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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

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.
    - Turing_Machine 3y ago
      > After all, copyright laws have a purpose and AI subverts that purpose. While it may differ in other countries, in the United States the purpose of intellectual property laws, as expressed in the Constitution, is to "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries". Enriching the copyright holders (on the rare occasions that actually occurs) is a secondary consequence, not the prime purpose. Does AI "subvert" "promoting the Progress of Science and useful Arts"? I don't think so. Quite the contrary... I think it advances the progress of science and the useful arts, if anything. It's pretty well established that a description of a copyrighted work is not protected, even an extremely-detailed description (see, for example, the way that Phoenix assigned one team to write an extremely-detailed description of the IBM PC BIOS, then gave that description to a second clean-room team that hadn't seen any of the actual source code. The second team then produced a clone of the BIOS that could be sold without paying IBM anything). The data stored in these models seems more like a "description" rather than a "copy" to me -- though, of course, there's no guessing what a court or legislature will decide.
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)

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.
  - Turing_Machine 3y ago
    > After all, copyright laws have a purpose and AI subverts that purpose. While it may differ in other countries, in the United States the purpose of intellectual property laws, as expressed in the Constitution, is to "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries". Enriching the copyright holders (on the rare occasions that actually occurs) is a secondary consequence, not the prime purpose. Does AI "subvert" "promoting the Progress of Science and useful Arts"? I don't think so. Quite the contrary... I think it advances the progress of science and the useful arts, if anything. It's pretty well established that a description of a copyrighted work is not protected, even an extremely-detailed description (see, for example, the way that Phoenix assigned one team to write an extremely-detailed description of the IBM PC BIOS, then gave that description to a second clean-room team that hadn't seen any of the actual source code. The second team then produced a clone of the BIOS that could be sold without paying IBM anything). The data stored in these models seems more like a "description" rather than a "copy" to me -- though, of course, there's no guessing what a court or legislature will decide.

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)