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This seems disingenous. People don’t have a problem that AI is being used in some form to provide the service. The complaint is pretty clearly that code is be

This seems disingenous. People don’t have a problem that AI is being used in some form to provide the service. The complaint is pretty clearly that code is being lifted from repositories without attribution or compensation, and being redistributed into other applications. How impressive the work behind copilot is or is not really isn’t relevant.

csee 4y ago
This is how it always works, though. Moderna is standing on the shoulders of centuries of cumulative human knowledge without compensating all the sources of that knowledge. Musicians learn from other musicians and imitate to an extent, which is why all the musicians in a genre sound very similar, and we don't see present day rappers compensating the previous generation of rappers. This is where some modest taxation comes in. To reallocate a slice of the output of value creation to its actual source in a rough kind of way wherever more direct compensation isn't feasible.
- jacquesm 4y ago
  Yes, but those humans are humans, not machines. With machines the scale changes dramatically. Which, incidentally is something copyright law has addressed explicitly: if you mechanically transform at best you end up with a derived work.
  - csee 4y ago
    I don't understand the difference between Co-Pilot on the one hand and Moderna (on the shoulders of medical research) or SpaceX (on the shoulders of physics knowledge and cumulative rocket engineering knowledge) on the other. They all heavily use technology, automation and machines. I don't see where the distinction is coming from, and if there is a technical legal distinction, is it an ethically important one?
    - meheleventyone 4y ago
      There are thousands of novel decisions in the work of Moderna and SpaceX beyond their cultural starting points. Same thing with art. Copilot isn't inventing nor is DALLE-2 being artistic.
    - jacquesm 4y ago
      The distinction is a legal one: intellectual property can not be re-used without permission of the rights holder, be it a patent or a chunk of source code. And you can bet that SpaceX using physics knowledge and cumulative rocket engineering knowledge are very careful to either license the tech they use or be very explicit about documenting their own. That you can't see the difference is entirely on you, going 'against the flow' of society sometimes leads to change but more often it simply results in friction and a lack of comprehension. Keep in mind that open source is based on copyright law, and without copyright law the protections that open source offers would be gone. To give an extreme example: if you had a chunk of software that was constructed in such a way that it would spit out a complete copy of 'the Gimp' without the license file if you started to write an image processing program that would be a very clear case of copyright violation. If you then start breaking the Gimp down into smaller and smaller re-usable fractions at some point you might be able to argue that such a generic and oft used snippet should be free of copyright. But that only works as long as you then don't string together a whole pile of pieces that you each copied somewhere else, the whole idea is that your creation is an original one. Medical research (which quite often leads to patents, which I don't believe should be possible, especially if that research was publicly funded) and physics knowledge are of a different kind than copyrighted program code. The latter would be better compared to universally present language constructs and constraints, such as 'memory management', 'data manipulation' etc. Once you make those explicit in an implementation copyright applies. Or, to make another analogy: it's like comparing the skill of writing to the product of that skill. The skill isn't protected, but the output of the act of writing is.
      - Xunjin 4y ago
        An amazing argument and analogy, also I do agree about Medical research, being possible to patent a work which is publicly funded is an A*** move.
- cycomanic 4y ago
  > Musicians learn from other musicians and imitate to an extent, which is why all the musicians in a genre sound very similar, and we don't see present day rappers compensating the previous generation of rappers. You clearly don't know how copyright around sampling works. Yes rappers are paying shitloads to previous generation musicians for samples they use.
  - csee 4y ago
    Sure, if we're talking about sampling, which is analogous to co-pilot copy and pasting chunks of code verbatim (which we've seen happen). But the complaints about co-pilot go far deeper than that. Quoting from the tweet: "it just sells code other people wrote". Do musicians "just" copy from all the people they've been inspired by and learned from?
    - cycomanic 4y ago
      What does "inspired" mean in the context of a computer program?
- Dracophoenix 4y ago
  > This is where some modest taxation comes in. To reallocate a slice of the output of value creation to its actual source in a rough kind of way wherever more direct compensation isn't feasible. I was with you until this statement. The vast majority of society consumes, but doesn't create something new in the process. I'm bewildered as to why you think taxation is a solution rather than a disincentive towards creating. As far as compensating the giants upon whose shoulders most stand, there are plenty of vehicles for that: royalties, patents, copyrights, pensions, awards and prizes, paid fellowships, etc. These are relatively easy to calculate and write a contract for.
tiborsaas 4y ago
I've made use of a ton of open source tools and have not paid any attribution or compensation. By made use of, I mean I used them as their intended purposes and not their source code. I have a FOSS OS, server, CMD tools and libraries powering my ideas, it's part of the deal that I don't have to pay. If I modify them I know what I have to do, but Co-pilot is somewhere in-between the two, it's abstracting knowledge from these codebases. We don't yet know how to deal with it properly, but this will change with time, that's why having these conversations are important. I think that AI models will gain a new legal state, whatever they learn will be considered original work if it's not repeating non-trivial work 1:1.
- moffkalast 4y ago
  > it's not repeating non-trivial work 1:1 But that's basically all copilot does? It's just a fancy compression system with a search function.
  - tiborsaas 4y ago
    No, it customizes the snippets to your context, the code is synthesized and not looked up in a db like a web search engine.
    - moffkalast 4y ago
      But it kind of is when you think about it. Network weights are just a db written in an incomprehensible format and the synthesis part is searching and converting it back to readable data. Even if it changes the var names and formatting a bit, it's still at best highly derivative. And at worst it spits out the exact code verbatim.
      - tiborsaas 4y ago
        > Network weights are just a db written in an incomprehensible format That makes all the difference IMHO, its complexity makes it much more than "just a DB". The synthesis part takes into account the context also, so it does intelligent things automatically, a smart SQL query does not. My brain also works kinda like this. My knowledge is encoded in an incomprehensible format and I convert my knowledge into code based on the problem at hand.

