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I’ve noticed that people tend to disapprove of AI trained on their profession’s data, but are usually indifferent or positive about other applications of AI. F

I’ve noticed that people tend to disapprove of AI trained on their profession’s data, but are usually indifferent or positive about other applications of AI. For example, I know artists who are vehemently against DALL-E, Stable Diffusion, etc. and regard it as stealing, but they view Copilot and GPT-3 as merely useful tools. I also know software devs who are extremely excited about AI art and GPT-3 but are outraged by Copilot. For myself, I am skeptical of intellectual property in the first place. I say go for it.

ChildOfChaos 4y ago
I think sadly it's just people being protective, the technology is interesting so if it doesn't hit their line of work, it's fantastic, if it does, then it's terrible. There is no arguing against it though, you can't stop it, all this stuff is coming eventually to all of these areas, might as well try and find ways to use the oppurutinies while you can while some of this is still new.
- naillo 4y ago
  I mean we definitely can stop it. Laws are a pretty strong deterrent.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    "We" maybe can't stop it. But if there were the political will to kneecap many uses of machine learning, it's not obvious there's any reason it couldn't be done even if not 100% effective. Whether that would be a good thing is a different question.
  - faeriechangling 4y ago
    You can slow this, you can't stop it whatsoever. It's about as ultimately futile as an effort as trying to stop piracy. People are ALREADY running salesforce codegen and stable diffusion at home, you can't put the genie back in the bottle, what we'll have 20 years from now is going to make critics of these tools have nightmares. If you try to outlaw it, the day before the laws come into effect, I'm going to download the very best models out there and run it on my home computer. I'll start organising with other scofflaws and building our own AI projects in the fashion of leelachesszero with donated compute time. You can shut down the commercial versions of these tools. You can scare large corporations from banning the use of these tools by corporations. You can pull an uno reverse card and use modified versions of the tools to CHECK for copyright infringement and sue people under existing laws AND you'll probably even be able to statistically prove somebody is an AI user. But STOPPING the use of these tools? Go ahead and try, won't happen.
    - tablespoon 4y ago
      > You can slow this, you can't stop it whatsoever. It's about as ultimately futile as an effort as trying to stop piracy. ... But STOPPING the use of these tools? Go ahead and try, won't happen. So? No one needs to stop it totally. The world isn't black and white, pushing it to the fringes is almost certainly a sufficient success. Outlawing murder hasn't stopped murder, but no one's given up on enforcing those laws because of the futility of perfect success. > If you try to outlaw it, the day before the laws come into effect, I'm going to download the very best models out there and run it on my home computer. I'll start organising with other scofflaws and building our own AI projects in the fashion of leelachesszero with donated compute time. That sounds like a cyberpunk fantasy.
      - faeriechangling 4y ago
        Cyberpunk sure, but fantasy? Not at all.
        tablespoon 4y ago
        > Cyberpunk sure, but fantasy? Not at all. The fantasy is the idea that doing what you describe will matter.
      - throwaway675309 4y ago
        You'll never be able to push it to the fringes because there will never be a legal universal agreement even from country to country on where to draw the line. And as computers get more powerful and the models get more efficient it'll become easier and easier to self host and run them on your own dime. There are already one click installers for generative models such as stable diffusion that run on modest hardware from a few years back.
        tablespoon 4y ago
        > You'll never be able to push it to the fringes because there will never be a legal universal agreement even from country to country on where to draw the line. Huh? "Legal universal agreement" has never been required to push something to the fringes in a particular country. If (in the US) these models were declared to be copyright infringement, or the users were required to pay license feeds to the creators of the data that was used to build the models, they will vanish from the public sphere. GitHub/Microsoft's legal department will pull Copilot down immediately, and development will effectively cease. No US company will sponsor development, and no company will allow in-house use. It will be dead. Some dude might still run the model in his bedroom in his spare time on his own hardware, but that's what irrelevance looks like. > And as computers get more powerful and the models get more efficient it'll become easier and easier to self host and run them on your own dime. There are already one click installers for generative models such as stable diffusion that run on modest hardware from a few years back. If that's the only way you can run something, because it's illegal, you're describing a fringe technology right there.
  - tpm 4y ago
    What would the law do? Forbid automatic data collection and/or indexing and further use without explicit copyright holder agreement? That would essentially ban the whole internet as we know it, not saying that would be bad, but this is never going to happen, too much accumulated momentum in the opposite direction.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - chiefalchemist 4y ago
      To your point, the law can do a lot of things. The issue here is the clarity and ability to enforce the law.
  - BeFlatXIII 4y ago
    Laws in which nation and enforced by which juries?
machinekob 4y ago
I'm pretty sure DALL-E was trained only on not copyright material ( they say so :| ). But to be honest if your code is open source im pretty sure Microsoft don't care about licence they'll just use it cause "reasons" same about stable diffusion they don't give a fuk about data if its in internet they'll use it so its topic that probably will be regulated in few years. Until then lets hope they'll get milked (both Microsoft and NovelAI) for illegal content usage and I srsly hope at least few layers will try milking it asap especially NovelAI which illegally usage a lot of copyrighted art in the training data.
- msbarnett 4y ago
  > I'm pretty sure DALL-E was trained only on not copyright material Nope. DALL-E generates images with the Getty Watermark, so clearly there’s copyrighted materials in its training set: https://www.reddit.com/r/dalle2/comments/xdjinf/its_pretty_obvious_where_dalle2_gets_some_of/ https://www.reddit.com/r/dalle2/comments/xdjinf/its_pretty_o...
  - machinekob 4y ago
    Thanks for posting this out never see that before. If they use copyright images they should also get punished in the original paper they say no copyright content was used but it can be just lies who know data speak for itself and if they can prove this in court they should get punished ( so again Microsoft getting rekt for that will be good to see :] ).
  - pclmulqdq 4y ago
    Lots of people ironically put the Getty watermark on pictures and memes that they make to satirically imply that they are pulling stock photos off the internet with the printscreen function instead of paying for them.
    - msbarnett 4y ago
      Memes generally would not fall under the category of non-copyrighted material; they’re most of the time extremely copyrighted material just being used without permission. And even a wholly original work an artist sarcastically puts a Getty watermark and then licensed under Creative Commons or something would fall into very murky territory – the Getty watermark itself is the intellectual property of Getty. The original image author might plead fair use as satire, but satirical intentions aren’t really a defence available to DALL-E. So even if we’re assuming these were wholly original works that the author placed under something like a Creative Commons license, the fact that it incorporated an image they had no rights to would at the very least create a fairly tangled copyright situation that any really rigorous evaluation of the copyright status of every image in the training set would tend to argue towards rejecting as not worth the risk of litigation. But the more likely scenario here is that they did minimal at best filtering of the training set for copyrights.
tpxl 4y ago
When Joe Rando plays a song from 1640 on a violin he gets a copyright claim on Youtube. When Jane Rando uses devtools to check a website source code she gets sued. When Microsoft steals all code on their platform and sells it, they get lauded. When "Open" AI steals thousands of copyrighted images and sells them, they get lauded. I am skeptical of imaginary property myself, but fuck this one set of rules for the poor, another set of rules for the masses.
