We should probably start thinking about AI rights at some point. Personally I'll be crediting GPT-3 as any other contributor because it sounds cool but maybe morally too in future
What you can expect a person to do is understand the principles behind that GPL code, and write something along the same lines. GitHub Co-Pilot is not a general ai, and it's not touted as one, so we shouldn't be considering whether it really knows code principles, only that it can reliably output code that fits a similar function to what came before, which could reasonably include entire blocks of GPL code.
It's perfectly fine for me to develop programming skills by reading any code regardless of the license. When a corp snatches an employee from competitors, they get to keep their skills even if they signed an NDA and can't talk about what they worked on. On the other hand there's the no-compete agreement, where you can't. Good luck making a no-compete agreement with a neural network.
Even if someone feeds stolen or illegal data as an input dataset to gain advantage in ML, how do we even prove it if we're only given the trained model and it generalizes well?
I hope you're actually reading those LICENSE files before using open source code in your projects.
I'd be inclined to agree with this, but whenever a high profile leak of source code happens, reading that code can have dire consequences for reverse engineers. It turns clean room reverse engineering into something derivative, as if the code that was read had the ability to infected whatever the programmer wrote later.
A situation involving the above developed in the ReactOS project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReactOS#Internal_audit
Someone's going to have to audit the model the training and the data that does it. There's a documentary on black holes on Netflix that did something similar (no idea if it was AI) but each team wrote code to interpret the data independently and without collaboration or hints or information leakage, and they were all within a certain accuracy of one-another for interpreting the raw data at the end of it.
So, as an example, if I can't train something in parallel and get similar results to an already trained model, we know something is up and there is missing or altered data (at least I think that's how it works).
> "but eevee, humans also learn by reading open source code, so isn't that the same thing"
> - no
> - humans are capable of abstract understanding and have a breadth of other knowledge to draw from
> - statistical models do not
> - you have fallen for marketing
Preemptive, doesn't work as it turns out :)
Compare if you had only learned writing from, say, the Bible. You would probably write in a very Biblical manner, but would you write the Psalms exactly? Most likely not.
In any case my original question was answered by the tweeter in a later tweet I missed https://twitter.com/eevee/status/1410049195067674625
I get where they're coming from but they are kinda just handwaving it back the other way with the "u fell for marketing idiot" vibe. I wish someone smarter than me could simplify the legal ramifications around this but we'll probably have to wait till it kills someone (or at least costs someone a bunch of money) to get any actual laws set up.
* Co-pilot fails to detect it, and you have a potential lawsuit/ethical concern when someone finds out. Although the devil on my shoulder says that if Co-pilot didn't detect it, what's to say another tool will?
* Co-pilot reuses code in a way that still violates copyright, but is difficult to detect. I.e. If you checked via a syntax tree, you'd notice that the code was the same, but if you looked at it as raw text, you wouldn't.
* Purely ethical - is it right to take licensed code and condense it into a product, without having to take into account the wishes of the original creators? It might be treated as normal that other coders will read it, and pick up on it, but when these licenses were written no one saw products like this coming about. They never assumed that a single person could read all their code, memorise it, and quote it near-verbatim on command.
It's gonna be really interesting to see how this plays out.