csee 4y ago

This is how it always works, though. Moderna is standing on the shoulders of centuries of cumulative human knowledge without compensating all the sources of that knowledge. Musicians learn from other musicians and imitate to an extent, which is why all the musicians in a genre sound very similar, and we don't see present day rappers compensating the previous generation of rappers. This is where some modest taxation comes in. To reallocate a slice of the output of value creation to its actual source in a rough kind of way wherever more direct compensation isn't feasible.

jacquesm 4y ago
Yes, but those humans are humans, not machines. With machines the scale changes dramatically. Which, incidentally is something copyright law has addressed explicitly: if you mechanically transform at best you end up with a derived work.
- csee 4y ago
  I don't understand the difference between Co-Pilot on the one hand and Moderna (on the shoulders of medical research) or SpaceX (on the shoulders of physics knowledge and cumulative rocket engineering knowledge) on the other. They all heavily use technology, automation and machines. I don't see where the distinction is coming from, and if there is a technical legal distinction, is it an ethically important one?
  - meheleventyone 4y ago
    There are thousands of novel decisions in the work of Moderna and SpaceX beyond their cultural starting points. Same thing with art. Copilot isn't inventing nor is DALLE-2 being artistic.
  - jacquesm 4y ago
    The distinction is a legal one: intellectual property can not be re-used without permission of the rights holder, be it a patent or a chunk of source code. And you can bet that SpaceX using physics knowledge and cumulative rocket engineering knowledge are very careful to either license the tech they use or be very explicit about documenting their own. That you can't see the difference is entirely on you, going 'against the flow' of society sometimes leads to change but more often it simply results in friction and a lack of comprehension. Keep in mind that open source is based on copyright law, and without copyright law the protections that open source offers would be gone. To give an extreme example: if you had a chunk of software that was constructed in such a way that it would spit out a complete copy of 'the Gimp' without the license file if you started to write an image processing program that would be a very clear case of copyright violation. If you then start breaking the Gimp down into smaller and smaller re-usable fractions at some point you might be able to argue that such a generic and oft used snippet should be free of copyright. But that only works as long as you then don't string together a whole pile of pieces that you each copied somewhere else, the whole idea is that your creation is an original one. Medical research (which quite often leads to patents, which I don't believe should be possible, especially if that research was publicly funded) and physics knowledge are of a different kind than copyrighted program code. The latter would be better compared to universally present language constructs and constraints, such as 'memory management', 'data manipulation' etc. Once you make those explicit in an implementation copyright applies. Or, to make another analogy: it's like comparing the skill of writing to the product of that skill. The skill isn't protected, but the output of the act of writing is.
    - Xunjin 4y ago
      An amazing argument and analogy, also I do agree about Medical research, being possible to patent a work which is publicly funded is an A*** move.
cycomanic 4y ago
> Musicians learn from other musicians and imitate to an extent, which is why all the musicians in a genre sound very similar, and we don't see present day rappers compensating the previous generation of rappers. You clearly don't know how copyright around sampling works. Yes rappers are paying shitloads to previous generation musicians for samples they use.
- csee 4y ago
  Sure, if we're talking about sampling, which is analogous to co-pilot copy and pasting chunks of code verbatim (which we've seen happen). But the complaints about co-pilot go far deeper than that. Quoting from the tweet: "it just sells code other people wrote". Do musicians "just" copy from all the people they've been inspired by and learned from?
  - cycomanic 4y ago
    What does "inspired" mean in the context of a computer program?
Dracophoenix 4y ago
> This is where some modest taxation comes in. To reallocate a slice of the output of value creation to its actual source in a rough kind of way wherever more direct compensation isn't feasible. I was with you until this statement. The vast majority of society consumes, but doesn't create something new in the process. I'm bewildered as to why you think taxation is a solution rather than a disincentive towards creating. As far as compensating the giants upon whose shoulders most stand, there are plenty of vehicles for that: royalties, patents, copyrights, pensions, awards and prizes, paid fellowships, etc. These are relatively easy to calculate and write a contract for.

tiborsaas 4y ago

I've made use of a ton of open source tools and have not paid any attribution or compensation. By made use of, I mean I used them as their intended purposes and not their source code. I have a FOSS OS, server, CMD tools and libraries powering my ideas, it's part of the deal that I don't have to pay. If I modify them I know what I have to do, but Co-pilot is somewhere in-between the two, it's abstracting knowledge from these codebases. We don't yet know how to deal with it properly, but this will change with time, that's why having these conversations are important. I think that AI models will gain a new legal state, whatever they learn will be considered original work if it's not repeating non-trivial work 1:1.

moffkalast 4y ago
> it's not repeating non-trivial work 1:1 But that's basically all copilot does? It's just a fancy compression system with a search function.
- tiborsaas 4y ago
  No, it customizes the snippets to your context, the code is synthesized and not looked up in a db like a web search engine.
  - moffkalast 4y ago
    But it kind of is when you think about it. Network weights are just a db written in an incomprehensible format and the synthesis part is searching and converting it back to readable data. Even if it changes the var names and formatting a bit, it's still at best highly derivative. And at worst it spits out the exact code verbatim.
    - tiborsaas 4y ago
      > Network weights are just a db written in an incomprehensible format That makes all the difference IMHO, its complexity makes it much more than "just a DB". The synthesis part takes into account the context also, so it does intelligent things automatically, a smart SQL query does not. My brain also works kinda like this. My knowledge is encoded in an incomprehensible format and I convert my knowledge into code based on the problem at hand.