9 ms·

Why HN is so defensive against copilot but have a completely different opinion about MidJourney / StableDiffusion? Both are generative softwares which when gene

Why HN is so defensive against copilot but have a completely different opinion about MidJourney / StableDiffusion? Both are generative softwares which when generate a piece verbatim only means over fitting / over training on that particular example. The tone on one of these tools is hypocritical. When it comes to digital art general sentiment is that it's inevitable and artists need to up their game. This sentiment is not being repeated for code generators.

psychphysic 3y ago
100% everyone wants to do away with everyone else.
earthnail 3y ago
Because digital art is trained on the end result. The equivalent would be learning to write software by looking at compiled binaries. Learning from source code is like learning from Photoshop files or Logic projects. Artists usually do not share them. In music, not even the labels get anything than the final mixdown (the music equivalent of the binary); the stems or projects remain with the studio - just like the source code in software projects tends to remain with the studios. In software, we started showing and sharing source code under the assumption that it makes other humans making software better. People still rarely do this in music, as holding up industry secrets is deemed more important than fostering a community of personal growth. We don't open source our code so an AI can grow. We do it so that humans can grow. There's no need to publish our code to distribute our final binary. This breaks the common understanding of why it's a good idea to share your source code, and as a result, people might become more protective of their code again. In many ways, your comment is similar to all the comments saying "but you open-sourced it, surely you must know that people will then put it in their commercial code?"
- kajaktum 3y ago
  People share arts because they want to help other humans grow too, not the AI. Also the code is the end product. Similarly, artists don't share their project file because it’s not the point. This is like saying programmers not sharing their vim macros.
  - earthnail 3y ago
    When you want to help other humans grow in music production in an open-source way, you have to share your studio project file. Try finding some of these... you'll find YouTube videos where people walk through aspects of their projects, but you won't find the actual studio project file.
    - jasonjmcghee 3y ago
      Billie Eilish famously released her files for her first hit song and it includes a bunch of takes etc that they didn't use. Apparently it's directly available in Logic (or was) https://old.reddit.com/r/Logic_Studio/comments/gic2r2/logic_pro_x_105_features_the_multitrack_project/ https://old.reddit.com/r/Logic_Studio/comments/gic2r2/logic_...
  - Turing_Machine 3y ago
    > People share arts because they want to help other humans grow too, not the AI. Hold on just a second here. How do you know what "people" "want"? Who put you in charge of speaking for them? Yes, there have been some loud complaints, but given that millions of people are involved, the overwhelming majority of whom haven't expressed an opinion one way or the other, I think it's a bit premature for this kind of blanket statement. Secondly, there's a difference between what people want and what people are legally entitled to. If you ask people if they want a million dollars, most of them will say "Sure!". That doesn't mean they're going to get it. Existing copyright controls the making of copies. That's it. There's a fudge factor in there called "fair use" that controls whether or not something constitutes an infringing copy. Whether AI training data falls within that or not is going to have to be decided in the courts or by some type of government action. It's clearly not an exact copy...the actual pixels in the original work aren't anywhere in the database. But is what is in there close enough to be considered a "derivative work"? I don't know, and neither do you. Again, it's way too soon to be making blanket statements on the issue.
    - quonn 3y ago
      More important than an opinion of a court is the opinion of lawmakers. After all, copyright laws have a purpose and AI subverts that purpose. Lawmakers will have to decide whether the benefit of AI to society is greater than the benefit of having works published. We will see laws adapted accordingly.
- keldami 3y ago
  >> "but you open-sourced it, surely you must know that people will then put it in their commercial code?" this is a general problem in open source. And with obfusication in an AI it is just unfair. If AI / codepilot would reference the source in a nice way, then I woundn't mind.
  - bombcar 3y ago
    Especially given the history of the last 30 years where major open source licenses carefully fought over just how much "commercial code" could use the works involved.
- ZoomZoomZoom 3y ago
