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You make GPL code, a make an AI that learns from GPL code, shouldn't its output be GPL licensed as well? I think, for the desired outcome to occur, you should

by b112 4y ago

You make GPL code, a make an AI that learns from GPL code, shouldn't its output be GPL licensed as well? I think, for the desired outcome to occur, you should instead ask: You write close sourced code, then a make an AI that learns from that code, shouldn't its output be licensed as well? Ask the above, and suddenly Microsoft will agree.

skissane 4y ago
> You write close sourced code, then a make an AI that learns from that code, shouldn't its output be licensed as well? > Ask the above, and suddenly Microsoft will agree. Does Microsoft actually agree? Many people have posted leaked/stolen Microsoft code (such as Windows, MS-DOS 6) to GitHub. Microsoft doesn't seem to make a very serious effort to stop it – sometimes they DMCA repos hosting it, but others have stayed up for ages. They could easily build some system to automatically detect and takedown leaks of their own code, but they haven't. Given this reality, if they trained GitHub Copilot on all public GitHub repos, it seems likely that its training included leaked Microsoft source code. If true, that means Microsoft doesn't actually have a problem with people using the outputs of an AI trained on their own closed source code.
andybak 4y ago
Depends if you think the GPL means "copyright is great!" vs "let's use their biggest weapon against them..." It's a surprisingly subtle distinction. EDIT - if I squint hard enough in exactly the right way, there's a sense in which CoPilot etc aligns perfectly with the goals of the free software movement. A world in which you can use it as a code copyright laundry might be a world where code is actually free. Is that any weirder than bizarre legal contortions such as the Google/Oracle "9 lines of code"? Or the whole dance around reverse engineering: "It's OK if you never saw the actual code but you're allowed to read comprehensive notes from someone who did"..? There's a ton of examples like this. Tell me with a straight face that there's a clear moral line in either copyright or patent law as it relates to software. IP is a mess and it's not clear who benefits. Is a world where code isn't subject to copyright so bad?
- kmeisthax 4y ago
  If Copilot was released as FOSS with trained model weights, I don't think the Free Software movement would have "shot first" in the resulting copyright fight. It is specifically the idea of using copyright to eat itself that is harmed by AI training. In the world where we currently live in, only source code can be trained on. If I want to train an AI on, say, the NT kernel; I have to decompile it first, and even then it's not going to be good training data because there's no comments or variable names to guide the AI. The whole point of the GPL was to force other companies to not lock down programs and withhold source code, after all. Keep in mind too that AI is basically proprietary software's final form. Not even the creator of an AI program has anything that resembles "source code"; and a good chunk of AI safety research boils down to "here's a program you can't comprehend except through gradient descent, how do we design it to have an incentive to not do bad things". If you like copyright licensing and just view the GPL as an exception sales vehicle, then AI is less of a threat, because it's just another thing to sell licenses for.

by b112 4y ago

skissane 4y ago

> You write close sourced code, then a make an AI that learns from that code, shouldn't its output be licensed as well? > Ask the above, and suddenly Microsoft will agree. Does Microsoft actually agree? Many people have posted leaked/stolen Microsoft code (such as Windows, MS-DOS 6) to GitHub. Microsoft doesn't seem to make a very serious effort to stop it – sometimes they DMCA repos hosting it, but others have stayed up for ages. They could easily build some system to automatically detect and takedown leaks of their own code, but they haven't. Given this reality, if they trained GitHub Copilot on all public GitHub repos, it seems likely that its training included leaked Microsoft source code. If true, that means Microsoft doesn't actually have a problem with people using the outputs of an AI trained on their own closed source code.

andybak 4y ago

Depends if you think the GPL means "copyright is great!" vs "let's use their biggest weapon against them..." It's a surprisingly subtle distinction. EDIT - if I squint hard enough in exactly the right way, there's a sense in which CoPilot etc aligns perfectly with the goals of the free software movement. A world in which you can use it as a code copyright laundry might be a world where code is actually free. Is that any weirder than bizarre legal contortions such as the Google/Oracle "9 lines of code"? Or the whole dance around reverse engineering: "It's OK if you never saw the actual code but you're allowed to read comprehensive notes from someone who did"..? There's a ton of examples like this. Tell me with a straight face that there's a clear moral line in either copyright or patent law as it relates to software. IP is a mess and it's not clear who benefits. Is a world where code isn't subject to copyright so bad?

kmeisthax 4y ago
If Copilot was released as FOSS with trained model weights, I don't think the Free Software movement would have "shot first" in the resulting copyright fight. It is specifically the idea of using copyright to eat itself that is harmed by AI training. In the world where we currently live in, only source code can be trained on. If I want to train an AI on, say, the NT kernel; I have to decompile it first, and even then it's not going to be good training data because there's no comments or variable names to guide the AI. The whole point of the GPL was to force other companies to not lock down programs and withhold source code, after all. Keep in mind too that AI is basically proprietary software's final form. Not even the creator of an AI program has anything that resembles "source code"; and a good chunk of AI safety research boils down to "here's a program you can't comprehend except through gradient descent, how do we design it to have an incentive to not do bad things". If you like copyright licensing and just view the GPL as an exception sales vehicle, then AI is less of a threat, because it's just another thing to sell licenses for.