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What do people think the future looks like where publicly available resources on the Internet (art, code, etc) aren't fair use for training ML models? Where you

What do people think the future looks like where publicly available resources on the Internet (art, code, etc) aren't fair use for training ML models? Where you have to opt into models or can opt out (and many wind up doing so)? OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, et al will STILL train such models that can do all the same things, but it will be much harder for non-industry-backed individuals to navigate the legal minefield where you must ensure you properly attribute your model outputs, only train on opt-in data, etc, etc. Surely no one really thinks that a court case against Microsoft/OpenAI (even if they lose) would stop CoPilot? Most of these complaints seem to be extremely emotional and cherry-picked. "People's legal rights are being violated!" (you definitely don't know that, no one knows that, the article is 100% right about that), "look I prompted CoPilot for this piece of code that I already knew about and it spit it right out" (that's not how it's going to be used in practice). It seems to me that the longer-term implications of the outcome of a lawsuit like this are far more interesting, yet almost all the comments I see are nitpicking and whining about how the world isn't the way they want it to be. I wish the conversations around generative AI could be...just better.

downrightmike 4y ago
It creates a body of knowledge, everyone can use and can't be sued for since it would be the industry standard way to do things.
- nordsieck 4y ago
  > It creates a body of knowledge, everyone can use and can't be sued for since it would be the industry standard way to do things. That's just not true. If the "industry standard way to do things" is to violate other peoples' copyright, then everyone doing that absolutely can be sued. And while it's not clear if using these AI tools constitutes copyright infringement, it looks to me like there's at least a very strong case that could be made. And at up to $10,000 per copy (register your code with the copyright office if you care about this issue!), that starts to add up very quickly. Even for a company like Microsoft.
gfynt 4y ago
If they continue that path, the future will be that OpenAI, Microsoft, Google etc. will pay larger and larger fines at least in the EU, until they are blocked entirely.
- pixl97 4y ago
  And the EU will continue to fall farther and farther behind in software development.
  - Tijdreiziger 4y ago
    If that’s what it takes to uphold EU citizens’ legal and moral rights, so be it. People said the GDPR would hinder business too.
  - rwalle 4y ago
    Yeah, regulation is definitely the only reason Europe is behind. /s
    - CamperBob2 4y ago
      What are some other reasons?
  - thrillgore 4y ago
    While continuing to represent individual rights? That sounds like a good compromise to me.
- toss1 4y ago
  Which may be entirely justifiable Earlier HN thread today on a large chunk of OS code pasted almost verbatim by the CoPilot engine into a project, but stripped of any licensing references. Within the last few days, another thread on artists who have spent decades developing a unique and valuable style are making parallel complaints about Dall-E/SD/etc., where inputting "Xyz in the style of [Artist]" produces exactly a copy of [Artist]'s unique style, barely distinguishable from the original. These engines are fairly literally giant collage engines, able to parse language inputs and output a collage of the input works. Maybe some are small snippets so it could be fair use, but they are also evidently capable of outputs of a far larger scope, amounting to wholesale ripoff. Opting out or not posting on Github or whatever prevents nothing, as stuff is posted everywhere by many, and with code, it's totally legit posting a fork under OS licensing. Is there a solution analogous to a <NoRobots> flag? How do we verify it? Will there soon be HaveIBeenUsedAsTraining adversarial systems to probe these output engines? Not sure of the solution, but this seems to rather rapidly overstepping boundaries of creators.
giobox 4y ago
Its not popular to say it, but I agree to some extent here too. We may need a wholesale reimagining of copyright/patents in many places to accept the new reality of both of building the tools (data to train) and in accepting the occasional bad output (copyright/patented function appears in output). I think watching the law evolve with the tech is going to have a lot of ups and downs.
- nomagicbullet 4y ago
  I think you hit the nail on the head. Our laws and rules were created for a cultural context that is quickly becoming outdated. I feel there are many valid criticisms of AI today, but demonizing the technology doesn't allow for fruitful discussions. We need to evolve our thinking and we need to be open minded to do so first.
  - ROTMetro 4y ago
    What makes the rules outdated? The fact that you want to get away with what they were designed to prevent?
    - faeriechangling 4y ago
      Yes, I like doing things that people prevent me from doing.
planetsprite 4y ago
Any law where the penalty is a fine only exists for the poor. Any regulation where the penalty is in the millions only exists for small businesses.
- Plasmoid 4y ago
  I guess that's true. If you consider laws to be strictly transactional then you can totally do the crime if you're willing to do the time. I'm just not convinced by the idea that any penalty less than death isn't a penalty.
  - arrosenberg 4y ago
    Lots of distance between small monetary fines and a death penalty. I would settle for executives and board members going to jail when they do crimes.
  - kevingadd 4y ago
    Penalties that scale off the offender's income/revenues work a lot better. They're common in some countries.
  - nix0n 4y ago
    Any penalty less than the profit, isn't an effective penalty, and won't act as a deterrent. The Securities and Exchange Commission (USA) has a history of giving million-dollar fines for crimes that produced billions in profit and/or took billions away from victims. And the lack of deterrence has been reflected in the actions of the US financial industry.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
