Note that it is _my_ code that Copilot regurgitates, and at least 50 lines of it as I kept prodding it. I didn't actually put it in Github, but some scammer decided to mirror it there. It is a popular program, but not that popular, so I just can't accept the argument that "these models reproducing a copyrighted program is a rare situation".
It is actually a frequent occurrence, and this dismantles the majority of this type of arguments.
> Which is why I made that Photoshop analogy. You can use it and get it to output someone's copyrighted work. The fact that you can do that doesn't make photoshop itself a problem.
Photoshop analogy is still not really working. These models have been trained on copyrighted programs and can reproduce portions of them on demand based on short prompts (or at least significantly shorter than the actual portion of the program). Photoshop _cannot_, unless you literally load the original artwork on it or literally reproduce it in the program action by action (or pixel by pixel).
There is simply no way to argue that Photoshop is a derivative work of 3rd party X's artwork, specially if Photoshop creators didn't even have access to X's artwork; but there is ample opportunity that the model _is_ a derivative work of 3rd party programs, specially when by their own admission they used my program's code to build their tool.
In addition, and based on a strict interpretation of today's legal definitions, I could build a case that model infringes on my copyrights, from the mere fact that my programs were used for the construction of the model. It doesn't really matter what you think about the particularities of the model; there was no human in the loop, and therefore it is impossible for the model to be anything other than a derivative work. For Photoshop I just cannot have a case (unless, e.g. the brushes of photoshop were "trained" by a program from my artwork).
> The data of these things are trained on is absolutely massive and the final files are not nearly so large. The compression ratio would be absolutely bonkers if that was what was going on here
Yet it happens. Is it a matter of numbers? Would a very clever compression algorithm suddenly strip from its output the copyright protections of its input? Unless it was a bonkers algorithm, like always decompressing to the same string, I rather doubt anyone would claim that.
> You've got a picture and you're going to claim that this AI model that was trained on 7 billion pictures or something like that is derivative of your work?
The model is literally trained on my picture; how can it _not_ be a derivative of my work?
Not to mention that the discussion quickly goes moot when the model can reproduce _my picture_ (in this case, my code) on demand, as is the case here.
If it could reproduce my code without having been trained on it, you could have had a (weak) case... something equivalent to clean-room reverse engineering. But this is not the case at all; these models have literally consumed copyrighted code as input.