- gw99 4y ago
  If this is the new status quo then I suggest we find out how to fuck up the corpus as best as possible.
- a4isms 4y ago
  > one set of rules for the poor, another set of rules for the masses. Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect. —Composer Frank Wilhoit[1] [1]: https://crookedtimber.org/2018/03/21/liberals-against-progressives/#comment-729288 https://crookedtimber.org/2018/03/21/liberals-against-progre...
  - sbuttgereit 4y ago
    Thanks for posting the link to the quote. Having said that, I don't think it's possible to quote that bit and get an understanding of the idea being conveyed without it's opening context. Indeed, it's likely to cause a false idea of what's being conveyed. From earlier in the same post: "There is no such thing as liberalism — or progressivism, etc. There is only conservatism. No other political philosophy actually exists; by the political analogue of Gresham’s Law, conservatism has driven every other idea out of circulation."
    - a4isms 4y ago
      I agree that adds considerable depth to the value of the quote, and connects it to the conversation he appeared to be having, which is about the first line you've quoted: There is no such thing as being a Liberal or Progressive, there is only being a Conservative or anti-Conservative, and while there is much nuänce and policy to debate about that, it boils down to deciding whether you actually support or abhor the idea of "the law" (which is a much broader concept than just the legal system) existing to enforce or erase the distinction between in-groups and out-groups. But that's just my read on it. Getting back to intellectual property, it has become a bitter joke on artists and creatives, who are held up as the beneficiaries of intellectual property laws in theory, but in practice are just as much of an out-group as everyone else. We are bound by the law—see patent trolls, for example—but not protected by it unless we have pockets deep enough to sue Disney for not paying us.
ghoward 4y ago
I am a programmer who has written extensively on my blog and HN against Copilot. I am also not a hypocrite; I do not like DALL-E or Stable Diffusion either. As a sibling comment implies, these AI tools give more power to people who control data, i.e., big companies or wealthy people, while at the same time, they take power away from individuals. Copilot is bad for society. DALL-E and Stable Diffusion are bad for society. I don't know what the answer is, but I sure wish I had the resources to sue these powerful entities.
- williamcotton 4y ago
  I’m a programmer and a songwriter and I am not worried about these tools and I don’t think they are bad for society. What did the photograph do to the portrait artist? What did the recording do to the live musician? Here’s some highfalutin art theory on the matter, from almost a hundred years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Work_of_Art_in_the_Age_of_Mechanical_Reproduction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Work_of_Art_in_the_Age_of_...
  - SamoyedFurFluff 4y ago
    But this isn’t like photography and portrait artistry. This is more like a wealthy person stealing your entire art catalog, laundering it in some fancy way, and then claiming they are the original creator. Stable Diffusion has literally been used to create new art by screenshotting someone’s live-streamed art creation process as the seed. While creating derivative work has always been considered art(such as deletion poetry and collage), it’s extremely uncommon and blasé to never attribute the original(s).
    - insanitybit 4y ago
      > This is more like a wealthy person stealing your entire art catalog, laundering it in some fancy way, and then claiming they are the original creator. If I take a song, cut it up, and sing over it, my release is valid. If I parody your work, that's my work. If you paint a picture of a building and I go to that spot and take a photograph of that building it is my work. I can derive all sorts of things, things that I own, from things that others have made. Fair use is a thing: https://www.copyright.gov/fair-use/ https://www.copyright.gov/fair-use/ As for talking about the originals, would an artist credit every piece of inspiration they have ever encountered over a lifetime? Publishing a seed seems fine as a nice thing to do, but pointing at the billion pictures that went into the drawing seems silly.
dawnerd 4y ago
In theory AI should never return an exact copy of a copyrighted work or even anything close enough you could argue is the original “just changed”. If the styles are the same I think that’s fine, no different than someone else cloning it. But there’s definitely outputs from stable diffusion that looks like the original with some weird artifacts. We need regulation around it.
- rtkwe 4y ago
  Code is much easier to do that because the avenues for expression are significantly limited compared to just creating an image. For it to be useful copilot has to produce compiling and reasonably terse and understandable code. The compiler in particular is a big bottle neck to the range of the output.
- XorNot 4y ago
  > there’s definitely outputs from stable diffusion that looks like the original with some weird artifacts. Do you have examples? Because SD will generate photoreal outputs and then get subtle details (hands, faces) wrong, but unless you have the source image in hand then you've no way of knowing whether it's a "source image" or not.
- orbital-decay 4y ago
  This is like saying "we need a regulation around bugs in software", with similar consequences. ML models are generally too large to ensure that there's no bugs. Same with software.
wzdd 4y ago
This talking point seems to come up often, but since it's basically saying that people are hypocrites I think it is a bad faith thing to say without reasonable proof that it's not a fringe opinion (or completely invented). For what it's worth, the people I know who are opposed to this sort of "useful tool" don't discriminate by profession.
teddyh 4y ago
An accusation of hypocrisy is not an argument; at least not a relevant one.
- kweingar 4y ago
  I’m not making an argument.
pclmulqdq 4y ago
I think the distinction is that only one of those classes tends to produce exact copies of work. Programmers get very upset at DALL-E and Stable Diffusion producing exact (and near-exact) copies of artwork too. In contrast to exact copying, production of imitations (not exact copies, but "X in the style of Y") is something that artists have been doing for centuries, and is widely thought of as part of arts education. For some reason, code seems to lend itself to exact copying by AIs (and also some humans) rather than comprehension and imitation.
- XorNot 4y ago
  I'm mildly suspicious that this example is an implementation of a generic matrix functionality though: you couldn't patent this sort of work, because it's not patentable - it's a mathematics. It's fundamentally a basic operation, that would have to be implemented with a similar structure regardless of how you do it.
  - heavyset_go 4y ago
    Mathematics is not patentable, but you can patent the steps a computer takes to compute the results of that particular algorithm.
    - pclmulqdq 4y ago
      Only if it has physical consequences. There was a case in 2014 that narrowed software patents significantly, called "Alice vs CLS Bank." No more patents on computerized shopping carts, but encryption or compression can still be patented.
  - pclmulqdq 4y ago
    Patents and copyrights are totally different, and should be treated as such. The issue isn't about whether someone copies the algorithm, it's whether they copy the written code. Nothing in an algorithms textbook is patentable either, but if you copy the words describing an algorithm from it, you are stealing their description.
- 4y ago
bayindirh 4y ago
I, with my software developer hat, am not excited by AI. Not a bit, honestly. Esp. about these big models trained on huge amount of data, without any consent. Let me be perfectly clear. I'm all for the tech. The capabilities are nice. The thing I'm strongly against is training these models on any data without any consent. GPT-3 is OK, training it with public stuff regardless of its license is not. Copilot is OK, training on with GPL/LGPL licensed code without consent is not. DALL-E/MidJourney/Stable Diffusion is OK. Training it with non public domain or CC0 images is not. "We're doing something amazing, hence we need no permission" is ugly to put it very lightly. I've left GitHub because of CoPilot. Will leave any photo hosting platform if they hint any similar thing with my photography, period.
- psychphysic 4y ago
  I disagree. Those are effectively cases of cryptomnesia[0]. Part and parcel of learning. If you don't want broad access your work, don't upload it to a public repository. It's very simple. Good on you for recognising that you don't agree with what GitHub looks at data in public repos, but it's not their problem. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptomnesia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptomnesia
  - bayindirh 4y ago
    > Those are effectively cases of cryptomnesia. Disagree, outputting training data as-is is not cryptomnesia. This is not Copilot's first case. It also reproduced ID software's fast inverse square root function as-is, including its comments, but without its license. > If you don't want broad access your work, don't upload it to a public repository. It's very simple. This is actually both funny and absurd. This is why we have licenses at this point. If all the licenses is moot, then this opens a very big can of worms... My terms are simple. If you derive, share the derivation with the same license (xGPL). Copilot is deriving my code. If you use my code as a derivation point, honor the license, mark the derivation with GPL license. This voids your business case? I don't care. These are my terms. If any public item can be used without any limitations, Getty Images (or any other stock photo business) is illegal. CC licensing shouldn't exist. GPL is moot. Even the most litigious software companies' cases (Oracle, SCO, Microsoft, Adobe, etc.) is moot. Just don't put it on public servers, eh? Similarly, music and other fine arts are generally publicly accessible. So copyright on any and every production is also invalid as you say, because it's publicly available. Why not put your case forward with attorneys of Disney, WB, Netflix and others? I'm sure they'll provide all their archives for training your video/image AI. Similarly Microsoft, Adobe, Mathworks, et al. will be thrilled to support your CoPilot competitor with their code, because a) Any similar code will be just cryptomnesia, b) The software produced from that code is publicly accessible anyway. At this point, I even didn't touch to the fact that humans are trained much more differently than neural networks.
heavyset_go 4y ago
Your post is a good example of the tu quoque fallacy[1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_quoque https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_quoque
- kweingar 4y ago
  Well, it would be fallacious reasoning if I was using this as the basis of an argument. I didn’t intend to argue anything or draw any conclusions. Just making an observation based on conversations with friends and coworkers.
  - heavyset_go 4y ago
    This is a good example of sealioning. (I kid)
tablespoon 4y ago
> I’ve noticed that people tend to disapprove of AI trained on their profession’s data, but are usually indifferent or positive about other applications of AI. In other words: the banal observation that people care far more when their stuff is stolen than when some stranger has their stuff stolen.
bcrosby95 4y ago
I look at IP differently. For copyright, the act of me creating something doesn't deprive you of anything, except the ability to consume or use the thing I created. If I were influenced by something, you can still be influenced by that same thing - I do not exhaust any resources I used. This is wholely different from physical objects. If I create a knife, I deprive you of the ability to make something else from those natural resources. Natural resources that I didn't create - I merely exploited them. Because of this, I'm fine with copyright (patents are another story). But I have some issues with physical property.
yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
I can think of two explanations for that off the top of my head. The first is that people only recognize the problems with the things that they're familiar with, which you would kind of expect. The other option is that there's a difference in the thing that people object to. My impression is that artists seem to be reacting to the idea that they could be automated out of a job, where programmers are mostly objecting to blatant copyright violation. (Not universally in either case, but often.) If that is the case, then those are genuinely different arguments made by different people.
joecot 4y ago
> For myself, I am skeptical of intellectual property in the first place. I say go for it. If we didn't live in a Capitalist society, that would be fair. But we currently do. That Capitalist society cares little about the well being of artists unless it can find a way to make their art profitable. Projects like DALL-E and Midjourney pillage centuries of human art and sell it back to us for a profit, while taking away work from artists who struggle to make ends meet as it is. Software Developers are generally less concerned about Copilot because they're still making 6 figures a year, but they'll start to get concerned if the technology gets smart enough that society needs less Developers. An automated future should be a good thing. It should mean that computers can take care of most tasks and humans can have more leisure time to relax and pursue their passions. The reason that artists and developers panic over things like this is that they are watching themselves be automated out of existence, and have seen how society treats people who aren't useful anymore.
lucideer 4y ago
I don't know specifically what DALL-E was trained on, but if it's art for which the artists' have not consented to it being used to train AI then that's problematic. I haven't seen any objections to DALL-E on that basis specifically though, whereas all the discussion of Copilot is around the fact that code authorship & Github accounts are not intrinsically tied together, making it impossible to have code authors consent to their code being used, regardless of what ToS someone's agreed to. > For myself, I am skeptical of intellectual property in the first place. I say go for it. I'm in a similar boat but this is precisely the reason I object so strongly to Copilot. IP has been invented & perpetuated/extended to protect large corporate interests, under the guise of protecting & sustaining innovators & creative individuals. Copilot is a perfect example of large corporate interest ignoring IP when it suits them to exploit individuals. In other words: the reason I'm skeptical of IP is the same reason I'm skeptical of Copilot.
- __alexs 4y ago
  Stable Diffusion and DallE were both trained on copyrighted content scraped from the internet with no consent from the publishers. It's quite a common complaint because some of the most popular prompts involve just appending an artist's name to something to get it to copy their style.
matheusmoreira 4y ago
> For myself, I am skeptical of intellectual property in the first place. I say go for it. Me too. I think copyright and these silly restrictions should be abolished. At the same time, I can't get over the fact these self-serving corporations are all about "all rights reserved" when it benefits them while at the same time undermining other people's rights. Microsoft absolutely knows that what they're doing is wrong. Recently it was pointed out to me that Microsoft employees can't even look at GPL source code, lest they subconsciously reproduce it. Yet they think their software can look at other people's code and reproduce it? What a load of BS. I'll forgive them for going for it the second copyright is gone. Then it won't be a crime for any of us to copy Windows and Office either. You bet we're gonna go for it too.
- Schroedingersat 4y ago
  > Then it won't be a crime for any of us to copy Windows and Office either. You bet we're gonna go for it too. Don't worry. At that time all of the available hardware will refuse to run any software unless it comes with a signed license from one of the big three.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
9wzYQbTYsAIc 4y ago
> [people] are usually indifferent or positive about other applications of AI That sounds like the pro-innovation bias: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pro-innovation_bias https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pro-innovation_bias
maxbond 4y ago
> I’ve noticed that people tend to disapprove of AI trained on their profession’s data, but are usually indifferent or positive about other applications of AI. This is a fascinating observation and I think there's a lot of truth to it. But maybe our inference should be that these systems mistreat each of us, even if it's difficult to see unless it's falling on you. Maybe a more important question than whether or not this is a violation of intellectual property is whether this is a violation of human dignity, not that it's illegal (though in this case, it may be) but that it's extremely rude in a way that we don't necessarily have the vocabulary for yet.
teawrecks 4y ago
When it comes to solving a problem, I want it to emit whatever solves the problem. When it comes to being an AI that understands coding concepts, I don't want it to regurgitate code verbatim. When it comes to being a product, I don't want it to plagiarize.
jrm4 4y ago