klyrs 4y ago
> "look I prompted CoPilot for this piece of code that I already knew about and it spit it right out" https://twitter.com/docsparse/status/1581461734665367554 https://twitter.com/docsparse/status/1581461734665367554 An english description plus three characters of a function name is enough to coax CoPilot into distributing LGPL-licensed code out of context, without a proper license. That's neither "emotional" nor "cherry-picked", it's a clear-cut license violation.
- williamcotton 4y ago
  - striking 4y ago
    From your second link: > In a computer program, the lowest level of abstraction, the concrete code of the program, is clearly expression, while the highest level of abstraction, the general function of the program, might be better classified as the idea behind the program. Copilot is alleged to be reproducing blocks of code verbatim, which fall into the expression side of the idea/expression distinction, which by your own links and statements appears to show that the allegations against Copilot are not false. I'm not going to say you're necessarily disagreeing with reality (I'm not really sure what that's supposed to mean) but you're certainly contradicting the evidence you've brought.
    - dragonwriter 4y ago
      This quote: > In a computer program, the lowest level of abstraction, the concrete code of the program, is clearly expression, while the highest level of abstraction, the general function of the program, might be better classified as the idea behind the program. Seems to be trying to force everything associated with programming into a false “expressive/abstract idea” divide. Abstract ideas are distinct from expression and not subject to copyright, but not everything outside of the scope of copyright is abstract rather than detailed: notably, functional elements.
      - 4y ago
nmilo 4y ago
> What do people think the future looks like where publicly available resources on the Internet (art, code, etc) aren't fair use for training ML models? A better future to me. I don't want pictures of my face training ML models, nor do I want my art, or my code. I don't want my face to be more recognizable to AI, and I don't want my work to contribute to the consolidation of power to a few big firms. And for what, what can ML models even bring me besides surveillance? Cool art? Text-to-speech?
- rockemsockem 4y ago
  IDK how generative models can really be used for surveillance? Certainly facial recognition models etc, can be, but those would seem to be appropriately covered by the Google Books ruling dealing with discriminitive models: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild,_Inc._v._Google,_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild,_Inc._v._Google,.... They've also been a thing for quite a while, so I think that cat escaped the bag a long time ago. Remember clip art in Microsoft Word back in the day? Now there is an infinite supply of that. Stock images? Infinite supply. Solo filmmakers are going to have a much easier time creating their own films that can rival the best movie studios in the world. Any text anywhere will be read to you in any voice or voices you like, with tone and setting appropriate sound-effects. Smaller things will just be better too, noise cancellation on microphones? Easy and free. Image editing? Trivial to remove, relight, reposition, etc, etc, etc. So many other things too. It's going to be magnificent. If you're not into then I guess to each their own, but I do think we are looking at something that can be a net good for everyone in the world, so long as it's available and cheap for everyone in the world.
- pmarreck 4y ago
  what if a service could tell you everywhere your photo was on the Internet?
  - shakna 4y ago
    Such a service would make a great and fantastic service for stalkers to bypass the usual difficulties in locating someone who has done the best to excise them from their life.
throwaway8820 4y ago
I personally expect the law to end up with a "safe harbor"-like situation. Consider YouTube. Occasional copyrighted content does not make YouTube illegal, or able to be held liable for slip-ups. See the DMCA as well, which requires takedowns upon notice, but otherwise provides near total indemnity for user-generated content. Because of this, if the law looks at GitHub Copilot, I would expect that they would find Copilot to be A-OK despite the occasional regurgitation of copyrighted material that isn't fair-use, as long as it is removed upon request.
Tijdreiziger 4y ago
Well, what does the future where those materials are free use look like? You argue that desiring ownership of works that you created is “extremely emotional and cherry-picked”, but you do not provide a compelling argument why artists, photographers, and indeed programmers should be excluded from the conversation when it is their art, photography and code that is being appropriated in the first place.
- rockemsockem 4y ago
  I think that future has a lot of really cool and cheap tools that will help all those artists, photographers, programmers, etc get even more out of what they love doing. I think there will wind up being some job markets that shrink (not with the tech we have now though) for small-medium things in all of these fields (think logo design, stock photos, client libraries, simple out-of-the-box applications) and my hope is that those job markets that shrink cause others to grow due to the increased levels of productivity that these tools will give us. Ultimately my argument is that these tools will allow human beings to accomplish more things with less and that these tools should be distributed to as many people as possible for as little cost as possible. Part of that belief comes from the fact that I think these tools are coming no matter what and I'm slightly concerned about the potential (although unlikely-looking) future where a small number of large corporations are the only ones controlling these tools and they just rent-seek on them.
  - hladder 4y ago
    The job market for cheap rehashed garbage will grow and quality productions will suffer. For programmers, the job market for loud-mouthed posers and plagiarizers will grow and quality will suffer. But those programmers will be fluent in marketing speak.
