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Comment by akagusu | Hacker News Reader

For years people have warned about hosting the majority of world's open source code in a proprietary platform that belongs to a for profit company. These people were called lunatics, fundamentalists, radicals, conspiracy theorists, and many other names.

Well, they were ignored and this is the result. A for profit company built a proprietary system using every code hosted in its platform without respecting the code license.

There will be a lot of people saying this is not a license violation but it is, and more, it is an exploitation of other people work.

Right now I'm asking myself when people will stop supporting these kind of company that exploit people's work without giving anything in return to people and society while making a huge amount of profit.

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If we feed the entirety of a library to an AI and have it generate new books, is it an exploitation of people's work?

If we read a book and use its instructions to build a bicycle, is it an exploitation of people's work?

No, no it's not.

If you read a book and use the instructions to build a bicycle you are learning a new skill and this is obviously not exploitation of people's work.

When you read a book and copy this book partially or entirely to create a new book or create a derivative work using this book without citation it's called plagiarism and copyright infringement. It is not only exploitation, it is against the law.

If you feed an entire library to an AI to generate new books without source citation and copyright agreements it is not only exploitation, it is against the law. We can call this automated plagiarism and copyright infringement, and automated or not, it is against the law. Except if you use public domain books. It wouldn't be illegal but highly unethical considering there are powerful companies with big pockets bending public domain's laws to avoid their assets to be public available (I'm looking at you Disney), but that is another story.

I think you are abstracting the matter by taking out the humanity. It's one thing to learn to do something by hand after purchasing the book. It's a totally different thing to read every single book in the world (humanly impossible) and then absorb some knowledge and train yourself to write exceptional books because you (the AI in this scenario) have learned that some words and sentence structures have lead to books having higher ratings than others. It's not humanly possible.

Of course we generate the world around us and its rules but I get angry every time we compare people to machines and say that it's the same thing. No it's not. We are constrained by time and space. I can't add more brain or more eyes to my body so I read more books can I? Microsoft can have a small city of servers somewhere and that could replace lots of people's jobs.

People have trained ML models on code thats on Github before co-pilot. (lots of examples here: https://github.com/src-d/awesome-machine-learning-on-source-...) There's nothing proprietary that other interested people or companies couldn't easily replicate here.

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