  > People still rarely do this in music, as holding up industry secrets is deemed more important than fostering a community of personal growth. This is absolutely not the reason and it's surprising to read this opinion stated as a fact. First of all, not revealing multi-tracks doesn't prevent personal growth. Human ear is pretty good at discerning individual elements of a mix. It's all in the final product. If you can't learn from it or can't hear something, either it's an unimportant part of the mix, your ear is not good enough yet to distill any meaningful information from the balances of the mix in question, or it's just not a good mix. Secondly, multi-tracks are not the source code. Putting it in relevant terms, it's just the assets. What's important are processes and artistic decisions made while processing them and combining them in their final form. Not revealing stems/multi-tracks is not a matter of gatekeeping, it's a safety measure to prevent unauthorized use of individual composition elements and creation of "alternative" mixes which break artistic integrity of the piece. Music is art (at least a considerable portion of it), and and artist needs as much control over the final product as possible. Mixing is a part of it.
  - rschneid 3y ago
    Gatekeeping isn't boolean, it falls on a spectrum. If your rationale about preventing un 'authorized' use is in fact true, the process must be effectively keeping some notional gate some kind of closed even if it's only from people you (or maybe even the original artist) consider to be acting 'unscrupulously.' If musicians' priorities were for the world to share in their musical indulgence not just in listening but also in like-minded creation, they would release as much of their mixing tools/backgrounds/stems/etc as possible. Since the capitalist framework is a foregone conclusion, they need to keep some secrets in their sauce to produce scarcity to justify a price for their labor so they can eat... Because the farmers and butchers all keep gates of their own kind, too :)
    - Juliate 3y ago
      > If musicians' priorities were for the world to share in their musical indulgence not just in listening but also in like-minded creation, they would release as much of their mixing tools/backgrounds/stems/etc as possible. They do. For a price. When you know how to ask. The thing is, if you really want to « like-minded create », you do not need, not even want their stems (you can find most of them anyway online, if only for learning). If your thing is not « consumption » but creation, your own voice/process/way matters more (and is more fun) than starting from the studio separate tracks. As for the music _business_ side of things, attention (hence scarcity management) on and availability/capacity to provide are the two main levers you have if you want to live from it. As with any other business actually.
- Waterluvian 3y ago
  > The equivalent would be learning to write software by looking at compiled binaries. Only if Copilot was issuing compiled binaries. In this case the end result is the code.
- mbreese 3y ago
  > We do it so that humans can grow. I think you’re being a little too altruistic. When I publish code, it’s not about helping people grow. It’s so that others can see the code they are using and that if there is a bug or mistake, they can correct it. Hopefully they share that fix back, but it’s not required.
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    I think that people do it for a whole bunch of different reasons. Helping others is one of them, yours is another. But I remember that back at the start of code-sharing, the usual reason people gave for doing it was to help advance overall knowledge.
- newswasboring 3y ago
  > We do it so that humans can grow. When was this decided? I don't remember any licences or foundational essays saying this.
- SoftTalker 3y ago
  Since you mentioned music, can we draw any parallel with the recent Ed Sheeran case? You can't copyright a chord progression, or a rhythm. So can you claim license violation for code which is similar in how it arranges standard design patterns and well-known language idioms? Unless you can find a line-for-line match in a substantial portion of the code, I don't see how you can make a claim for license violation, whether a person or an AI wrote the code in question.
  - bayindirh 3y ago
    The problem is not "training using GPL", it's stripping the license and providing the resulting code to anyone, for any purpose. Copilot can provide very specific implementations of problems with "in the style of $NAME" prompts. Consider a case where you put your life's work as GPL licensed code, and someone can reproduce + adapt your highly optimized matrix multiplication code with a simple prompt, without license. Even if it's not a "textbook license violation", you're lifting one's GPL licensed function and landing it to your codebase without its license. If your code base is not licensed under the same GPL version (or later if the repo allows), it's both unethical and license breach at the same time. Adaptation of the code doesn't matter. Same is true for more strict, source-available licenses. They are open source, but not open to be reused. What will happen if you put a function derived from a codebase with these strict licenses with or without knowledge? You're again in a dangerous grey area from both license and legal perspective. The issue we discuss is neither straightforward nor simple to navigate. I left GitHub because of this, and may tag my repositories with this badge. Open source means nothing if copyleft is taken out of the picture, and licenses are simply ignored.
