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Comment by m00x | Hacker News Reader

If you look at licensed code, then write new code, do you also bring in those licenses?

It's been proved in court that AI does not infringe on copyright or licenses since it generates things from an understanding of the whole, instead of directly stealing, just like the human brain does.

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That is going to need a source. All I see in these AI data gathering exercises is that if the industry isn’t a well established litigious one, the companies will happily suck in all the data, license be damned. Code and art both fall under this. But when it comes to music which is heavily litigated, suddenly the only content a company like stable AI will use is open and voluntary because in that case they worry about “overfitting and legal issues”. (Refer Harmon ai)

Hypocrisy dressing up as progress in the machine learning field has been one of the most embarrassing scenes in software engineering recently. The genie may be out of the bottle but the fact is that a bunch of software engineers with a “move fast ethics later” attitude are the ones who let it out and they shouldn’t get to shrug it off for free.

>It's been proved in court that AI does not infringe on copyright or licenses since it generates things from an understanding of the whole, instead of directly stealing, just like the human brain does.

Do you have a source for that?

This SF Conservancy article[0] says that's not true:

>Consider GitHub’s claim that “training ML systems on public data is fair use”. We have not found any case of note — at least in the USA — that truly contemplates that question.

The first major court case I know about is the class-action case Matthew Butterick is trying to build.[1]

[0] https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2022/feb/03/github-copilot-co...

[1] https://githubcopilotinvestigation.com/

astonishingly enough every sentence in this post is untrue. There's been no court case on any of the models in question here. They don't work like human brains, nor understand anything they output. Even if they did of course that output would still be subject to licenses, given that human code is subject to them, which is why those licenses exist in the first place.

If you ever plan to steal someone's code and justify it with "my brain is able to learn, therefore copyright doesn't exist" I warn you right now this will not fly.

US Court rulings do not automatically apply worldwide, and not everything it would apply to exists within its jurisdiction.

> If you look at licensed code, then write new code, do you also bring in those licenses?

If the “new” code is close enough to be considered a derived work then you will need a license.

> If the “new” code is close enough to be considered a derived work then you will need a license.

And how is that determined... in court at trial? By an unbiased 3rd party competent enough to understand both codebases?

Same for all programmers out there. Copilot will need to be careful, and like with everyone else, they'll learn.

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