    - rockemsockem 4y ago
      In a world where the cost of producing cheap rehashed garbage approaches 0 why would the job market for cheap rehashed garbage grow at the expense of the expensive unique gems market? There will definitely be more cheap rehashed garbage online and we will be forced to invent tools to wade through it. I actually look at that as a bright side because there's already a lot of cheap rehashed garbage, we just don't have good tools for wading through it yet because it hasn't become completely intolerable yet.
j2kun 4y ago
There are plenty of regulations that only apply to companies with more than X employees, etc. What makes you think any way to improve the law would necessarily harm individuals?
nkrisc 4y ago
> look I prompted CoPilot for this piece of code that I already knew about and it spit it right out" (that's not how it's going to be used in practice). So what? I’m not being snarky: does that actually make any difference, legally?
grepLeigh 4y ago
I'm expecting to see dual-licensing used as precedent here. Github/OpenAI should have to pay a licensing fee to use GPL and similarly-licensed code in their closed-source derivative IP (CoPilot).
baryphonic 4y ago
> What do people think the future looks like where publicly available resources on the Internet (art, code, etc) aren't fair use for training ML models? Where you have to opt into models or can opt out (and many wind up doing so)? A future where technology is developed in accordance with longstanding law? Also, maybe a future where my copyrighted works are compensated for when they're being used to automate my job away? If the music industry can deal with royalties, maybe software can, too? > OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, et al will STILL train such models that can do all the same things, but it will be much harder for non-industry-backed individuals to navigate the legal minefield where you must ensure you properly attribute your model outputs, only train on opt-in data, etc, etc. Surely no one really thinks that a court case against Microsoft/OpenAI (even if they lose) would stop CoPilot? I'd expect injunctions against Microsoft/OpenAI from further training CoPilot with inappropriately-licensed code. I'd expect damages for all of the instances of copyrighted material that CoPilot regurgitates. > Most of these complaints seem to be extremely emotional and cherry-picked. "People's legal rights are being violated!" (you definitely don't know that, no one knows that, the article is 100% right about that), "look I prompted CoPilot for this piece of code that I already knew about and it spit it right out" (that's not how it's going to be used in practice). How are these emotional? They're opinions, like all legal claims, supported by facts. It doesn't really matter if they're "cherry-picked" or not, only whether CoPilot actually violated copyright. If it gives seemingly novel results 999 times out of 1000, but in the other case verbatim generates copyrighted material without proper permission, then that is a copyright violation. At scale, that's a copyright violation with some modest damages even.
- randallsquared 4y ago
  > If the music industry can deal with royalties, maybe software can, too? Maybe this is not the industry to emulate: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/11/how-musicians-really-make-money-in-one-long-graph/249267/ https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/11/how-mus...
numpad0 4y ago
I think I agree with this comment[1] from the other thread; never previously thought that a process being transformative means input and output datatypes do not coincide, but maybe that is it. 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33240681 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33240681
- rockemsockem 4y ago
  That's an interesting take, the whole level of indirection thing between Microsoft-OpenAI and StabilityAI and that research group is certainly another dimension to this that sort of muddies the waters.
  - kapoxjHLuMm1 4y ago
    very interesting indeed
batmanturkey 4y ago
You should read the article before commenting. The WAY it was done with copilot is the problem: no attribution, just shoving all legal liability off on the end “programmer” without providing the attribution required TO COMPLY WITH LICENSES as the diligent programmer tries to clear all the code copilot handed it without meta data. Go read the article before arguing further, please. Otherwise you are wasting all of our time.
- rockemsockem 4y ago
  I did read the article first. Start-to-finish. As others have pointed out, it's a very visually appealing website. I hope that when a case on generative models hits the courts that it's found that training on data from the Internet counts as fair use. I hope that for the reasons I laid out in my comment, because I think that if it isn't then we are all in trouble since these tools will STILL EXIST, but they will be in the hands of the few instead of the many. My main reaction is to how short-sighted it seems like the authors and many others are being about this technology in general. They seem to think they can just wish it away. I also think that training on data from the Internet is fair-use, but I'm not a lawyer and I haven't studied the law extensively, so who cares what I think about that.
- abigail95 4y ago
  The only waste of time in this thread is people making allegations about copyright infringement without applying a fair use test.
anothernewdude 4y ago
I foresee licenses that contain 'upon training an AI network with this code, you give us an irrevocable license to your source code and IP' clauses. Assuming they will even get off the ground with their copilot system not suggesting vulnerabilities and license traps already.
MichaelZuo 4y ago
There does seem to be more heat and noise then substantive discussions here. Though that doesn't justify such a dismissive attitude towards ordinary HN commenters. As the way it's written implies that most are too stupid and overly emotional, which is more likely to fuel complaints instead of dousing them.
ummonk 4y ago
