
  I think it's best if we sidestep these big conceptual questions about what cognition or creativity really are. It's hard to find agreement, and perhaps it is not necessary to do so. My position is that if a person hired in a company can currently use Google, Stack Overflow and GitHub to help develop their custom scripts, and no moral or copyright issues are infringed (ie, you don't try to say you came up with it on your own, and you use only enough that it is clearly fair use), then I think an AI should be able to assist in that task. There is no need to complicate things by legislating what the AI is doing and what Google is doing, as they are very similar things and in fact even use similar methods.
  - trention 4y ago
    You are saying that the AI should be treated the same way as a person would regarding its 'output'. I disagree. This is a conceptual disagreement and you cannot just sweep under the rug "what cognition or creativity really are". At the end, when in several (2-5) years we start seeing structural unemployment emerging because of AI deployments, this will be resolved by the legal system, most likely by some sort of partial prohibition of training/monetizing such systems.
    - spupe 4y ago
      I think I still have not understood your argument. Are you saying that you are afraid that AIs will become too powerful and cause unemployment, and therefore we should regulate them now before they do so? Many people are worried about this, which is why there is a lot of debate about minimum income programs. However, at present, what Copilot is doing is similar to what Google does, and it is certainly not going to replace devs any time soon. Personally, I think we should exploit technology to its fullest, and the only reason we can have this conversation is because in the past, we haven't given too much consideration about the mailmen, secretaries, delivery workers and everyone else who got displaced by our use of the internet and similar technologies. We merely adapted to better exploit them.
      - trention 4y ago
        I am not saying (in that last comment) what should happen, I am saying what will happen. Past automation in terms of impact is nothing compared to what's coming and people and lawmakers will react accordingly - not in favor of the automators.
  - jhugo 4y ago
    I would agree with you if the AI was genuinely assisting with that task, but it isn't. It's taking inputs, ignoring their licenses, permuting them in ways that are not understandable to the user, and then outputting them. That's an entirely different task than the user reading SO or using Google and then writing their own code, because the "AI" is not capable of writing its own code at that level. Relying on this tool means ignoring the license of code that you're copying, without even knowing that you're doing it.
- nl 4y ago
  Copilot understands concepts as well as may humans. You can see primitive versions of this in the old Word2Vec demos showing how those models understand how London:England ~= Paris:France Copilot is much more sophisticated than that, and it no more copies code than a human does. It generates on a character by character basis given the contextual probability of the next character conditioned on the previous set of tokens with the "heat" being a factor how how randomly it will choose characters. This is much more similar to how a human writes than "copying".
  - jhugo 4y ago
    "it no more copies code than a human does" < that's a very big call right there, considering how much verbatim copying has already been documented in Copilot. The primitive understanding Copilot has of what it is generating doesn't even approach that of the most average programmers. It's classic AI: impressive on the surface.
    - nl 4y ago
      This isn't true. All the "copied code" I've seen is where the person prompts it with a large amount of very unique preamble and then it fills in the exact example they are quoting from. Try it without doing that. And it's weird people think it can't understand conceptual relationships. Word2Vec demonstrated that nearly 10 years ago and that's a much weaker model in terms of both size and techniques than this is.
      - jhugo 4y ago
        > And it's weird people think it can't understand conceptual relationships. Word2Vec demonstrated that nearly 10 years ago and that's a much weaker model in terms of both size and techniques than this is. Saying that Word2Vec or Copilot have "understanding" of their input requires a redefinition of the word "understanding".
        nl 4y ago
        What's your definition?