Again, as a lawyer, I think it's really important to focus on intent. The Constitution gives us "To promote the progress of science and Useful Arts" (which we've expanded.) So question one in the back of our heads should be "Are we promoting progress here?" That most often means protecting the little guy, and that's why I think it's mostly necessary, and also must be evaluated very skeptically.
- ShamelessC 4y ago
  Define progress. Good luck.
  - jrm4 4y ago
    I mean, I don't have to do it alone. There's this thing called "the law" that's put in a little work on this :)
    - ShamelessC 4y ago
      Fair enough; from a legal framework that's a highly practical way to move forward. I don't think many people like to point at the current status quo, with all its flaws, and immediately think "the courts will help me!"; but you did mention you are a lawyer and I respect that you are working in the bounds of what is possible rather than what is ideal.
sattoshi 4y ago
While I personally wouldn’t care about it, I can understand someone taking offense at copilot for spitting out their code verbatim and claiming it isn’t theirs. Neither GPT nor Dall-e produces content that anyone can point to and say “they are laundering MY work”. The closest we’ve been to that point is the image generators spitting out copyright watermarks, but they are not clearly attributable to any one single image (afaik).
TaylorAlexander 4y ago
I am strongly against intellectual property, but I don’t like this idea that any one of us will get in big trouble for openly violating IP restrictions, but if one of these big companies scoops up copyrighted works for their AI it’s fine? The double standard is unfair. This all seems like a great opportunity for big companies to encourage the growth of Creative Commons, which would benefit everyone, but instead they’re making large private datasets only they control.
zahrc 4y ago
Quod licet Iovi, non licet bovi[0] [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quod_licet_Iovi,_non_licet_bovi https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quod_licet_Iovi,_non_licet_b...
dopidopHN 4y ago
I think you might be into something with your conclusion. Nonetheless that’s problematic for folks relying on the copyright as of now. I feel for artists here, devs won’t go hungry or jobless.
KrishnaShripad 4y ago
> I know artists who are vehemently against DALL-E, Stable Diffusion, etc. and regard it as stealing, but they view Copilot and GPT-3 as merely useful tools. An example: https://twitter.com/DaveScheidt/status/1578411434043580416 https://twitter.com/DaveScheidt/status/1578411434043580416 > I also know software devs who are extremely excited about AI art and GPT-3 but are outraged by Copilot. The fear is not unwarranted though. I can clearly see AI replacing most jobs (not just in tech) but art, crafts, music and even science. There probably will be no field untouched by AI in this decade and completely replaced by next decade. We have multiple extinction events for humanity lined up: Climate Change, Nuclear Apocalypse and now AI. We will have to not just work towards reducing harm to the Planet, but also work towards stopping meaningless Wars and figuring out how to deal with unemployment and economic crisis that is looming on the horizon. The only ones to suffer in the end would be the "elites" (or will they be the first depending on how quickly Civilization goes towards Anarchy?). Can't say for sure. But definitely gloomy days ahead.
cercatrova 4y ago
I often quote this comment regarding AI advances and jobs [0]: > Yes, many of us will turn into cowards when automation starts to touch our work, but that would not prove this sentiment incorrect - only that we're cowards. >> Dude. What the hell kind of anti-life philosophy are you subscribing to that calls "being unhappy about people trying to automate an entire field of human behavior" being a "coward". Geez. >>> Because automation is generally good, but making an exemption for specific cases of automation that personally inconvenience you is rooted is cowardice/selfishness. Similar to NIMBYism. It's true cowardice to assume that our own profession should be immune from AI while other professions are not. Either dislike all AI, or like it. To be in between is to be a hypocrite. For me, I definitely am on the side of full AI, even if it automates my job away, simply because I see AI as an advancing force on mankind. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32461138#32463198 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32461138#32463198
- ironmagma 4y ago
  It’s not hypocrisy to think some jobs shouldn’t be automated. I don’t teach, but I definitely want human teachers teaching my kin, not AI teachers.
  - cercatrova 4y ago
    Perhaps, or perhaps not. We have not yet seen the true reach of pedagogy of AI. If AI can teach better than humans (something like the Matrix's brain uploading of training), then I will want to do that than have a human teach me.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
cypress66 4y ago
I'm actually fine with both. I think copyright/IP related to software needs to be toned down a lot. Software patents abolished. In my opinion the only thing that should be an infringement regarding code is copying entire non trivial files or entire projects outright. A 100 line snippet should not be copyrighteable. Only the entire work, which you could think as the composition of many of those snippets.
sanderjd 4y ago
For what it's worth, I think it's all very impressive and amazing but also really sketchy. Or at least, I think the developers of these systems need to be very careful about what they are allowed to do with what content, and I don't trust that they are doing that, because of articles like this one and others.
sinenomine 4y ago
I know much less programmers offended by copilot than artists offended by StableDiffusion. This is a mostly irrelevant red herring setting up professions against each other. Instead we should cooperate on a costly yet necessary decision of instituting a basic income, especially prioritizing professions about to be superseded by modern ML. Obviously, our decision-making class views the topic of instituting a realistic basic income right now as something extremely unpleasant, and so it goes. People who helped to bootstrap the AI should be compensated, at the very least by being able to live a modest lifestyle without having to work. Simple as.
sicp-enjoyer 4y ago
Does it cost money to produce high quality training sets? Yes. Would an organization or individual be willing to pay for samples for their data set? Absolutely. It seems pretty easy to discern that value is being taken from people.
stevewatson301 4y ago
The last time I happened to point this out[1], all I got was a bunch of HNers nitpicking the words I chose, but not addressing the core issue. I have to assume this is just people being protective of their own profession and consequently, setting up a high bar for what constitutes as performance in that profession. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32895251#32895709 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32895251#32895709
orbital-decay 4y ago
There's a substantial difference between being trained and being overfit to repeat training data 1:1. Overtraining is a bug of a model, not a feature. For example, Stable Diffusion 1.4 is overtrained on one specific Aivazovsky painting (among some others by other authors, like Mona Lisa, or Sunflowers - Van Gogh painted several of those). Copilot was famously overtrained on Carmack's fast square root code, so they had to block it programmatically after receiving bad publicity. Both are not intended by model authors, this is a flaw.
sireat 4y ago
I must be in the minority of programmers that I really really like Copilot but am indifferent about Stable Diffusion/Dall-E/midJourney. Copilot on Python makes me x5 more productive. I used Copilot in Beta for a year and continue paying for it now. For example: I can make a command line data wrangling script for a novel data set in a few minutes with a few prompts with full complement of extras (proper argparse parameters with sane defaults, ready to import etc etc). # reasonable comments included for free as well Before copilot I could do the same in about 20-30minutes but my code would be a mess with little commenting. I would spend 30-60 minutes just looking up docs for various libraries. Now without Copilot, if all I was doing was writing data wrangling scripts 4 hours a day I could approach this Copilot like productivity for a single task. However with Copilot I can switch problem domains very quickly and remain productive. Interestingly, on something like CSS or Javascript - Copilot is helping only slightly, maybe because my local training set is insufficient and my web-dev prompts are too generic. So I think AI can be fantastic force multiplier in a skillset that you already are reasonably familiarity. I can handle the 5-10% wtf Python code that Copilot produces. I do not particularly like copyrights and do wish Copilot had been trained on private Microsoft code as well.