You could still train your AI on, for example, Wikimedia Commons and simply add the required license to the output of your model.
majormajor 4y ago
It's a bit of a bait and switch (obviously not literally, these things didn't exist so nobody was ever promised they wouldn't be used). But in terms of user behavior, it's rather the same. I used to make more stuff publicly available online than I do now, and the mass-scale surveillance and data modeling that big companies do off of publicly available stuff is a big part of that. Generally that's how you get walled gardens - by abusing the commons - but here you'd need not just a walled garden but a TINY TINY invitation only one if you don't want people doing mass surveillance and data modeling (CoPilot is really more of the latter than the former, but any of this "scrape the whole internet" stuff is just a tiny little sidestep away from being used for more blatantly evil surveillance purposes - here we're training a generative model, they're we're de-annonymizing everything you've written anywhere...). Is there a good solution to "BigCos are gonna do whatever they want with the shit you make" other than invite-only, paid-content type models?
saghm 4y ago
> "People's legal rights are being violated!" (you definitely don't know that, no one knows that, the article is 100% right about that) I'm not sure what the argument being made here is. If you make something opaque enough that no one can tell if it's violating legal rights, no one is allowed to say anything about it? This seems uncomfortably close to "it's only a crime if you get caught"
gernb 4y ago
My 2 cents, 1. I think if you don't want your code re-used in CoPilot you should have that right 2. I think if CoPilot gets smart enough that it can read your open source code and then reproduce the algorithms without copying your code that should be fair use. It's the same thing a human would do. AFAIK CoPilot can not do that but I can certainly imagine it's not too many years away from that. 3. I think I would opt into sharing all my open source code mostly unrestricted with services like CoPilot. I think the group of people that choose to share their code with AI will do better over all than those that lock their code behind licenses. Note that I'm referring to snippets of code. I don't know what a good definition of snippet is. In other words, if AI helps me write chunks of 10-100 lines at a time I don't see a problem. Effectively, S.O. answer level of snippets. Whereas, if I tell AI "create LibreOffice" and it clones the millions of lines of code, I think that is a problem. I don't know where the cut off is.
- phire 4y ago
  What you describe, is what co-pilot already does most of the time. The examples where people can show it reproducing snippits of code are more the exception than the rule. And they are usually done by people who are trying to manuliption into proving that it can reproduce copyrighted code. Some people tend to think of it as a search engine. Looking though it's database for relevant snippets for the current situation and regurgitating them unmodified. But that's really not what it's doing. It's more like the AI autocomplete on your phone, but for code. It might not be able to understand the algorithms. But it seems to be able to adapt simple algorithms that it's seen multiple times in it's training data to match the surrounding code (in style, naming conventions, and actually using the variable/functions you already have). I don't have number, but from my experience, I would say it generates uniqu(ish) non-copyrighted code at least 95% of the time. The only question is what to do about the other times when it does occasionally output potentially copyright infringing code, either by accident, or when it's forced.
- wilsonnb3 4y ago
  > 1. I think if you don't want your code re-used in CoPilot you should have that right People already have that right - all you have to do is not host your code on GitHub.
EamonnMR 4y ago
I don't think that having emotional discussions around technology that does no less than provoke homan emotions on command is low quality.
snickerbockers 4y ago
>OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, et al will STILL train such models that can do all the same things, but it will be much harder for non-industry-backed individuals to navigate the legal minefield where you must ensure you properly attribute your model outputs, only train on opt-in data, etc, etc. Surely no one really thinks that a court case against Microsoft/OpenAI (even if they lose) would stop CoPilot? I don't fucking care, I'm not in the business of competing with OpenAI or whatever. If you want to launch and AI startup but you can't that's your fucking problem, not mine. I just don't want them violating the licenses of the open-source programs I have created. > "look I prompted CoPilot for this piece of code that I already knew about and it spit it right out" (that's not how it's going to be used in practice). It proves that copilot has the capacity to copy existing code without fulfilling the requirements of the license. I don't care if it's "cherrypicked", this shouldn't happen under any circumstances. > I wish the conversations around generative AI could be...just better. I wish that these people making all these complicated language-comprehension machine-learning systems could read the fucking license statement at the top of the file and copy that license statement along with the code. this ought to be a solvable problem. I'm pretty sure i could write a bash script that does it if M$ is looking to hire.
- lucasyvas 4y ago
  The removal of the license where the code was learned is the real tidbit that everyone needs to focus on. This is where the laundering comments come from. The product would be useless if it prompted you with license approvals. They didn't care and removed them. They consciously decided to prioritize their paid-for product over the rights of their users. I'm amazed that MS's lawyers allowed it out the door. That's the even scarier part.
deleted 4y ago
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brigandish 4y ago
> that's not how it's going to be used in practice If I'm writing some code and want the suggestion to be good then why wouldn't I use the name of a top programmer as a prompt?