    - Brian_K_White 3y ago
      "The problem is not "training using GPL", it's stripping the license and providing the resulting code to anyone, for any purpose." This. Since Copilot arrived I thought that most open source developers would be fine with it if github simply even tried to acknowledge the original licences in any way. I personally would be ok with even a very indirect aggregate group based thing that should be no burden at all for github. They make a big list with everyone's name in it and call it the copilot contributors, and provide some kind of page for it, then when copilot spits out code, it includes a link to that page, and/or a user includes that in the credits/authors for their project like any other credited source. No excuses about how impractical it would be to cite 3 other authors for every line of output. But they don't even do that tiny bit. They don't try and fall short, they don't even try. But they still take the goods. The goods are already free, and yet they still manage to steal them.
- charlesrocket 3y ago
  To be fair, artists share lyrics, since everything else can be easily scanned by ear. Negatives are frequently the only source. You do not need any negatives to recreate a photograph. Just like you do not need masters or sketches to recreate a song or a popular paining. Most modern photographs are not even produced by photographers - the camera would do all the work, your job is to pick one frame from 9528 you took while your finger got stuck on a button. Moving code somewhere else or omitting the source would not bring back dead ethics of greed-driven modern society and definitely can not slow down reversing in any way.
- UncleMeat 3y ago
  Code is the end product. We store code in our repos, not binaries.
- benatkin 3y ago
  > The equivalent would be learning to write software by looking at compiled binaries. Challenge accepted? With the speed at which things are advancing....
- yellowapple 3y ago
  > We don't open source our code so an AI can grow. We do it so that humans can grow. I open source my code so that programmers and users can grow. I don't care if that programmer or user is a meatbag or a machine (or both! or neither!). What I do care about is that the license terms of said code are respected. The vast majority of my code may be under something permissive like MIT or (lately) ISC, but I do make giving credit where credit's due a condition of using the code I've written, for good reason. That's where tools like Copilot make a misstep: by ignoring the conditions I've placed on the use of my intellectual property. Plagiarism is plagiarism, regardless if it's a human or AI or dolphin or Martian or whatever doing it. That's also where tools like Copilot differ from e.g. StableDiffusion. AI-generated art doesn't (usually) involve copying and pasting snippets of existing artwork into a new work the way Copilot has been demonstrated to do on multiple occasions. (My other "problem" is that I can guarantee Microsoft will assert double-standards when it comes to Copilot infringing on e.g. the GPL v. Copilot infringing on Microsoft's own EULAs - and I really really really want to see that happen via someone tricking Copilot into ingesting the Windows source code and vomiting that into Copilot users' IDEs verbatim)
nottorp 3y ago
Because HN doesn't draw obviously.
helsinkiandrew 3y ago
> Why HN is so defensive against copilot but have a completely different opinion about MidJourney / StableDiffusion There's a miss match between producers of the content used to create the models and those using it. At the moment its mostly software developers who are using the output of Copilot, whilst its mostly non artists who are using MidJourney/StableDiffusion.
omnicognate 3y ago
Because HN doesn't have opinions on things. You're reading the opinions of individuals who frequently disagree with each other, and the groups of individuals commenting differ from post to post. Why does this need explaining so often? FTR I personally think that training commercial ML algorithms on bulk data produced by people that haven't released it to the public domain or licensed it for such use is ethically dubious (regardless of the legality) whether the data consists of code, art, metrics or anything else.
- nottorp 3y ago
  > Because HN doesn't have opinions on things. HN is actually one of the most homogeneous public communities I've seen. And judging by how few downmodded posts are around, self censoring.
  - TeMPOraL 3y ago
    Don't confuse basic manners with homogeneity. Just because the rest of the Internet is a dumpster fire, doesn't mean people posting here have limited range of views.
  - sundarurfriend 3y ago
    HN sprouts weirdly localized hiveminds - every post is its own little hivemind, where a "correct opinion" is formed, and opposing opinions downvoted and/or ridiculed. But then the next day a different post on the same topic could have an entirely opposite hivemind, often no discernible reason.