ChildOfChaos 4y ago

I think sadly it's just people being protective, the technology is interesting so if it doesn't hit their line of work, it's fantastic, if it does, then it's terrible. There is no arguing against it though, you can't stop it, all this stuff is coming eventually to all of these areas, might as well try and find ways to use the oppurutinies while you can while some of this is still new.

naillo 4y ago
I mean we definitely can stop it. Laws are a pretty strong deterrent.
- ghaff 4y ago
  "We" maybe can't stop it. But if there were the political will to kneecap many uses of machine learning, it's not obvious there's any reason it couldn't be done even if not 100% effective. Whether that would be a good thing is a different question.
- faeriechangling 4y ago
  You can slow this, you can't stop it whatsoever. It's about as ultimately futile as an effort as trying to stop piracy. People are ALREADY running salesforce codegen and stable diffusion at home, you can't put the genie back in the bottle, what we'll have 20 years from now is going to make critics of these tools have nightmares. If you try to outlaw it, the day before the laws come into effect, I'm going to download the very best models out there and run it on my home computer. I'll start organising with other scofflaws and building our own AI projects in the fashion of leelachesszero with donated compute time. You can shut down the commercial versions of these tools. You can scare large corporations from banning the use of these tools by corporations. You can pull an uno reverse card and use modified versions of the tools to CHECK for copyright infringement and sue people under existing laws AND you'll probably even be able to statistically prove somebody is an AI user. But STOPPING the use of these tools? Go ahead and try, won't happen.
  - tablespoon 4y ago
    > You can slow this, you can't stop it whatsoever. It's about as ultimately futile as an effort as trying to stop piracy. ... But STOPPING the use of these tools? Go ahead and try, won't happen. So? No one needs to stop it totally. The world isn't black and white, pushing it to the fringes is almost certainly a sufficient success. Outlawing murder hasn't stopped murder, but no one's given up on enforcing those laws because of the futility of perfect success. > If you try to outlaw it, the day before the laws come into effect, I'm going to download the very best models out there and run it on my home computer. I'll start organising with other scofflaws and building our own AI projects in the fashion of leelachesszero with donated compute time. That sounds like a cyberpunk fantasy.
    - faeriechangling 4y ago
      Cyberpunk sure, but fantasy? Not at all.
      - tablespoon 4y ago
        > Cyberpunk sure, but fantasy? Not at all. The fantasy is the idea that doing what you describe will matter.
    - throwaway675309 4y ago
      You'll never be able to push it to the fringes because there will never be a legal universal agreement even from country to country on where to draw the line. And as computers get more powerful and the models get more efficient it'll become easier and easier to self host and run them on your own dime. There are already one click installers for generative models such as stable diffusion that run on modest hardware from a few years back.
      - tablespoon 4y ago
        > You'll never be able to push it to the fringes because there will never be a legal universal agreement even from country to country on where to draw the line. Huh? "Legal universal agreement" has never been required to push something to the fringes in a particular country. If (in the US) these models were declared to be copyright infringement, or the users were required to pay license feeds to the creators of the data that was used to build the models, they will vanish from the public sphere. GitHub/Microsoft's legal department will pull Copilot down immediately, and development will effectively cease. No US company will sponsor development, and no company will allow in-house use. It will be dead. Some dude might still run the model in his bedroom in his spare time on his own hardware, but that's what irrelevance looks like. > And as computers get more powerful and the models get more efficient it'll become easier and easier to self host and run them on your own dime. There are already one click installers for generative models such as stable diffusion that run on modest hardware from a few years back. If that's the only way you can run something, because it's illegal, you're describing a fringe technology right there.
- tpm 4y ago
  What would the law do? Forbid automatic data collection and/or indexing and further use without explicit copyright holder agreement? That would essentially ban the whole internet as we know it, not saying that would be bad, but this is never going to happen, too much accumulated momentum in the opposite direction.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - chiefalchemist 4y ago
    To your point, the law can do a lot of things. The issue here is the clarity and ability to enforce the law.
- BeFlatXIII 4y ago
  Laws in which nation and enforced by which juries?

machinekob 4y ago

I'm pretty sure DALL-E was trained only on not copyright material ( they say so :| ). But to be honest if your code is open source im pretty sure Microsoft don't care about licence they'll just use it cause "reasons" same about stable diffusion they don't give a fuk about data if its in internet they'll use it so its topic that probably will be regulated in few years. Until then lets hope they'll get milked (both Microsoft and NovelAI) for illegal content usage and I srsly hope at least few layers will try milking it asap especially NovelAI which illegally usage a lot of copyrighted art in the training data.

msbarnett 4y ago
> I'm pretty sure DALL-E was trained only on not copyright material Nope. DALL-E generates images with the Getty Watermark, so clearly there’s copyrighted materials in its training set: https://www.reddit.com/r/dalle2/comments/xdjinf/its_pretty_obvious_where_dalle2_gets_some_of/ https://www.reddit.com/r/dalle2/comments/xdjinf/its_pretty_o...
- machinekob 4y ago
  Thanks for posting this out never see that before. If they use copyright images they should also get punished in the original paper they say no copyright content was used but it can be just lies who know data speak for itself and if they can prove this in court they should get punished ( so again Microsoft getting rekt for that will be good to see :] ).
- pclmulqdq 4y ago
  Lots of people ironically put the Getty watermark on pictures and memes that they make to satirically imply that they are pulling stock photos off the internet with the printscreen function instead of paying for them.
  - msbarnett 4y ago
    Memes generally would not fall under the category of non-copyrighted material; they’re most of the time extremely copyrighted material just being used without permission. And even a wholly original work an artist sarcastically puts a Getty watermark and then licensed under Creative Commons or something would fall into very murky territory – the Getty watermark itself is the intellectual property of Getty. The original image author might plead fair use as satire, but satirical intentions aren’t really a defence available to DALL-E. So even if we’re assuming these were wholly original works that the author placed under something like a Creative Commons license, the fact that it incorporated an image they had no rights to would at the very least create a fairly tangled copyright situation that any really rigorous evaluation of the copyright status of every image in the training set would tend to argue towards rejecting as not worth the risk of litigation. But the more likely scenario here is that they did minimal at best filtering of the training set for copyrights.

tpxl 4y ago

When Joe Rando plays a song from 1640 on a violin he gets a copyright claim on Youtube. When Jane Rando uses devtools to check a website source code she gets sued. When Microsoft steals all code on their platform and sells it, they get lauded. When "Open" AI steals thousands of copyrighted images and sells them, they get lauded. I am skeptical of imaginary property myself, but fuck this one set of rules for the poor, another set of rules for the masses.