downrightmike 4y ago

It creates a body of knowledge, everyone can use and can't be sued for since it would be the industry standard way to do things.

nordsieck 4y ago
> It creates a body of knowledge, everyone can use and can't be sued for since it would be the industry standard way to do things. That's just not true. If the "industry standard way to do things" is to violate other peoples' copyright, then everyone doing that absolutely can be sued. And while it's not clear if using these AI tools constitutes copyright infringement, it looks to me like there's at least a very strong case that could be made. And at up to $10,000 per copy (register your code with the copyright office if you care about this issue!), that starts to add up very quickly. Even for a company like Microsoft.

gfynt 4y ago

If they continue that path, the future will be that OpenAI, Microsoft, Google etc. will pay larger and larger fines at least in the EU, until they are blocked entirely.

pixl97 4y ago
And the EU will continue to fall farther and farther behind in software development.
- Tijdreiziger 4y ago
  If that’s what it takes to uphold EU citizens’ legal and moral rights, so be it. People said the GDPR would hinder business too.
- rwalle 4y ago
  Yeah, regulation is definitely the only reason Europe is behind. /s
  - CamperBob2 4y ago
    What are some other reasons?
- thrillgore 4y ago
  While continuing to represent individual rights? That sounds like a good compromise to me.
toss1 4y ago
Which may be entirely justifiable Earlier HN thread today on a large chunk of OS code pasted almost verbatim by the CoPilot engine into a project, but stripped of any licensing references. Within the last few days, another thread on artists who have spent decades developing a unique and valuable style are making parallel complaints about Dall-E/SD/etc., where inputting "Xyz in the style of [Artist]" produces exactly a copy of [Artist]'s unique style, barely distinguishable from the original. These engines are fairly literally giant collage engines, able to parse language inputs and output a collage of the input works. Maybe some are small snippets so it could be fair use, but they are also evidently capable of outputs of a far larger scope, amounting to wholesale ripoff. Opting out or not posting on Github or whatever prevents nothing, as stuff is posted everywhere by many, and with code, it's totally legit posting a fork under OS licensing. Is there a solution analogous to a <NoRobots> flag? How do we verify it? Will there soon be HaveIBeenUsedAsTraining adversarial systems to probe these output engines? Not sure of the solution, but this seems to rather rapidly overstepping boundaries of creators.

giobox 4y ago

Its not popular to say it, but I agree to some extent here too. We may need a wholesale reimagining of copyright/patents in many places to accept the new reality of both of building the tools (data to train) and in accepting the occasional bad output (copyright/patented function appears in output). I think watching the law evolve with the tech is going to have a lot of ups and downs.

nomagicbullet 4y ago
I think you hit the nail on the head. Our laws and rules were created for a cultural context that is quickly becoming outdated. I feel there are many valid criticisms of AI today, but demonizing the technology doesn't allow for fruitful discussions. We need to evolve our thinking and we need to be open minded to do so first.
- ROTMetro 4y ago
  What makes the rules outdated? The fact that you want to get away with what they were designed to prevent?
  - faeriechangling 4y ago
    Yes, I like doing things that people prevent me from doing.

planetsprite 4y ago

Any law where the penalty is a fine only exists for the poor. Any regulation where the penalty is in the millions only exists for small businesses.

Plasmoid 4y ago
I guess that's true. If you consider laws to be strictly transactional then you can totally do the crime if you're willing to do the time. I'm just not convinced by the idea that any penalty less than death isn't a penalty.
- arrosenberg 4y ago
  Lots of distance between small monetary fines and a death penalty. I would settle for executives and board members going to jail when they do crimes.
- kevingadd 4y ago
  Penalties that scale off the offender's income/revenues work a lot better. They're common in some countries.
- nix0n 4y ago
  Any penalty less than the profit, isn't an effective penalty, and won't act as a deterrent. The Securities and Exchange Commission (USA) has a history of giving million-dollar fines for crimes that produced billions in profit and/or took billions away from victims. And the lack of deterrence has been reflected in the actions of the US financial industry.
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klyrs 4y ago

