5 ms·

Your magic box is not a film maker and the inputs you are encoding with it are verbatim file content. Said content belonging to someone else. Please study the

Your magic box is not a film maker and the inputs you are encoding with it are verbatim file content. Said content belonging to someone else. Please study the series of events that unfolded in the music industry after folk begun incorporating recordings made by other artists in their own work and proceeded to sell the result. Spoiler: The deeply nuanced question of feeding a mechanical recording through a series of complex physical and mathematical apparatus and whether that constituted a transformational creative act did not come up during the proceedings or final judgements!

nomilk 4y ago
> Said content belonging to someone else. Is CoPilot just trained on OSS, or on private repos too?
- bayindirh 4y ago
  Just on public repositories, as far as I know, however regardless of license. There are GPL repositories which force you to open your code, which is one aspect, and there are "source available" repositories, which allows you to see the code, but forbids everything else. There are a lot of blurry areas about this, and in my opinion, an AI learns like a human is not a solid basis for fair use. On the other hand, if private repositories are crawled too, this would be very, very bad.
  - ufo 4y ago
    There is also plenty on code on the training set that violates OSS licenses (e.g. copying code without attribution)
    - bayindirh 4y ago
      Yes, however humans making mistakes knowingly or unknowingly doesn't make what Copilot does right. We just talked this with a couple of friends. I always cite what I got from where (it's just two occasions, but it's not zero), and always respect their licenses. I'm worried about both ways of the permeation: GPL to closed and closed to open. Open source is a widely misunderstood concept and people (and companies) are using that misunderstanding to validate their blanket options. That's wrong on so many (legal to ethical, and everything in between) levels. Emulator writers are afraid to read leaked console code, because any resemblance of their code to it means destruction of years (or decades) of reverse engineering and clean room development done in that domain. If code licensing is that important and crucial, why a court tested license (e.g. GPL) is so worthless? Is this fair, again in the same cross-section (legal to ethical)? There's a lot to be discussed, and a lot of ideas to be re-learnt here. Open Source (or precisely Free / Copylefted software) doesn't mean free for all. We need to understand that.
      - BeefWellington 4y ago
        The emulators thing can also run afoul of patents, for example, so they're not purely copyright concerns there. It's not an easy/exact comparison to something that's LGPL licensed for example.
- belorn 4y ago
  Microsoft decided to only use public available repos. Their don't use their own private code or that of other companies private code, for quite obvious reasons.

nomilk 4y ago

> Said content belonging to someone else. Is CoPilot just trained on OSS, or on private repos too?

bayindirh 4y ago
Just on public repositories, as far as I know, however regardless of license. There are GPL repositories which force you to open your code, which is one aspect, and there are "source available" repositories, which allows you to see the code, but forbids everything else. There are a lot of blurry areas about this, and in my opinion, an AI learns like a human is not a solid basis for fair use. On the other hand, if private repositories are crawled too, this would be very, very bad.
- ufo 4y ago
  There is also plenty on code on the training set that violates OSS licenses (e.g. copying code without attribution)
  - bayindirh 4y ago
    Yes, however humans making mistakes knowingly or unknowingly doesn't make what Copilot does right. We just talked this with a couple of friends. I always cite what I got from where (it's just two occasions, but it's not zero), and always respect their licenses. I'm worried about both ways of the permeation: GPL to closed and closed to open. Open source is a widely misunderstood concept and people (and companies) are using that misunderstanding to validate their blanket options. That's wrong on so many (legal to ethical, and everything in between) levels. Emulator writers are afraid to read leaked console code, because any resemblance of their code to it means destruction of years (or decades) of reverse engineering and clean room development done in that domain. If code licensing is that important and crucial, why a court tested license (e.g. GPL) is so worthless? Is this fair, again in the same cross-section (legal to ethical)? There's a lot to be discussed, and a lot of ideas to be re-learnt here. Open Source (or precisely Free / Copylefted software) doesn't mean free for all. We need to understand that.
    - BeefWellington 4y ago
      The emulators thing can also run afoul of patents, for example, so they're not purely copyright concerns there. It's not an easy/exact comparison to something that's LGPL licensed for example.
belorn 4y ago
Microsoft decided to only use public available repos. Their don't use their own private code or that of other companies private code, for quite obvious reasons.