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Comment by sega_sai | Hacker News Reader

I notice an interesting pattern on HN. When the art/music is being discussed, there is a large fraction of people in the comments who are altogether against copyright. But when say github copilot is being discussed, the majority is against copilot and is for protection of code authors. I wonder if people really thought about whether their stances on both those topics are consistent or not.

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I rarely see more than a thousand comments on a topic. There are undoubtedly more than a thousand users on HN. Therefore one could deduce that not all milkshakes bring the same people to the same yards.

This "observation" gets brought up on every damn post about generative art / large language models.

That and every armchair philosopher on HN who trots out that "human intelligence is just cleverly disguised auto predictor heuristics based on statistical models the same as GPT."

It's because they aren't contradictory positions. The people who are against copilot are people who specifically choose licenses designed to ridicule and dismantle copyright. The problem is with Microsoft, who vigorously enforces their own copyrights, not only taking advantage of these projects without following their licenses, but even enabling others to do the same thing as a service. If Microsoft and Github released all of their source code under a FOSS license and required all of the users of copilot to do the same, people wouldn't have a problem with it.

If copyright were ended for art, music, and source code, there would be nothing wrong with copilot.

How is that any different than the art generators? Most of the content they are trained on is not licensed even under a copyleft model, and rather have all rights reserved. The software equivalent is proprietary closed-source, or possibly available-source.

Yes, they aren't different; they have exactly the same problem, which is why StableDiffusion is also the subject of a lawsuit, like Copilot.

What submission about Copilot had a majority of comments against it?

Like this one https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27710287 But in the same time I can admit that I didn't do the formal counting of comments, so saying "majority" may be technically incorrect. It was more of an impression from reading comments that many people are negative about copilot (possibly for a right reason, I don't know, I haven't played with it)

I have the same leaning as you. I have been following the AI art commentary and noticed that the language learning models are commented on more critically. My take is that a large portion of the commenters for AI art believe that artists learn to make art by copying existing art, so having a computer do the same is a non issue. The reality is that artists learn to use tools and materials to express art, although there are some that copy, it is not the norm. Artists study other artists to be literate in the field, not to simply regurgitate existing imagery. There is an attitude of 'the artists are jealous that anybody can now make art' even though AI art could not exist without being fed human artistic skill and effort. Any public online portfolio is now free game for AI to scoop, 'too bad, they shouldn't have put it online....These are the most vociferous viewpoints. AI art is not to be criticized, lest we are jealous luddites, yet I have found lots of thoughtful, balanced criticisms and discussions in the AI language and coding commentary.

The scale is conveniently ignored a lot of the time. The model can analyze art far faster than any person can appreciate the same volume.

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