> "look I prompted CoPilot for this piece of code that I already knew about and it spit it right out" https://twitter.com/docsparse/status/1581461734665367554 https://twitter.com/docsparse/status/1581461734665367554 An english description plus three characters of a function name is enough to coax CoPilot into distributing LGPL-licensed code out of context, without a proper license. That's neither "emotional" nor "cherry-picked", it's a clear-cut license violation.

williamcotton 4y ago
- striking 4y ago
  From your second link: > In a computer program, the lowest level of abstraction, the concrete code of the program, is clearly expression, while the highest level of abstraction, the general function of the program, might be better classified as the idea behind the program. Copilot is alleged to be reproducing blocks of code verbatim, which fall into the expression side of the idea/expression distinction, which by your own links and statements appears to show that the allegations against Copilot are not false. I'm not going to say you're necessarily disagreeing with reality (I'm not really sure what that's supposed to mean) but you're certainly contradicting the evidence you've brought.
  - dragonwriter 4y ago
    This quote: > In a computer program, the lowest level of abstraction, the concrete code of the program, is clearly expression, while the highest level of abstraction, the general function of the program, might be better classified as the idea behind the program. Seems to be trying to force everything associated with programming into a false “expressive/abstract idea” divide. Abstract ideas are distinct from expression and not subject to copyright, but not everything outside of the scope of copyright is abstract rather than detailed: notably, functional elements.
    - 4y ago

nmilo 4y ago

> What do people think the future looks like where publicly available resources on the Internet (art, code, etc) aren't fair use for training ML models? A better future to me. I don't want pictures of my face training ML models, nor do I want my art, or my code. I don't want my face to be more recognizable to AI, and I don't want my work to contribute to the consolidation of power to a few big firms. And for what, what can ML models even bring me besides surveillance? Cool art? Text-to-speech?

rockemsockem 4y ago
IDK how generative models can really be used for surveillance? Certainly facial recognition models etc, can be, but those would seem to be appropriately covered by the Google Books ruling dealing with discriminitive models: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild,_Inc._v._Google,_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild,_Inc._v._Google,.... They've also been a thing for quite a while, so I think that cat escaped the bag a long time ago. Remember clip art in Microsoft Word back in the day? Now there is an infinite supply of that. Stock images? Infinite supply. Solo filmmakers are going to have a much easier time creating their own films that can rival the best movie studios in the world. Any text anywhere will be read to you in any voice or voices you like, with tone and setting appropriate sound-effects. Smaller things will just be better too, noise cancellation on microphones? Easy and free. Image editing? Trivial to remove, relight, reposition, etc, etc, etc. So many other things too. It's going to be magnificent. If you're not into then I guess to each their own, but I do think we are looking at something that can be a net good for everyone in the world, so long as it's available and cheap for everyone in the world.
pmarreck 4y ago
what if a service could tell you everywhere your photo was on the Internet?
- shakna 4y ago
  Such a service would make a great and fantastic service for stalkers to bypass the usual difficulties in locating someone who has done the best to excise them from their life.

throwaway8820 4y ago

I personally expect the law to end up with a "safe harbor"-like situation. Consider YouTube. Occasional copyrighted content does not make YouTube illegal, or able to be held liable for slip-ups. See the DMCA as well, which requires takedowns upon notice, but otherwise provides near total indemnity for user-generated content. Because of this, if the law looks at GitHub Copilot, I would expect that they would find Copilot to be A-OK despite the occasional regurgitation of copyrighted material that isn't fair-use, as long as it is removed upon request.

Tijdreiziger 4y ago

Well, what does the future where those materials are free use look like? You argue that desiring ownership of works that you created is “extremely emotional and cherry-picked”, but you do not provide a compelling argument why artists, photographers, and indeed programmers should be excluded from the conversation when it is their art, photography and code that is being appropriated in the first place.

rockemsockem 4y ago
I think that future has a lot of really cool and cheap tools that will help all those artists, photographers, programmers, etc get even more out of what they love doing. I think there will wind up being some job markets that shrink (not with the tech we have now though) for small-medium things in all of these fields (think logo design, stock photos, client libraries, simple out-of-the-box applications) and my hope is that those job markets that shrink cause others to grow due to the increased levels of productivity that these tools will give us. Ultimately my argument is that these tools will allow human beings to accomplish more things with less and that these tools should be distributed to as many people as possible for as little cost as possible. Part of that belief comes from the fact that I think these tools are coming no matter what and I'm slightly concerned about the potential (although unlikely-looking) future where a small number of large corporations are the only ones controlling these tools and they just rent-seek on them.
- hladder 4y ago
  The job market for cheap rehashed garbage will grow and quality productions will suffer. For programmers, the job market for loud-mouthed posers and plagiarizers will grow and quality will suffer. But those programmers will be fluent in marketing speak.
  - rockemsockem 4y ago
    In a world where the cost of producing cheap rehashed garbage approaches 0 why would the job market for cheap rehashed garbage grow at the expense of the expensive unique gems market? There will definitely be more cheap rehashed garbage online and we will be forced to invent tools to wade through it. I actually look at that as a bright side because there's already a lot of cheap rehashed garbage, we just don't have good tools for wading through it yet because it hasn't become completely intolerable yet.