gw99 4y ago
If this is the new status quo then I suggest we find out how to fuck up the corpus as best as possible.
a4isms 4y ago
> one set of rules for the poor, another set of rules for the masses. Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect. —Composer Frank Wilhoit[1] [1]: https://crookedtimber.org/2018/03/21/liberals-against-progressives/#comment-729288 https://crookedtimber.org/2018/03/21/liberals-against-progre...
- sbuttgereit 4y ago
  Thanks for posting the link to the quote. Having said that, I don't think it's possible to quote that bit and get an understanding of the idea being conveyed without it's opening context. Indeed, it's likely to cause a false idea of what's being conveyed. From earlier in the same post: "There is no such thing as liberalism — or progressivism, etc. There is only conservatism. No other political philosophy actually exists; by the political analogue of Gresham’s Law, conservatism has driven every other idea out of circulation."
  - a4isms 4y ago
    I agree that adds considerable depth to the value of the quote, and connects it to the conversation he appeared to be having, which is about the first line you've quoted: There is no such thing as being a Liberal or Progressive, there is only being a Conservative or anti-Conservative, and while there is much nuänce and policy to debate about that, it boils down to deciding whether you actually support or abhor the idea of "the law" (which is a much broader concept than just the legal system) existing to enforce or erase the distinction between in-groups and out-groups. But that's just my read on it. Getting back to intellectual property, it has become a bitter joke on artists and creatives, who are held up as the beneficiaries of intellectual property laws in theory, but in practice are just as much of an out-group as everyone else. We are bound by the law—see patent trolls, for example—but not protected by it unless we have pockets deep enough to sue Disney for not paying us.

ghoward 4y ago

I am a programmer who has written extensively on my blog and HN against Copilot. I am also not a hypocrite; I do not like DALL-E or Stable Diffusion either. As a sibling comment implies, these AI tools give more power to people who control data, i.e., big companies or wealthy people, while at the same time, they take power away from individuals. Copilot is bad for society. DALL-E and Stable Diffusion are bad for society. I don't know what the answer is, but I sure wish I had the resources to sue these powerful entities.

williamcotton 4y ago
I’m a programmer and a songwriter and I am not worried about these tools and I don’t think they are bad for society. What did the photograph do to the portrait artist? What did the recording do to the live musician? Here’s some highfalutin art theory on the matter, from almost a hundred years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Work_of_Art_in_the_Age_of_Mechanical_Reproduction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Work_of_Art_in_the_Age_of_...
- SamoyedFurFluff 4y ago
  But this isn’t like photography and portrait artistry. This is more like a wealthy person stealing your entire art catalog, laundering it in some fancy way, and then claiming they are the original creator. Stable Diffusion has literally been used to create new art by screenshotting someone’s live-streamed art creation process as the seed. While creating derivative work has always been considered art(such as deletion poetry and collage), it’s extremely uncommon and blasé to never attribute the original(s).
  - insanitybit 4y ago
    > This is more like a wealthy person stealing your entire art catalog, laundering it in some fancy way, and then claiming they are the original creator. If I take a song, cut it up, and sing over it, my release is valid. If I parody your work, that's my work. If you paint a picture of a building and I go to that spot and take a photograph of that building it is my work. I can derive all sorts of things, things that I own, from things that others have made. Fair use is a thing: https://www.copyright.gov/fair-use/ https://www.copyright.gov/fair-use/ As for talking about the originals, would an artist credit every piece of inspiration they have ever encountered over a lifetime? Publishing a seed seems fine as a nice thing to do, but pointing at the billion pictures that went into the drawing seems silly.

dawnerd 4y ago

In theory AI should never return an exact copy of a copyrighted work or even anything close enough you could argue is the original “just changed”. If the styles are the same I think that’s fine, no different than someone else cloning it. But there’s definitely outputs from stable diffusion that looks like the original with some weird artifacts. We need regulation around it.

rtkwe 4y ago
Code is much easier to do that because the avenues for expression are significantly limited compared to just creating an image. For it to be useful copilot has to produce compiling and reasonably terse and understandable code. The compiler in particular is a big bottle neck to the range of the output.
XorNot 4y ago
> there’s definitely outputs from stable diffusion that looks like the original with some weird artifacts. Do you have examples? Because SD will generate photoreal outputs and then get subtle details (hands, faces) wrong, but unless you have the source image in hand then you've no way of knowing whether it's a "source image" or not.
orbital-decay 4y ago
This is like saying "we need a regulation around bugs in software", with similar consequences. ML models are generally too large to ensure that there's no bugs. Same with software.

wzdd 4y ago

This talking point seems to come up often, but since it's basically saying that people are hypocrites I think it is a bad faith thing to say without reasonable proof that it's not a fringe opinion (or completely invented). For what it's worth, the people I know who are opposed to this sort of "useful tool" don't discriminate by profession.

teddyh 4y ago

An accusation of hypocrisy is not an argument; at least not a relevant one.

kweingar 4y ago
I’m not making an argument.

pclmulqdq 4y ago

I think the distinction is that only one of those classes tends to produce exact copies of work. Programmers get very upset at DALL-E and Stable Diffusion producing exact (and near-exact) copies of artwork too. In contrast to exact copying, production of imitations (not exact copies, but "X in the style of Y") is something that artists have been doing for centuries, and is widely thought of as part of arts education. For some reason, code seems to lend itself to exact copying by AIs (and also some humans) rather than comprehension and imitation.

XorNot 4y ago
I'm mildly suspicious that this example is an implementation of a generic matrix functionality though: you couldn't patent this sort of work, because it's not patentable - it's a mathematics. It's fundamentally a basic operation, that would have to be implemented with a similar structure regardless of how you do it.
- heavyset_go 4y ago
  Mathematics is not patentable, but you can patent the steps a computer takes to compute the results of that particular algorithm.
  - pclmulqdq 4y ago
    Only if it has physical consequences. There was a case in 2014 that narrowed software patents significantly, called "Alice vs CLS Bank." No more patents on computerized shopping carts, but encryption or compression can still be patented.
- pclmulqdq 4y ago
  Patents and copyrights are totally different, and should be treated as such. The issue isn't about whether someone copies the algorithm, it's whether they copy the written code. Nothing in an algorithms textbook is patentable either, but if you copy the words describing an algorithm from it, you are stealing their description.
4y ago

bayindirh 4y ago

I, with my software developer hat, am not excited by AI. Not a bit, honestly. Esp. about these big models trained on huge amount of data, without any consent. Let me be perfectly clear. I'm all for the tech. The capabilities are nice. The thing I'm strongly against is training these models on any data without any consent. GPT-3 is OK, training it with public stuff regardless of its license is not. Copilot is OK, training on with GPL/LGPL licensed code without consent is not. DALL-E/MidJourney/Stable Diffusion is OK. Training it with non public domain or CC0 images is not. "We're doing something amazing, hence we need no permission" is ugly to put it very lightly. I've left GitHub because of CoPilot. Will leave any photo hosting platform if they hint any similar thing with my photography, period.