    - dtech 3y ago
      It often depends on the first comment which gets traction (>5 upvotes)
    - JohnFen 3y ago
      > opposing opinions downvoted and/or ridiculed. I'm not so sure this is a huge effect. I often express "incorrect opinions", and get some amount of downvoting or ridicule, but not usually to a significant degree. When I've had my comments dogpiled, I can see that it happened because of how I stated my opinion more than because of the opinion itself.
orbital-decay 3y ago
> Why HN is so defensive against copilot but have a completely different opinion about MidJourney / StableDiffusion? Is it, though? My impression is that HN opinions on possible copyright issues are generally mixed for both, and mostly dismissive about the job replacement stuff for both.
komape 3y ago
Maybe because the main users of HN are software developers and their work is used to train Copilot while probably a minority is creating images used to train MidJourney / StableDiffusion. A question of whether one's own work is used for this purpose or whether one is only a beneficiary.
Karsteski 3y ago
HN is not a person
_a_a_a_ 3y ago
Because MS owns github and MS therefore WILL abuse whatever goes there. Not 'if' but 'when'. Source: over 20 years of working with their products and seeing the way they treat everyone else
lucideer 3y ago
> Why HN is so defensive against copilot but have a completely different opinion about MidJourney / StableDiffusion? I've seen this question posted on HN so many times in defence of Copilot but I have yet to encounter people who fit what you're describing: people in general raise a lot of issues with MidJourney/StableDiffusion/&c. too. HN is particularly defensive when it comes to Copilot because Copilot deals with sourcecode which is central to the daily vocation of a large portion of HN's readership. HN focuses on Copilot because they're subject matter experts in what Copilot trains on. Also - as mentioned in siblings - while criticisms of training material sourcing by various ML models is common, there are quite a few details that makes Copilot's sourcing that little bit worse. > it's inevitable and artists need to up their game If this is your answer it seems you didn't even bother to read the title (never mind the article). There are two issues with Generative AI to discuss: input and output. Your answer addresses output - i.e. fear that what is produced may compete with humans. This article, and the vast majority of HN criticism of Copilot exclusively addresses input: objection to copyrighted works being used to train models without author consent. These are two entirely separate discussions.
Jayakumark 3y ago
There is a funny question people ask in India - If it comes out of your mouth it must be blood but the same from mine - is the red sauce I ate ?
PurpleRamen 3y ago
Because people are protective of their own ground, but open for conquering others ground. There are probably not as many artists here, as there are coders. So the general opinion will be against all tools which will harm the coders ground, but more open for the benefits AI will bring for the laymen, when they must not fear harm from them.
iinnPP 3y ago
It's NIMBYism for jobs. We need a new acronym for it. My effortless attempt: OMIJIB(Only My Information Job Is Brilliant)? O-My-Jib
- skinnymuch 3y ago
  This is pretty brilliant after reading all the responses to why HN is so obviously anti-specific things more than others. I can’t handle hearing another person say “HN is a big place”. Sure. It’s also incredibly obvious how homogeneous it is and how HN essentially forces you to toe the line.
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    HN has never once forced me to toe any line.
    - skinnymuch 3y ago
      Okay thanks. Anything of substance?
      - JohnFen 3y ago
        I made a reasonably substantial point. You asserted that "HN essentially forces you to toe the line" and I brought up a counterexample to demonstrate that your assertion might not be entirely correct.
        iinnPP 3y ago
        You can toe a line without toeing a line. That's the group involved in enforcing the line.
        skinnymuch 3y ago
        The person who responded to you showed the obvious logic. I’m a leftist in tech. HN is not the place where you can publicly behave as an assertive leftist otherwise would.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
_boffin_ 3y ago
I’d say it’s because of personal feelings and that the technologies didn’t get trained on their data and because of that, disassociation makes those other technologies easier to use.
UncleMeat 3y ago
Because code is “my stuff” and copilot changes our jobs while so generated art doesn’t affect me and is cool. There’s no real difference it is just wagon circling once a thing threatens somebody personally. The tech community has been one of the big proponents of “data wants to be free” and “the entire idea of intellectual property is bs” for a long time and that’s suddenly reversed.
aftbit 3y ago
I dunno if HN has one particular opinion on _anything_. The echo chamber isn't quite that strong here. However, I'd posit that the main difference is that there are more software engineers on HN than digital artists.