j2kun 4y ago

There are plenty of regulations that only apply to companies with more than X employees, etc. What makes you think any way to improve the law would necessarily harm individuals?

nkrisc 4y ago

> look I prompted CoPilot for this piece of code that I already knew about and it spit it right out" (that's not how it's going to be used in practice). So what? I’m not being snarky: does that actually make any difference, legally?

grepLeigh 4y ago

I'm expecting to see dual-licensing used as precedent here. Github/OpenAI should have to pay a licensing fee to use GPL and similarly-licensed code in their closed-source derivative IP (CoPilot).

baryphonic 4y ago

> What do people think the future looks like where publicly available resources on the Internet (art, code, etc) aren't fair use for training ML models? Where you have to opt into models or can opt out (and many wind up doing so)? A future where technology is developed in accordance with longstanding law? Also, maybe a future where my copyrighted works are compensated for when they're being used to automate my job away? If the music industry can deal with royalties, maybe software can, too? > OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, et al will STILL train such models that can do all the same things, but it will be much harder for non-industry-backed individuals to navigate the legal minefield where you must ensure you properly attribute your model outputs, only train on opt-in data, etc, etc. Surely no one really thinks that a court case against Microsoft/OpenAI (even if they lose) would stop CoPilot? I'd expect injunctions against Microsoft/OpenAI from further training CoPilot with inappropriately-licensed code. I'd expect damages for all of the instances of copyrighted material that CoPilot regurgitates. > Most of these complaints seem to be extremely emotional and cherry-picked. "People's legal rights are being violated!" (you definitely don't know that, no one knows that, the article is 100% right about that), "look I prompted CoPilot for this piece of code that I already knew about and it spit it right out" (that's not how it's going to be used in practice). How are these emotional? They're opinions, like all legal claims, supported by facts. It doesn't really matter if they're "cherry-picked" or not, only whether CoPilot actually violated copyright. If it gives seemingly novel results 999 times out of 1000, but in the other case verbatim generates copyrighted material without proper permission, then that is a copyright violation. At scale, that's a copyright violation with some modest damages even.

randallsquared 4y ago
> If the music industry can deal with royalties, maybe software can, too? Maybe this is not the industry to emulate: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/11/how-musicians-really-make-money-in-one-long-graph/249267/ https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/11/how-mus...

numpad0 4y ago

I think I agree with this comment[1] from the other thread; never previously thought that a process being transformative means input and output datatypes do not coincide, but maybe that is it. 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33240681 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33240681

rockemsockem 4y ago
That's an interesting take, the whole level of indirection thing between Microsoft-OpenAI and StabilityAI and that research group is certainly another dimension to this that sort of muddies the waters.
- kapoxjHLuMm1 4y ago
  very interesting indeed

batmanturkey 4y ago

You should read the article before commenting. The WAY it was done with copilot is the problem: no attribution, just shoving all legal liability off on the end “programmer” without providing the attribution required TO COMPLY WITH LICENSES as the diligent programmer tries to clear all the code copilot handed it without meta data. Go read the article before arguing further, please. Otherwise you are wasting all of our time.

rockemsockem 4y ago
I did read the article first. Start-to-finish. As others have pointed out, it's a very visually appealing website. I hope that when a case on generative models hits the courts that it's found that training on data from the Internet counts as fair use. I hope that for the reasons I laid out in my comment, because I think that if it isn't then we are all in trouble since these tools will STILL EXIST, but they will be in the hands of the few instead of the many. My main reaction is to how short-sighted it seems like the authors and many others are being about this technology in general. They seem to think they can just wish it away. I also think that training on data from the Internet is fair-use, but I'm not a lawyer and I haven't studied the law extensively, so who cares what I think about that.
abigail95 4y ago
The only waste of time in this thread is people making allegations about copyright infringement without applying a fair use test.

anothernewdude 4y ago

I foresee licenses that contain 'upon training an AI network with this code, you give us an irrevocable license to your source code and IP' clauses. Assuming they will even get off the ground with their copilot system not suggesting vulnerabilities and license traps already.