psychphysic 4y ago
I disagree. Those are effectively cases of cryptomnesia[0]. Part and parcel of learning. If you don't want broad access your work, don't upload it to a public repository. It's very simple. Good on you for recognising that you don't agree with what GitHub looks at data in public repos, but it's not their problem. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptomnesia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptomnesia
- bayindirh 4y ago
  > Those are effectively cases of cryptomnesia. Disagree, outputting training data as-is is not cryptomnesia. This is not Copilot's first case. It also reproduced ID software's fast inverse square root function as-is, including its comments, but without its license. > If you don't want broad access your work, don't upload it to a public repository. It's very simple. This is actually both funny and absurd. This is why we have licenses at this point. If all the licenses is moot, then this opens a very big can of worms... My terms are simple. If you derive, share the derivation with the same license (xGPL). Copilot is deriving my code. If you use my code as a derivation point, honor the license, mark the derivation with GPL license. This voids your business case? I don't care. These are my terms. If any public item can be used without any limitations, Getty Images (or any other stock photo business) is illegal. CC licensing shouldn't exist. GPL is moot. Even the most litigious software companies' cases (Oracle, SCO, Microsoft, Adobe, etc.) is moot. Just don't put it on public servers, eh? Similarly, music and other fine arts are generally publicly accessible. So copyright on any and every production is also invalid as you say, because it's publicly available. Why not put your case forward with attorneys of Disney, WB, Netflix and others? I'm sure they'll provide all their archives for training your video/image AI. Similarly Microsoft, Adobe, Mathworks, et al. will be thrilled to support your CoPilot competitor with their code, because a) Any similar code will be just cryptomnesia, b) The software produced from that code is publicly accessible anyway. At this point, I even didn't touch to the fact that humans are trained much more differently than neural networks.

heavyset_go 4y ago

Your post is a good example of the tu quoque fallacy[1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_quoque https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_quoque

kweingar 4y ago
Well, it would be fallacious reasoning if I was using this as the basis of an argument. I didn’t intend to argue anything or draw any conclusions. Just making an observation based on conversations with friends and coworkers.
- heavyset_go 4y ago
  This is a good example of sealioning. (I kid)

tablespoon 4y ago

> I’ve noticed that people tend to disapprove of AI trained on their profession’s data, but are usually indifferent or positive about other applications of AI. In other words: the banal observation that people care far more when their stuff is stolen than when some stranger has their stuff stolen.

bcrosby95 4y ago

I look at IP differently. For copyright, the act of me creating something doesn't deprive you of anything, except the ability to consume or use the thing I created. If I were influenced by something, you can still be influenced by that same thing - I do not exhaust any resources I used. This is wholely different from physical objects. If I create a knife, I deprive you of the ability to make something else from those natural resources. Natural resources that I didn't create - I merely exploited them. Because of this, I'm fine with copyright (patents are another story). But I have some issues with physical property.

yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago

I can think of two explanations for that off the top of my head. The first is that people only recognize the problems with the things that they're familiar with, which you would kind of expect. The other option is that there's a difference in the thing that people object to. My impression is that artists seem to be reacting to the idea that they could be automated out of a job, where programmers are mostly objecting to blatant copyright violation. (Not universally in either case, but often.) If that is the case, then those are genuinely different arguments made by different people.

joecot 4y ago

> For myself, I am skeptical of intellectual property in the first place. I say go for it. If we didn't live in a Capitalist society, that would be fair. But we currently do. That Capitalist society cares little about the well being of artists unless it can find a way to make their art profitable. Projects like DALL-E and Midjourney pillage centuries of human art and sell it back to us for a profit, while taking away work from artists who struggle to make ends meet as it is. Software Developers are generally less concerned about Copilot because they're still making 6 figures a year, but they'll start to get concerned if the technology gets smart enough that society needs less Developers. An automated future should be a good thing. It should mean that computers can take care of most tasks and humans can have more leisure time to relax and pursue their passions. The reason that artists and developers panic over things like this is that they are watching themselves be automated out of existence, and have seen how society treats people who aren't useful anymore.

lucideer 4y ago

I don't know specifically what DALL-E was trained on, but if it's art for which the artists' have not consented to it being used to train AI then that's problematic. I haven't seen any objections to DALL-E on that basis specifically though, whereas all the discussion of Copilot is around the fact that code authorship & Github accounts are not intrinsically tied together, making it impossible to have code authors consent to their code being used, regardless of what ToS someone's agreed to. > For myself, I am skeptical of intellectual property in the first place. I say go for it. I'm in a similar boat but this is precisely the reason I object so strongly to Copilot. IP has been invented & perpetuated/extended to protect large corporate interests, under the guise of protecting & sustaining innovators & creative individuals. Copilot is a perfect example of large corporate interest ignoring IP when it suits them to exploit individuals. In other words: the reason I'm skeptical of IP is the same reason I'm skeptical of Copilot.

__alexs 4y ago
Stable Diffusion and DallE were both trained on copyrighted content scraped from the internet with no consent from the publishers. It's quite a common complaint because some of the most popular prompts involve just appending an artist's name to something to get it to copy their style.

matheusmoreira 4y ago

> For myself, I am skeptical of intellectual property in the first place. I say go for it. Me too. I think copyright and these silly restrictions should be abolished. At the same time, I can't get over the fact these self-serving corporations are all about "all rights reserved" when it benefits them while at the same time undermining other people's rights. Microsoft absolutely knows that what they're doing is wrong. Recently it was pointed out to me that Microsoft employees can't even look at GPL source code, lest they subconsciously reproduce it. Yet they think their software can look at other people's code and reproduce it? What a load of BS. I'll forgive them for going for it the second copyright is gone. Then it won't be a crime for any of us to copy Windows and Office either. You bet we're gonna go for it too.

Schroedingersat 4y ago
> Then it won't be a crime for any of us to copy Windows and Office either. You bet we're gonna go for it too. Don't worry. At that time all of the available hardware will refuse to run any software unless it comes with a signed license from one of the big three.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

9wzYQbTYsAIc 4y ago

> [people] are usually indifferent or positive about other applications of AI That sounds like the pro-innovation bias: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pro-innovation_bias https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pro-innovation_bias

maxbond 4y ago

> I’ve noticed that people tend to disapprove of AI trained on their profession’s data, but are usually indifferent or positive about other applications of AI. This is a fascinating observation and I think there's a lot of truth to it. But maybe our inference should be that these systems mistreat each of us, even if it's difficult to see unless it's falling on you. Maybe a more important question than whether or not this is a violation of intellectual property is whether this is a violation of human dignity, not that it's illegal (though in this case, it may be) but that it's extremely rude in a way that we don't necessarily have the vocabulary for yet.

teawrecks 4y ago

When it comes to solving a problem, I want it to emit whatever solves the problem. When it comes to being an AI that understands coding concepts, I don't want it to regurgitate code verbatim. When it comes to being a product, I don't want it to plagiarize.

jrm4 4y ago

Again, as a lawyer, I think it's really important to focus on intent. The Constitution gives us "To promote the progress of science and Useful Arts" (which we've expanded.) So question one in the back of our heads should be "Are we promoting progress here?" That most often means protecting the little guy, and that's why I think it's mostly necessary, and also must be evaluated very skeptically.