psychphysic 3y ago

100% everyone wants to do away with everyone else.

earthnail 3y ago

Because digital art is trained on the end result. The equivalent would be learning to write software by looking at compiled binaries. Learning from source code is like learning from Photoshop files or Logic projects. Artists usually do not share them. In music, not even the labels get anything than the final mixdown (the music equivalent of the binary); the stems or projects remain with the studio - just like the source code in software projects tends to remain with the studios. In software, we started showing and sharing source code under the assumption that it makes other humans making software better. People still rarely do this in music, as holding up industry secrets is deemed more important than fostering a community of personal growth. We don't open source our code so an AI can grow. We do it so that humans can grow. There's no need to publish our code to distribute our final binary. This breaks the common understanding of why it's a good idea to share your source code, and as a result, people might become more protective of their code again. In many ways, your comment is similar to all the comments saying "but you open-sourced it, surely you must know that people will then put it in their commercial code?"

kajaktum 3y ago
People share arts because they want to help other humans grow too, not the AI. Also the code is the end product. Similarly, artists don't share their project file because it’s not the point. This is like saying programmers not sharing their vim macros.
- earthnail 3y ago
  When you want to help other humans grow in music production in an open-source way, you have to share your studio project file. Try finding some of these... you'll find YouTube videos where people walk through aspects of their projects, but you won't find the actual studio project file.
  - jasonjmcghee 3y ago
    Billie Eilish famously released her files for her first hit song and it includes a bunch of takes etc that they didn't use. Apparently it's directly available in Logic (or was) https://old.reddit.com/r/Logic_Studio/comments/gic2r2/logic_pro_x_105_features_the_multitrack_project/ https://old.reddit.com/r/Logic_Studio/comments/gic2r2/logic_...
- Turing_Machine 3y ago
  > People share arts because they want to help other humans grow too, not the AI. Hold on just a second here. How do you know what "people" "want"? Who put you in charge of speaking for them? Yes, there have been some loud complaints, but given that millions of people are involved, the overwhelming majority of whom haven't expressed an opinion one way or the other, I think it's a bit premature for this kind of blanket statement. Secondly, there's a difference between what people want and what people are legally entitled to. If you ask people if they want a million dollars, most of them will say "Sure!". That doesn't mean they're going to get it. Existing copyright controls the making of copies. That's it. There's a fudge factor in there called "fair use" that controls whether or not something constitutes an infringing copy. Whether AI training data falls within that or not is going to have to be decided in the courts or by some type of government action. It's clearly not an exact copy...the actual pixels in the original work aren't anywhere in the database. But is what is in there close enough to be considered a "derivative work"? I don't know, and neither do you. Again, it's way too soon to be making blanket statements on the issue.
  - quonn 3y ago
    More important than an opinion of a court is the opinion of lawmakers. After all, copyright laws have a purpose and AI subverts that purpose. Lawmakers will have to decide whether the benefit of AI to society is greater than the benefit of having works published. We will see laws adapted accordingly.
keldami 3y ago
>> "but you open-sourced it, surely you must know that people will then put it in their commercial code?" this is a general problem in open source. And with obfusication in an AI it is just unfair. If AI / codepilot would reference the source in a nice way, then I woundn't mind.
- bombcar 3y ago
  Especially given the history of the last 30 years where major open source licenses carefully fought over just how much "commercial code" could use the works involved.
ZoomZoomZoom 3y ago
> People still rarely do this in music, as holding up industry secrets is deemed more important than fostering a community of personal growth. This is absolutely not the reason and it's surprising to read this opinion stated as a fact. First of all, not revealing multi-tracks doesn't prevent personal growth. Human ear is pretty good at discerning individual elements of a mix. It's all in the final product. If you can't learn from it or can't hear something, either it's an unimportant part of the mix, your ear is not good enough yet to distill any meaningful information from the balances of the mix in question, or it's just not a good mix. Secondly, multi-tracks are not the source code. Putting it in relevant terms, it's just the assets. What's important are processes and artistic decisions made while processing them and combining them in their final form. Not revealing stems/multi-tracks is not a matter of gatekeeping, it's a safety measure to prevent unauthorized use of individual composition elements and creation of "alternative" mixes which break artistic integrity of the piece. Music is art (at least a considerable portion of it), and and artist needs as much control over the final product as possible. Mixing is a part of it.
- rschneid 3y ago
  Gatekeeping isn't boolean, it falls on a spectrum. If your rationale about preventing un 'authorized' use is in fact true, the process must be effectively keeping some notional gate some kind of closed even if it's only from people you (or maybe even the original artist) consider to be acting 'unscrupulously.' If musicians' priorities were for the world to share in their musical indulgence not just in listening but also in like-minded creation, they would release as much of their mixing tools/backgrounds/stems/etc as possible. Since the capitalist framework is a foregone conclusion, they need to keep some secrets in their sauce to produce scarcity to justify a price for their labor so they can eat... Because the farmers and butchers all keep gates of their own kind, too :)
  - Juliate 3y ago
