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Comment by freshhawk | Hacker News Reader

"Or maybe it is, but if so it essentially means the end of licensing because it would be trivial to make an AI that can take an input and produce the same output."

Yes, this is what is pretty interesting to me. I said in a previous comment that I have a really good OS generating AI. It asks you your favorite color and outputs a disk image you can use as an installer.

Right now it just happens to output a cracked version of Windows if you answer "blue". Who can know how that happened? It's a black box after all. Seems useful though, since Microsoft is loudly saying that if I distributed this it would have no license problems at all.

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I think this is peak programmer logic. You can’t just declare something a black box or declare something an AI — the courts, people, aren’t that stupid. Lawyer words aren’t that magic.

If when you crack open Copilot it’s determined that it’s not actually learning and boils down to storing and regurgitating snippets of code no matter how few or many layers of indirection it’s still infringement.

What your AI actually does is underneath all the indirection is what’s important.

> [..] not actually learning and boils down to storing and regurgitating [...]

Some would say that pretty much _all_ learning involves "storing" and "regurgitating".

Aside: my daughter started writing out her name at kindergarten a couple of years ago. One of the staff seemed a bit dismissive of this, and claimed what was happening wasn't really "writing" it was "merely memorising the shapes of letters and then reproducing them in the right order". <rolls eyes>

I didn't bother to argue...

Yeah ... that was my point. What copilot does underneath the indirection is steal GPL code and derive "new" stuff from it in a way that launders the licenses.

We know what it's doing, it's doing very well understood statistical inference techniques to derive outputs.

Also, it's trivially easy to teach a real neural network to output a specific binary stream in response to a specific input. My OS AI could use the exact same technology as Copilot, I'd just train it very specifically.

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