4 ms·

Only speaking to the coding situation. It seems to me that if the "LLM Copilots" just observed the existing license there would be less of a problem here. Cop

Only speaking to the coding situation. It seems to me that if the "LLM Copilots" just observed the existing license there would be less of a problem here. Copilot, only recommend work based on $LICENSE or $LICENSE compatible license when I am working on $LICENSE code. What's the problem genius?

II2II 4y ago
That only addresses part of the problem. Open source depends upon copyright in order to be enforceable. Copyright depends upon attribution. While I am confident that most (not all) open source authors would be happy if the license remains intact, what happens when someone infringes upon an open source license? Say that someone incorporates code generated by an AI based upon open source licenses into a closed source product.
- prettyStandard 4y ago
  That's what I am saying. Stop doing that. Train co-pilot, or whatever, to follow the terms of the license.
  - bruce343434 4y ago
    That's tough when Jimmy is using copilot to generate code for his proprietary company codebase. AI is just a tool, do you also sue the company that sold the paintbrush with which an infringing painting was made?
    - LtWorf 4y ago
      Well microsoft claims that if you infringe it's your fault and not theirs. However they don't give you any way of NOT infringing when using their tool.
    - II2II 4y ago
      The thing is, we aren't really talking about AI here. We are talking about datasets being used to train AI and the companies offering the services of a trained AI. If a company trained their own AI on their own code, the discussion would be very different (likely centred on moral issues rather than legal ones). We probably won't ever have a discussion about companies submitting proprietary code to train an AI created by a third-party since there would be a contract between the two parties (and it is unlikely a company will submit proprietary code to train an AI that will be used by others in the first place). What we are looking at is a kin to a company that makes paint brushes, trains graphics artists, and contracts out their graphics artists to use those paint brushes. If it turned out that the graphics artists turned out derivative works without the rights holder's permission, you can be assured that people would want to "sue the company that sold the paintbrush". I'm not going to claim that my example is equivalent to what is happening with these AI services. And while you may be right about AI fundamentally being a tool, like a paint brush, I would suggest that is only true if you ignore the data that is fed into it.
    - prettyStandard 4y ago
      Microsoft should make it more difficult UX wise to do this. Microsoft should also provide resources to content creators to find where their work has been used. This is not complicated. Generally I'm reluctant to say people are acting in bad faith. It's less tough to say Microsoft is acting in bad faith here.
    - prettyStandard 4y ago
      If you sold someone a gun knowing they knowing they did not know how to handle a gun and they said they were immediately going to the gun range and then someone died, you might get charged with negligent manslaughter. My point here is Microsoft knows there's no way to tell where the suggestions are coming from, they stripped out that information, in this case it's even more likely that the offense happens because they're selling the paintbrush on a large scale. It's just a question of how often it's going to occur. Is it for 30% of your users or 70% of their users that are infring on licenses on a wide scale basis?
LtWorf 4y ago
MIT license says that the author must be cited within the copyright section. So you should know and list all of the authors that contributed to that code being generated. And that's the least restrictive software license…

II2II 4y ago

That only addresses part of the problem. Open source depends upon copyright in order to be enforceable. Copyright depends upon attribution. While I am confident that most (not all) open source authors would be happy if the license remains intact, what happens when someone infringes upon an open source license? Say that someone incorporates code generated by an AI based upon open source licenses into a closed source product.

prettyStandard 4y ago
That's what I am saying. Stop doing that. Train co-pilot, or whatever, to follow the terms of the license.
- bruce343434 4y ago
  That's tough when Jimmy is using copilot to generate code for his proprietary company codebase. AI is just a tool, do you also sue the company that sold the paintbrush with which an infringing painting was made?
  - LtWorf 4y ago
    Well microsoft claims that if you infringe it's your fault and not theirs. However they don't give you any way of NOT infringing when using their tool.
  - II2II 4y ago
    The thing is, we aren't really talking about AI here. We are talking about datasets being used to train AI and the companies offering the services of a trained AI. If a company trained their own AI on their own code, the discussion would be very different (likely centred on moral issues rather than legal ones). We probably won't ever have a discussion about companies submitting proprietary code to train an AI created by a third-party since there would be a contract between the two parties (and it is unlikely a company will submit proprietary code to train an AI that will be used by others in the first place). What we are looking at is a kin to a company that makes paint brushes, trains graphics artists, and contracts out their graphics artists to use those paint brushes. If it turned out that the graphics artists turned out derivative works without the rights holder's permission, you can be assured that people would want to "sue the company that sold the paintbrush". I'm not going to claim that my example is equivalent to what is happening with these AI services. And while you may be right about AI fundamentally being a tool, like a paint brush, I would suggest that is only true if you ignore the data that is fed into it.
  - prettyStandard 4y ago
    Microsoft should make it more difficult UX wise to do this. Microsoft should also provide resources to content creators to find where their work has been used. This is not complicated. Generally I'm reluctant to say people are acting in bad faith. It's less tough to say Microsoft is acting in bad faith here.
  - prettyStandard 4y ago
    If you sold someone a gun knowing they knowing they did not know how to handle a gun and they said they were immediately going to the gun range and then someone died, you might get charged with negligent manslaughter. My point here is Microsoft knows there's no way to tell where the suggestions are coming from, they stripped out that information, in this case it's even more likely that the offense happens because they're selling the paintbrush on a large scale. It's just a question of how often it's going to occur. Is it for 30% of your users or 70% of their users that are infring on licenses on a wide scale basis?

LtWorf 4y ago

MIT license says that the author must be cited within the copyright section. So you should know and list all of the authors that contributed to that code being generated. And that's the least restrictive software license…