ShamelessC 4y ago
Define progress. Good luck.
- jrm4 4y ago
  I mean, I don't have to do it alone. There's this thing called "the law" that's put in a little work on this :)
  - ShamelessC 4y ago
    Fair enough; from a legal framework that's a highly practical way to move forward. I don't think many people like to point at the current status quo, with all its flaws, and immediately think "the courts will help me!"; but you did mention you are a lawyer and I respect that you are working in the bounds of what is possible rather than what is ideal.

sattoshi 4y ago

While I personally wouldn’t care about it, I can understand someone taking offense at copilot for spitting out their code verbatim and claiming it isn’t theirs. Neither GPT nor Dall-e produces content that anyone can point to and say “they are laundering MY work”. The closest we’ve been to that point is the image generators spitting out copyright watermarks, but they are not clearly attributable to any one single image (afaik).

TaylorAlexander 4y ago

I am strongly against intellectual property, but I don’t like this idea that any one of us will get in big trouble for openly violating IP restrictions, but if one of these big companies scoops up copyrighted works for their AI it’s fine? The double standard is unfair. This all seems like a great opportunity for big companies to encourage the growth of Creative Commons, which would benefit everyone, but instead they’re making large private datasets only they control.

zahrc 4y ago

Quod licet Iovi, non licet bovi[0] [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quod_licet_Iovi,_non_licet_bovi https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quod_licet_Iovi,_non_licet_b...

dopidopHN 4y ago

I think you might be into something with your conclusion. Nonetheless that’s problematic for folks relying on the copyright as of now. I feel for artists here, devs won’t go hungry or jobless.

KrishnaShripad 4y ago

> I know artists who are vehemently against DALL-E, Stable Diffusion, etc. and regard it as stealing, but they view Copilot and GPT-3 as merely useful tools. An example: https://twitter.com/DaveScheidt/status/1578411434043580416 https://twitter.com/DaveScheidt/status/1578411434043580416 > I also know software devs who are extremely excited about AI art and GPT-3 but are outraged by Copilot. The fear is not unwarranted though. I can clearly see AI replacing most jobs (not just in tech) but art, crafts, music and even science. There probably will be no field untouched by AI in this decade and completely replaced by next decade. We have multiple extinction events for humanity lined up: Climate Change, Nuclear Apocalypse and now AI. We will have to not just work towards reducing harm to the Planet, but also work towards stopping meaningless Wars and figuring out how to deal with unemployment and economic crisis that is looming on the horizon. The only ones to suffer in the end would be the "elites" (or will they be the first depending on how quickly Civilization goes towards Anarchy?). Can't say for sure. But definitely gloomy days ahead.

cercatrova 4y ago

I often quote this comment regarding AI advances and jobs [0]: > Yes, many of us will turn into cowards when automation starts to touch our work, but that would not prove this sentiment incorrect - only that we're cowards. >> Dude. What the hell kind of anti-life philosophy are you subscribing to that calls "being unhappy about people trying to automate an entire field of human behavior" being a "coward". Geez. >>> Because automation is generally good, but making an exemption for specific cases of automation that personally inconvenience you is rooted is cowardice/selfishness. Similar to NIMBYism. It's true cowardice to assume that our own profession should be immune from AI while other professions are not. Either dislike all AI, or like it. To be in between is to be a hypocrite. For me, I definitely am on the side of full AI, even if it automates my job away, simply because I see AI as an advancing force on mankind. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32461138#32463198 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32461138#32463198

ironmagma 4y ago
It’s not hypocrisy to think some jobs shouldn’t be automated. I don’t teach, but I definitely want human teachers teaching my kin, not AI teachers.
- cercatrova 4y ago
  Perhaps, or perhaps not. We have not yet seen the true reach of pedagogy of AI. If AI can teach better than humans (something like the Matrix's brain uploading of training), then I will want to do that than have a human teach me.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

cypress66 4y ago

I'm actually fine with both. I think copyright/IP related to software needs to be toned down a lot. Software patents abolished. In my opinion the only thing that should be an infringement regarding code is copying entire non trivial files or entire projects outright. A 100 line snippet should not be copyrighteable. Only the entire work, which you could think as the composition of many of those snippets.

sanderjd 4y ago

For what it's worth, I think it's all very impressive and amazing but also really sketchy. Or at least, I think the developers of these systems need to be very careful about what they are allowed to do with what content, and I don't trust that they are doing that, because of articles like this one and others.

sinenomine 4y ago

I know much less programmers offended by copilot than artists offended by StableDiffusion. This is a mostly irrelevant red herring setting up professions against each other. Instead we should cooperate on a costly yet necessary decision of instituting a basic income, especially prioritizing professions about to be superseded by modern ML. Obviously, our decision-making class views the topic of instituting a realistic basic income right now as something extremely unpleasant, and so it goes. People who helped to bootstrap the AI should be compensated, at the very least by being able to live a modest lifestyle without having to work. Simple as.

sicp-enjoyer 4y ago

Does it cost money to produce high quality training sets? Yes. Would an organization or individual be willing to pay for samples for their data set? Absolutely. It seems pretty easy to discern that value is being taken from people.

stevewatson301 4y ago

The last time I happened to point this out[1], all I got was a bunch of HNers nitpicking the words I chose, but not addressing the core issue. I have to assume this is just people being protective of their own profession and consequently, setting up a high bar for what constitutes as performance in that profession. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32895251#32895709 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32895251#32895709

orbital-decay 4y ago

There's a substantial difference between being trained and being overfit to repeat training data 1:1. Overtraining is a bug of a model, not a feature. For example, Stable Diffusion 1.4 is overtrained on one specific Aivazovsky painting (among some others by other authors, like Mona Lisa, or Sunflowers - Van Gogh painted several of those). Copilot was famously overtrained on Carmack's fast square root code, so they had to block it programmatically after receiving bad publicity. Both are not intended by model authors, this is a flaw.

sireat 4y ago

I must be in the minority of programmers that I really really like Copilot but am indifferent about Stable Diffusion/Dall-E/midJourney. Copilot on Python makes me x5 more productive. I used Copilot in Beta for a year and continue paying for it now. For example: I can make a command line data wrangling script for a novel data set in a few minutes with a few prompts with full complement of extras (proper argparse parameters with sane defaults, ready to import etc etc). # reasonable comments included for free as well Before copilot I could do the same in about 20-30minutes but my code would be a mess with little commenting. I would spend 30-60 minutes just looking up docs for various libraries. Now without Copilot, if all I was doing was writing data wrangling scripts 4 hours a day I could approach this Copilot like productivity for a single task. However with Copilot I can switch problem domains very quickly and remain productive. Interestingly, on something like CSS or Javascript - Copilot is helping only slightly, maybe because my local training set is insufficient and my web-dev prompts are too generic. So I think AI can be fantastic force multiplier in a skillset that you already are reasonably familiarity. I can handle the 5-10% wtf Python code that Copilot produces. I do not particularly like copyrights and do wish Copilot had been trained on private Microsoft code as well.