3 ms·

> And as a society we need to figure out how to protect artists by protecting and celebrating the expression of ideas. Github copilot would (until they manuall

> And as a society we need to figure out how to protect artists by protecting and celebrating the expression of ideas. Github copilot would (until they manually changed it) spit out the famous fast inverse square function word for word - comments and everything which is more than just the idea (why would you want the comments with them swearing?)

dcow 4y ago
I'll admit, writing something down is where it gets very murky. On one side, you have music and musicians, where the written form is somewhat of meaningless tool used to produce creative expression, which is the performance of sound on an instrument. On the other hand you have authors (and recently, software engineers), where the creative expression as most understand it, is in the choice of arrangement of words (or statements). You can't really resolve the two. And so I lean towards a stance that it is fraught to try and build a flourishing creative society on the idea that simply writing an idea down (or saving a file of data) means you own it and can legally bring a case against someone else who happens to write the same idea down, be it music or a book. And then there's https://libraryofbabel.info https://libraryofbabel.info, which contains all possible combinations of characters that every has been, or ever will be, written. Should that be copyrightable? Anyway, I am of the opinion that Copilot does infringe on copyright as we know it. But I'm also of the opinion that simply giving individuals universal claim to any written text they produce is problematic. And to answer your question, maybe I do want the comments. Maybe they communicate something that the code cannot, swearing be damned. I'd prefer a culture of citations for written/stored/saved works. And a culture of celebrating performance of the arts, not storage of them.
- pixl97 4y ago
  It's interesting watching AI turn into RMS's the Right to Read. When things were just a human endever alone there was a lot of pushback to prevent ownership of culture and words, but the AI battle looks like it's going to erode that

dcow 4y ago

I'll admit, writing something down is where it gets very murky. On one side, you have music and musicians, where the written form is somewhat of meaningless tool used to produce creative expression, which is the performance of sound on an instrument. On the other hand you have authors (and recently, software engineers), where the creative expression as most understand it, is in the choice of arrangement of words (or statements). You can't really resolve the two. And so I lean towards a stance that it is fraught to try and build a flourishing creative society on the idea that simply writing an idea down (or saving a file of data) means you own it and can legally bring a case against someone else who happens to write the same idea down, be it music or a book. And then there's https://libraryofbabel.info https://libraryofbabel.info, which contains all possible combinations of characters that every has been, or ever will be, written. Should that be copyrightable? Anyway, I am of the opinion that Copilot does infringe on copyright as we know it. But I'm also of the opinion that simply giving individuals universal claim to any written text they produce is problematic. And to answer your question, maybe I do want the comments. Maybe they communicate something that the code cannot, swearing be damned. I'd prefer a culture of citations for written/stored/saved works. And a culture of celebrating performance of the arts, not storage of them.

pixl97 4y ago
It's interesting watching AI turn into RMS's the Right to Read. When things were just a human endever alone there was a lot of pushback to prevent ownership of culture and words, but the AI battle looks like it's going to erode that