MichaelZuo 4y ago

There does seem to be more heat and noise then substantive discussions here. Though that doesn't justify such a dismissive attitude towards ordinary HN commenters. As the way it's written implies that most are too stupid and overly emotional, which is more likely to fuel complaints instead of dousing them.

ummonk 4y ago

You could still train your AI on, for example, Wikimedia Commons and simply add the required license to the output of your model.

majormajor 4y ago

It's a bit of a bait and switch (obviously not literally, these things didn't exist so nobody was ever promised they wouldn't be used). But in terms of user behavior, it's rather the same. I used to make more stuff publicly available online than I do now, and the mass-scale surveillance and data modeling that big companies do off of publicly available stuff is a big part of that. Generally that's how you get walled gardens - by abusing the commons - but here you'd need not just a walled garden but a TINY TINY invitation only one if you don't want people doing mass surveillance and data modeling (CoPilot is really more of the latter than the former, but any of this "scrape the whole internet" stuff is just a tiny little sidestep away from being used for more blatantly evil surveillance purposes - here we're training a generative model, they're we're de-annonymizing everything you've written anywhere...). Is there a good solution to "BigCos are gonna do whatever they want with the shit you make" other than invite-only, paid-content type models?

saghm 4y ago

> "People's legal rights are being violated!" (you definitely don't know that, no one knows that, the article is 100% right about that) I'm not sure what the argument being made here is. If you make something opaque enough that no one can tell if it's violating legal rights, no one is allowed to say anything about it? This seems uncomfortably close to "it's only a crime if you get caught"

gernb 4y ago

My 2 cents, 1. I think if you don't want your code re-used in CoPilot you should have that right 2. I think if CoPilot gets smart enough that it can read your open source code and then reproduce the algorithms without copying your code that should be fair use. It's the same thing a human would do. AFAIK CoPilot can not do that but I can certainly imagine it's not too many years away from that. 3. I think I would opt into sharing all my open source code mostly unrestricted with services like CoPilot. I think the group of people that choose to share their code with AI will do better over all than those that lock their code behind licenses. Note that I'm referring to snippets of code. I don't know what a good definition of snippet is. In other words, if AI helps me write chunks of 10-100 lines at a time I don't see a problem. Effectively, S.O. answer level of snippets. Whereas, if I tell AI "create LibreOffice" and it clones the millions of lines of code, I think that is a problem. I don't know where the cut off is.

phire 4y ago
What you describe, is what co-pilot already does most of the time. The examples where people can show it reproducing snippits of code are more the exception than the rule. And they are usually done by people who are trying to manuliption into proving that it can reproduce copyrighted code. Some people tend to think of it as a search engine. Looking though it's database for relevant snippets for the current situation and regurgitating them unmodified. But that's really not what it's doing. It's more like the AI autocomplete on your phone, but for code. It might not be able to understand the algorithms. But it seems to be able to adapt simple algorithms that it's seen multiple times in it's training data to match the surrounding code (in style, naming conventions, and actually using the variable/functions you already have). I don't have number, but from my experience, I would say it generates uniqu(ish) non-copyrighted code at least 95% of the time. The only question is what to do about the other times when it does occasionally output potentially copyright infringing code, either by accident, or when it's forced.
wilsonnb3 4y ago
> 1. I think if you don't want your code re-used in CoPilot you should have that right People already have that right - all you have to do is not host your code on GitHub.

EamonnMR 4y ago

I don't think that having emotional discussions around technology that does no less than provoke homan emotions on command is low quality.

snickerbockers 4y ago

>OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, et al will STILL train such models that can do all the same things, but it will be much harder for non-industry-backed individuals to navigate the legal minefield where you must ensure you properly attribute your model outputs, only train on opt-in data, etc, etc. Surely no one really thinks that a court case against Microsoft/OpenAI (even if they lose) would stop CoPilot? I don't fucking care, I'm not in the business of competing with OpenAI or whatever. If you want to launch and AI startup but you can't that's your fucking problem, not mine. I just don't want them violating the licenses of the open-source programs I have created. > "look I prompted CoPilot for this piece of code that I already knew about and it spit it right out" (that's not how it's going to be used in practice). It proves that copilot has the capacity to copy existing code without fulfilling the requirements of the license. I don't care if it's "cherrypicked", this shouldn't happen under any circumstances. > I wish the conversations around generative AI could be...just better. I wish that these people making all these complicated language-comprehension machine-learning systems could read the fucking license statement at the top of the file and copy that license statement along with the code. this ought to be a solvable problem. I'm pretty sure i could write a bash script that does it if M$ is looking to hire.

lucasyvas 4y ago
The removal of the license where the code was learned is the real tidbit that everyone needs to focus on. This is where the laundering comments come from. The product would be useless if it prompted you with license approvals. They didn't care and removed them. They consciously decided to prioritize their paid-for product over the rights of their users. I'm amazed that MS's lawyers allowed it out the door. That's the even scarier part.

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brigandish 4y ago

> that's not how it's going to be used in practice If I'm writing some code and want the suggestion to be good then why wouldn't I use the name of a top programmer as a prompt?