    > If musicians' priorities were for the world to share in their musical indulgence not just in listening but also in like-minded creation, they would release as much of their mixing tools/backgrounds/stems/etc as possible. They do. For a price. When you know how to ask. The thing is, if you really want to « like-minded create », you do not need, not even want their stems (you can find most of them anyway online, if only for learning). If your thing is not « consumption » but creation, your own voice/process/way matters more (and is more fun) than starting from the studio separate tracks. As for the music _business_ side of things, attention (hence scarcity management) on and availability/capacity to provide are the two main levers you have if you want to live from it. As with any other business actually.
Waterluvian 3y ago
> The equivalent would be learning to write software by looking at compiled binaries. Only if Copilot was issuing compiled binaries. In this case the end result is the code.
mbreese 3y ago
> We do it so that humans can grow. I think you’re being a little too altruistic. When I publish code, it’s not about helping people grow. It’s so that others can see the code they are using and that if there is a bug or mistake, they can correct it. Hopefully they share that fix back, but it’s not required.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  I think that people do it for a whole bunch of different reasons. Helping others is one of them, yours is another. But I remember that back at the start of code-sharing, the usual reason people gave for doing it was to help advance overall knowledge.
newswasboring 3y ago
> We do it so that humans can grow. When was this decided? I don't remember any licences or foundational essays saying this.
SoftTalker 3y ago
Since you mentioned music, can we draw any parallel with the recent Ed Sheeran case? You can't copyright a chord progression, or a rhythm. So can you claim license violation for code which is similar in how it arranges standard design patterns and well-known language idioms? Unless you can find a line-for-line match in a substantial portion of the code, I don't see how you can make a claim for license violation, whether a person or an AI wrote the code in question.
- bayindirh 3y ago
  The problem is not "training using GPL", it's stripping the license and providing the resulting code to anyone, for any purpose. Copilot can provide very specific implementations of problems with "in the style of $NAME" prompts. Consider a case where you put your life's work as GPL licensed code, and someone can reproduce + adapt your highly optimized matrix multiplication code with a simple prompt, without license. Even if it's not a "textbook license violation", you're lifting one's GPL licensed function and landing it to your codebase without its license. If your code base is not licensed under the same GPL version (or later if the repo allows), it's both unethical and license breach at the same time. Adaptation of the code doesn't matter. Same is true for more strict, source-available licenses. They are open source, but not open to be reused. What will happen if you put a function derived from a codebase with these strict licenses with or without knowledge? You're again in a dangerous grey area from both license and legal perspective. The issue we discuss is neither straightforward nor simple to navigate. I left GitHub because of this, and may tag my repositories with this badge. Open source means nothing if copyleft is taken out of the picture, and licenses are simply ignored.
  - Brian_K_White 3y ago
    "The problem is not "training using GPL", it's stripping the license and providing the resulting code to anyone, for any purpose." This. Since Copilot arrived I thought that most open source developers would be fine with it if github simply even tried to acknowledge the original licences in any way. I personally would be ok with even a very indirect aggregate group based thing that should be no burden at all for github. They make a big list with everyone's name in it and call it the copilot contributors, and provide some kind of page for it, then when copilot spits out code, it includes a link to that page, and/or a user includes that in the credits/authors for their project like any other credited source. No excuses about how impractical it would be to cite 3 other authors for every line of output. But they don't even do that tiny bit. They don't try and fall short, they don't even try. But they still take the goods. The goods are already free, and yet they still manage to steal them.
charlesrocket 3y ago
To be fair, artists share lyrics, since everything else can be easily scanned by ear. Negatives are frequently the only source. You do not need any negatives to recreate a photograph. Just like you do not need masters or sketches to recreate a song or a popular paining. Most modern photographs are not even produced by photographers - the camera would do all the work, your job is to pick one frame from 9528 you took while your finger got stuck on a button. Moving code somewhere else or omitting the source would not bring back dead ethics of greed-driven modern society and definitely can not slow down reversing in any way.
UncleMeat 3y ago
Code is the end product. We store code in our repos, not binaries.
benatkin 3y ago
> The equivalent would be learning to write software by looking at compiled binaries. Challenge accepted? With the speed at which things are advancing....
yellowapple 3y ago
> We don't open source our code so an AI can grow. We do it so that humans can grow. I open source my code so that programmers and users can grow. I don't care if that programmer or user is a meatbag or a machine (or both! or neither!). What I do care about is that the license terms of said code are respected. The vast majority of my code may be under something permissive like MIT or (lately) ISC, but I do make giving credit where credit's due a condition of using the code I've written, for good reason. That's where tools like Copilot make a misstep: by ignoring the conditions I've placed on the use of my intellectual property. Plagiarism is plagiarism, regardless if it's a human or AI or dolphin or Martian or whatever doing it. That's also where tools like Copilot differ from e.g. StableDiffusion. AI-generated art doesn't (usually) involve copying and pasting snippets of existing artwork into a new work the way Copilot has been demonstrated to do on multiple occasions. (My other "problem" is that I can guarantee Microsoft will assert double-standards when it comes to Copilot infringing on e.g. the GPL v. Copilot infringing on Microsoft's own EULAs - and I really really really want to see that happen via someone tricking Copilot into ingesting the Windows source code and vomiting that into Copilot users' IDEs verbatim)

