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Another example to consider as an intuition pump might be to ask how many engineers are going to publish their FOSS with a “using this as AI training input is f
by theptip 4y ago
Another example to consider as an intuition pump might be to ask how many engineers are going to publish their FOSS with a “using this as AI training input is forbidden” clause, or otherwise battle against training Copilot and other code authoring systems.
Art is typically quite style-promiscuous, and mostly protected by copyright. It’s also quite analog/continuous. Code is more discrete; you can diff it and easily see if an AI copied a particular block that doesn’t appear in other projects.
Personally I don’t think there is a strong argument that training an AI on art is problematic, as long as the AI doesn’t then commit copyright infringement. I think this process is equivalent to art students consuming art and synthesizing their own styles.
I think it’s more problematic if AI starts regurgitating discrete chunks of FOSS code, since that’s probably a license violation.
For digital artists, lots of skills are going to become irrelevant; the raw skill of pixel pushing and line work may well become obsolete. But the hardest part was always having good taste, composition, ideation. These are not going away any time soon.
And if you enjoy pushing pixels around, nothing to stop you doing that; we still play chess for fun even though computers dominate humans at the task. Indeed, computers make very scalable and accessible coaches; one could argue that chess is more fun, and easier to learn, now that computers have superseded humans. Perhaps the same will be true about art, and later, coding.
- shpx 4y ago> how many engineers are going to publish their FOSS with a “using this as AI training input is forbidden” clause That clause would make their software not Free and Open Source by definition.
- thomasahle 4y agoI suppose the Open Source Definition of Applied works apply: > The license must allow modifications and derived works, and must allow them to be distributed under the same terms as the license of the original software. So AI training would be allowed, but all code subsequently generated by the AI would have to be under a compatible license.
- sulam 4y agoJust like those art students you reference, engineers regularly find bits of code and regurgitate it in their projects. Stack Overflow gets its reputation for a reason. They especially do this earlier in their careers, before they develop their own intuition and style, just like an art student. Why would you treat the ML model (I very much hesitate to call it AI) differently in these two cases?
- theptip 4y agoSure, and doing so commercially and without attribution, especially when the code is not CC licensed, can be problematic. SO code is implicitly CC (and furthermore, contributed under the expectation that it will be used by anyone) so it’s not problematic to copy-pasta that code IMO. But copying blocks of code from a GPL-3 project would be, for example. To be clear I don’t think learning from (but not cloning) a GPL project is problematic. That is just what normal students do.
- thomasahle 4y ago> I think it’s more problematic if AI starts regurgitating discrete chunks of FOSS code, since that’s probably a license violation. What if the code is 99% FOSS code, but with variable names changed say? I'm curious because for humans I think that would still count as copyright infringement, but Github seems to only filter out 100% code matches. I suppose copyright law is not precise enough that you could algorithmically decide of two pieces of code are too close? The only way to be sure seems to be "clean room design", where the AI hasn't seen the FOSS code in the first place?