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Does anyone have a problem with it, so long as the material it trained on was with explicit permission/license and not potentially in violation of copyright? T

by nrb 4y ago

Does anyone have a problem with it, so long as the material it trained on was with explicit permission/license and not potentially in violation of copyright? That's where the line is for it to be suspect IMO.

adlpz 4y ago
I guess I'm just afraid that it might not be as good as it is that way. It's a bit like how GPT-3, Stable Diffusion and all those generative models use extensive amounts of copyrighted material in training to get as good as they do. In those cases however the output space is so vast that plagiarism is very unlikely. With code, not so much.
- jacobr1 4y ago
  GPT-3 and Stable Diffusion might not copy things exactly - but they certainly do copy "style" There are many articles likes this: https://hyperallergic.com/766241/hes-bigger-than-picasso-on-ai-platforms-and-he-hates-it/ https://hyperallergic.com/766241/hes-bigger-than-picasso-on-... The interesting thing is that the names get explicitly attached to these styles. It isn't exactly a copyright issue, but I'm sure it will get litigated regardless.
- bjourne 4y ago
  I think the prompt "GPT-3, tell me what the lyrics for the song Stan by Eminem is" is very likely to output copyrighted material. The same copyrighted material is, of course, already republished without permission on google.com.
- odessacubbage 4y ago
  there are literally thousands of years of artwork that fall under public domain, the idea that the dataset isn't big enough to make good images without copyright infringement and attribution laundering is frankly laughable.
  - adlpz 4y ago
    My guess is that is not as much about the amount of available data but how accessible it is. Scraping the internet seems to be one of the preferred ways of gathering vast amounts of, in particular, text and images. Telling apart what's public domain or not is not a trivially automatable task. If one just relies on curated libraries of vetted public domain content you don't get, by far, the expected amout of variability and diversity.
michaelmrose 4y ago
It being permissively licensed is virtually irrelevant because only a minority of code is so permissively licensed you can just do what you like under any license. Far more is do what you like within the scope of the license. For example GPL do with it what you like so long as any derivative work is also GPL.
bogwog 4y ago
This is what I hope comes out of the lawsuit. If a company wants to sell an AI model, they need to own all of the training data. It can't be "fair use" to take other peoples' works at zero cost, and use it to build a commercial product without compensation. And maybe models trained on public data should be in the public domain, so that AI research can happen without requiring massive investments to obtain the training data.
- bpicolo 4y ago
  > It can't be "fair use" to take other peoples' works at zero cost, and use it to build a commercial product without compensation. You just described open source software. That's the whole heart of this lawsuit, and equally Copilot. It was trained on OSS which is explicitly licensed for free use.
  - bogwog 4y ago
    Ok you got me, that wording was lazy on my part. But that's a really bad take on yours: > It was trained on OSS which is explicitly licensed for free use. That's not what the lawsuit is about. It's not about money, it's about licensing. OSS licenses have specific requirements and restrictions for using them, and Copilot explicitly ignores those requirements, thus violating the license agreement. The GPL, for example, requires you to release your own source code if you use it in a publicly-released product. If you don't do that, you're committing copyright infringement, since you're copying someone's work without permission.
    - bpicolo 4y ago
      Yeah, and I think that's fair re: licensing. Curious to see how it pans out. Also, re: your edit, not quite. They require you to release modified source under certain conditions if you make modifications to it. If everybody had to release code using GPL to the world, every companies code would currently be released to the world. There's more nuance than that. The gnu site covers a lot of that nuance (https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#UnreleasedMods https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#UnreleasedMods) LGPL is the one that enterprises won't touch with a 10 foot pole, due to more restrictive licensing, and more conditions under which you'd have to open source your own code.

by nrb 4y ago

adlpz 4y ago

I guess I'm just afraid that it might not be as good as it is that way. It's a bit like how GPT-3, Stable Diffusion and all those generative models use extensive amounts of copyrighted material in training to get as good as they do. In those cases however the output space is so vast that plagiarism is very unlikely. With code, not so much.

jacobr1 4y ago
GPT-3 and Stable Diffusion might not copy things exactly - but they certainly do copy "style" There are many articles likes this: https://hyperallergic.com/766241/hes-bigger-than-picasso-on-ai-platforms-and-he-hates-it/ https://hyperallergic.com/766241/hes-bigger-than-picasso-on-... The interesting thing is that the names get explicitly attached to these styles. It isn't exactly a copyright issue, but I'm sure it will get litigated regardless.
bjourne 4y ago
I think the prompt "GPT-3, tell me what the lyrics for the song Stan by Eminem is" is very likely to output copyrighted material. The same copyrighted material is, of course, already republished without permission on google.com.
odessacubbage 4y ago
there are literally thousands of years of artwork that fall under public domain, the idea that the dataset isn't big enough to make good images without copyright infringement and attribution laundering is frankly laughable.
- adlpz 4y ago
  My guess is that is not as much about the amount of available data but how accessible it is. Scraping the internet seems to be one of the preferred ways of gathering vast amounts of, in particular, text and images. Telling apart what's public domain or not is not a trivially automatable task. If one just relies on curated libraries of vetted public domain content you don't get, by far, the expected amout of variability and diversity.

michaelmrose 4y ago

It being permissively licensed is virtually irrelevant because only a minority of code is so permissively licensed you can just do what you like under any license. Far more is do what you like within the scope of the license. For example GPL do with it what you like so long as any derivative work is also GPL.

bogwog 4y ago

This is what I hope comes out of the lawsuit. If a company wants to sell an AI model, they need to own all of the training data. It can't be "fair use" to take other peoples' works at zero cost, and use it to build a commercial product without compensation. And maybe models trained on public data should be in the public domain, so that AI research can happen without requiring massive investments to obtain the training data.

bpicolo 4y ago
> It can't be "fair use" to take other peoples' works at zero cost, and use it to build a commercial product without compensation. You just described open source software. That's the whole heart of this lawsuit, and equally Copilot. It was trained on OSS which is explicitly licensed for free use.
- bogwog 4y ago
  Ok you got me, that wording was lazy on my part. But that's a really bad take on yours: > It was trained on OSS which is explicitly licensed for free use. That's not what the lawsuit is about. It's not about money, it's about licensing. OSS licenses have specific requirements and restrictions for using them, and Copilot explicitly ignores those requirements, thus violating the license agreement. The GPL, for example, requires you to release your own source code if you use it in a publicly-released product. If you don't do that, you're committing copyright infringement, since you're copying someone's work without permission.
  - bpicolo 4y ago
    Yeah, and I think that's fair re: licensing. Curious to see how it pans out. Also, re: your edit, not quite. They require you to release modified source under certain conditions if you make modifications to it. If everybody had to release code using GPL to the world, every companies code would currently be released to the world. There's more nuance than that. The gnu site covers a lot of that nuance (https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#UnreleasedMods https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#UnreleasedMods) LGPL is the one that enterprises won't touch with a 10 foot pole, due to more restrictive licensing, and more conditions under which you'd have to open source your own code.