nottorp 3y ago

Because HN doesn't draw obviously.

helsinkiandrew 3y ago

> Why HN is so defensive against copilot but have a completely different opinion about MidJourney / StableDiffusion There's a miss match between producers of the content used to create the models and those using it. At the moment its mostly software developers who are using the output of Copilot, whilst its mostly non artists who are using MidJourney/StableDiffusion.

omnicognate 3y ago

Because HN doesn't have opinions on things. You're reading the opinions of individuals who frequently disagree with each other, and the groups of individuals commenting differ from post to post. Why does this need explaining so often? FTR I personally think that training commercial ML algorithms on bulk data produced by people that haven't released it to the public domain or licensed it for such use is ethically dubious (regardless of the legality) whether the data consists of code, art, metrics or anything else.

nottorp 3y ago
> Because HN doesn't have opinions on things. HN is actually one of the most homogeneous public communities I've seen. And judging by how few downmodded posts are around, self censoring.
- TeMPOraL 3y ago
  Don't confuse basic manners with homogeneity. Just because the rest of the Internet is a dumpster fire, doesn't mean people posting here have limited range of views.
- sundarurfriend 3y ago
  HN sprouts weirdly localized hiveminds - every post is its own little hivemind, where a "correct opinion" is formed, and opposing opinions downvoted and/or ridiculed. But then the next day a different post on the same topic could have an entirely opposite hivemind, often no discernible reason.
  - dtech 3y ago
    It often depends on the first comment which gets traction (>5 upvotes)
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    > opposing opinions downvoted and/or ridiculed. I'm not so sure this is a huge effect. I often express "incorrect opinions", and get some amount of downvoting or ridicule, but not usually to a significant degree. When I've had my comments dogpiled, I can see that it happened because of how I stated my opinion more than because of the opinion itself.

