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This makes me think we need models to deliberately try to make code that's equivalent to copyrighted code, but sufficiently changed that it's not infringing. T

This makes me think we need models to deliberately try to make code that's equivalent to copyrighted code, but sufficiently changed that it's not infringing. The end state would be to make the rewriting powerful enough that trying to claim infringement would also hit manually created code. Alternately, generate code that is optimized for some task by some metric, and show that because the code is best by this criterion, it doesn't show creativity. Another possibility here is for the LLM vendor to log the code generation tasks typically asked for and then salt the model with vetted, correct, non-infringing code for those questions.

kelnos 2y ago
While I think that would probably get around the copyright infringement issues, it still bothers me. I don't like the idea that a corporation can hoover up countless open source code and contributions (including mine), and then use that to make money selling code generation assistance to other people, even if the output of that code generation would be different enough to any specific copyrighted block of code such that it couldn't result in a copyright infringement claim. It's not even clear that we can stop this from happening; it's certainly possible that a "GPLv4" that had a provision against using covered code for LLM trailing would be legally (if not just practically) unenforceable. To me, the ickiest part is centralization. While models and training tools will probably (maybe?) get cheaper over time, building and operating something like Copilot requires a lot of money and resources. Do we really want these capabilities to be locked up inside big, well-capitalized corporations? For me, the answer to that is a resounding hell no.