How do you draw the line between allowed learning and disallowed learning?
You don't think it's unethical for a human to learn from open source code and then write their own private code, surely?
You don't think it's unethical for a human to learn from open source code and then write their own private code, surely?
What is the copyright of code written with copilot? Copilot learns the code and forgets authors.
Would you agree if I take your open source project, learn piece by piece, rewrite it from scratch and put my name on it without a single word about your work?
If it was indeed written from scratch, I see no reason (although it’d feel nice) to credit my original work. Having multiple implementations of an idea is always a great thing.
Would this kind of copying be fine in software and not in other scientific papers or other industrial processes? Would it be fine if I train copilot on a patent database and start creating new patents (at a rate in which is would be unpractical to determine that it is regurgitating prior art)?
Open source would be ruined if it were easier to build upon past works with lower barriers to research and licensing?
> Would this kind of copying be fine in software and not in other scientific papers or other industrial processes?
Scientific papers are more about collecting and experimenting with novel data- and referencing an explicit paper trail of past results. It's not really comparable. Fiction is a better match.
> Would it be fine if I train copilot on a patent database and start creating new patents (at a rate in which is would be unpractical to determine that it is regurgitating prior art)?
This is a problem with the patent system, not copilot, and is also isn't a capability that copilot actually has. You're describing a different system entirely.
Why is recognizing someone else's work so much pain?
The whole point is that copilot forgets who wrote the code and who is the author of the whole idea (unfortunately few programmers write it but sometimes it is there is you are patient enough to read documentation). Thus a copilot's user cannot know who deserves the credit.
This whole discussion is like if you train an AI to pick apples from a supermarket and leave them on the street waiting for someone else to take them home, and pretending that nobody is stealing anything.
Because its basically impossible to completely and accurately attribute the origin of all your knowledge. And it is impossible to verify that the source you think is the originator of your knowledge is the original creator of that knowledge. Odds are they learned it from someone else. It really doesn't matter, at all.
> This whole discussion is like if you train an AI to pick apples from a supermarket and leave them on the street waiting for someone else to take them home, and pretending that nobody is stealing anything.
No, because in this case the supermarket has lost apples. This is more like accusing street performers singing popular songs without permission of the songwriter of being thieves. Or an engineer studying a bridge and leveraging techniques used in that bridge.
This is a fallacy.
If you don't explain why you think the comparison is wrong, your comment might as well be "nuh uh".
If a human does that we call it plagiarism.
Computers read, process according to predefined algorithms, and output. A computer "learns" code when it comes over a wire in pieces over a bus, and writes code when it transmits it over a bus to a another device.