orbital-decay 3y ago

> Why HN is so defensive against copilot but have a completely different opinion about MidJourney / StableDiffusion? Is it, though? My impression is that HN opinions on possible copyright issues are generally mixed for both, and mostly dismissive about the job replacement stuff for both.

komape 3y ago

Maybe because the main users of HN are software developers and their work is used to train Copilot while probably a minority is creating images used to train MidJourney / StableDiffusion. A question of whether one's own work is used for this purpose or whether one is only a beneficiary.

Karsteski 3y ago

HN is not a person

_a_a_a_ 3y ago

Because MS owns github and MS therefore WILL abuse whatever goes there. Not 'if' but 'when'. Source: over 20 years of working with their products and seeing the way they treat everyone else

lucideer 3y ago

> Why HN is so defensive against copilot but have a completely different opinion about MidJourney / StableDiffusion? I've seen this question posted on HN so many times in defence of Copilot but I have yet to encounter people who fit what you're describing: people in general raise a lot of issues with MidJourney/StableDiffusion/&c. too. HN is particularly defensive when it comes to Copilot because Copilot deals with sourcecode which is central to the daily vocation of a large portion of HN's readership. HN focuses on Copilot because they're subject matter experts in what Copilot trains on. Also - as mentioned in siblings - while criticisms of training material sourcing by various ML models is common, there are quite a few details that makes Copilot's sourcing that little bit worse. > it's inevitable and artists need to up their game If this is your answer it seems you didn't even bother to read the title (never mind the article). There are two issues with Generative AI to discuss: input and output. Your answer addresses output - i.e. fear that what is produced may compete with humans. This article, and the vast majority of HN criticism of Copilot exclusively addresses input: objection to copyrighted works being used to train models without author consent. These are two entirely separate discussions.

Jayakumark 3y ago

There is a funny question people ask in India - If it comes out of your mouth it must be blood but the same from mine - is the red sauce I ate ?

PurpleRamen 3y ago

Because people are protective of their own ground, but open for conquering others ground. There are probably not as many artists here, as there are coders. So the general opinion will be against all tools which will harm the coders ground, but more open for the benefits AI will bring for the laymen, when they must not fear harm from them.

iinnPP 3y ago

It's NIMBYism for jobs. We need a new acronym for it. My effortless attempt: OMIJIB(Only My Information Job Is Brilliant)? O-My-Jib

skinnymuch 3y ago
This is pretty brilliant after reading all the responses to why HN is so obviously anti-specific things more than others. I can’t handle hearing another person say “HN is a big place”. Sure. It’s also incredibly obvious how homogeneous it is and how HN essentially forces you to toe the line.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  HN has never once forced me to toe any line.
  - skinnymuch 3y ago
    Okay thanks. Anything of substance?
    - JohnFen 3y ago
      I made a reasonably substantial point. You asserted that "HN essentially forces you to toe the line" and I brought up a counterexample to demonstrate that your assertion might not be entirely correct.
      - iinnPP 3y ago
        You can toe a line without toeing a line. That's the group involved in enforcing the line.
      - skinnymuch 3y ago
        The person who responded to you showed the obvious logic. I’m a leftist in tech. HN is not the place where you can publicly behave as an assertive leftist otherwise would.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

_boffin_ 3y ago

I’d say it’s because of personal feelings and that the technologies didn’t get trained on their data and because of that, disassociation makes those other technologies easier to use.

UncleMeat 3y ago

Because code is “my stuff” and copilot changes our jobs while so generated art doesn’t affect me and is cool. There’s no real difference it is just wagon circling once a thing threatens somebody personally. The tech community has been one of the big proponents of “data wants to be free” and “the entire idea of intellectual property is bs” for a long time and that’s suddenly reversed.

aftbit 3y ago

I dunno if HN has one particular opinion on _anything_. The echo chamber isn't quite that strong here. However, I'd posit that the main difference is that there are more software engineers on HN than digital artists.