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Comment by bayindirh | Hacker News Reader

People don't want to acknowledge it, because they deem that CoPilot and similar tools are too useful. I personally left the day CoPilot became GA. It's an open secret that xGPL licensed applications are fed into AI models, but opponents' voice is drowned under "We're doing something amazing, we don't need any permission. Plus, it's all fair use, anyway" choir.

This also important for Source Available (for your eyes only) licenses. People don't care about them either.

This whole AI thing is a boundless ethics violation in every category, yet people don't care, because "it's awesome!" for reasons I don't understand.

Addendum: The reason why OpenAI has a non-profit part is to allow them to claim that they do non-profit research, which fair-use doctrine requires to work.

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As much as I agree with the conclusion (my AGPL code was stolen by OpenAI, as was a lot of other code), your logic is extreme. This is not good. A more reasoned argument is more convincing.

1. "Fair use"

It is fair use to use snippets of my code in other projects. AGPL doesn't change that. If I have a 3-line sort routine, and Copilot copies that verbatim, it's okay.

The place and reason Copilot is not okay is because I can ask it to spit out code which, in some versions, was almost verbatim code I wrote, and in others, a paraphrase. The same abstractions and high-level design I invented is copied by GPT.

It's like writing a book set in the Star Trek universe and (not as a parody), changing "Spock" to "Spork" and "Kirk" to "Dirk."

It's a problem for me because I compete with commercial systems, and chose the AGPL for very specific reasons: People have a right to know how their data is analyzed, and AGPL preserves that. Copilot allows companies to quickly replicate and whitewash my code.

If Microsoft uses a snippet in Windows -- e.g. a small use in an unrelated context, fair use clearly allows that. As much as I don't want my code stolen, degrading fair use would be the far greater evil.

2. "The reason why OpenAI has a non-profit part is to allow them to claim that they do non-profit research, which fair-use doctrine requires to work."

No, OpenAI was set up as a genuine, if ill-formed, non-profit. When it clearly became big $$$, bad people (likely breaking the law) formed a for-profit arm to personally profit from it. The non-profit arm is there for historical reasons.

Your statement is false, and there is ample historical record that what you're stating is not how it happened.

That's dangerous, since the wrong lessons would be drawn. The lesson this reiterates, which I learned many times the hard way, is that for non-profits, checks-and-balances matter. If you don't want your non-profit going south, this means everything -- licenses, corporate charter, bylaws, contracts, etc. -- need to be properly structured to act as a permanent network of checks-and-balances so the organization cannot go south even if bad people are involved, and that incentives are structured to support good behavior.

We do need a for-profit like the original OpenAI, but properly structured and resourced.

> It is fair use to use snippets of my code in other projects. AGPL doesn't change that. If I have a 3-line sort routine, and Copilot copies that verbatim, it's okay.

That depends. You may have a 30 line function which can be paper-worthy. I'm not supporting software patents, but reasonable attribution. If somebody uses my GPL licensed novel algorithm (which is a single function) to get unfair commercial advantage and doesn't adhere to the GPL license, can we say it's fair use? Example? See [0].

> It's a problem for me because I compete with commercial systems, and chose the AGPL for very specific reasons: People have a right to know how their data is analyzed, and AGPL preserves that. Copilot allows companies to quickly replicate and whitewash my code.

We're on the same page. I don't want my algorithms to be used by people verbatim w/o attribution or without proper license. Don't like the license? Reimplement it, paper is there.

> No, OpenAI was set up as a genuine, if ill-formed, non-profit. ... [snipped for brevity]

You're right. Let me rewrite my statement: "The reason why OpenAI keeps a non-profit part and has this convoluted many-company structure is to allow them to claim that they do non-profit research, which fair-use doctrine requires to work."

Hope that it's better now.

> Your statement is false, and there is ample historical record that what you're stating is not how it happened.

About OpenAI's structure, or GPL being fed to CoPilot? I didn't say anything about OpenAI's history AFAIK, but I have seen a tweet, containing a snapshot of an e-mail saying that "Copilot is indeed trained on every public repository on GitHub". The tweet is deleted later probably of threats. Just because of this tweet, I'm keeping this list [1].

Actually we're literally on the same page. Only difference is I keep my "plagiarism" threshold at "function" level, because they can contain some bigger magic than themselves, and you keep it at "design" level where the magic happens as a collection of functions + design.

This is probably due to different domains we operate in, in mine, a single function can affect accuracy and speed so much that it can be considered secret sauce. Welcome to HPC / Scientific Computing. :)

> We do need a for-profit like the original OpenAI, but properly structured and resourced.

When you do for-profit, fair use goes out of window. See [2].

[0]: https://journals.tubitak.gov.tr/elektrik/vol29/iss2/45/

[1]: https://notes.bayindirh.io/notes/Lists/Discussions+about+Art...

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39188979

Nits:

> That depends. You may have a 30 line function which can be paper-worthy

We have no disagreement. That's why I gave a pretty generic 3-line function. 90% of the upside of ML tools for me, by the way, is generating very routine code, so there's not even too much friction yet. I can prototype a parser with e.g. 5 XML libraries I've never used in 15 minutes, which means I make better design choices.

> You're right. Let me rewrite my statement: "The reason why OpenAI keeps a non-profit part and has this convoluted many-company structure is to allow them to claim that they do non-profit research, which fair-use doctrine requires to work."

> Hope that it's better now.

Nope. It's not. The reason the non-profit part is around is right now, they're skirting the law. If it went away, they'd be very clearly committing fraud.

The non-profit received support from donors -- including from the government in the form of a tax waiver and the general public in the forms of non-financial support (such as positive buzz / articles / scientific work) -- based on a 501(c)3 registration and a belief it would act in the public interest.

The instant the 501(c)3 part went away, this would all be fraud. Everyone who helped make OpenAI successful, from the grad student who spoke about it glowingly at a conference to the federal government, would have been embezzled.

I feel bad about having supported them, and I bet others do too.

We have been conditioned for decades to allow an increasingly slippery slope of dubious behavior in the name of 'cool'

Cool, or convenient.

Cool, convenient and coins

Don't miss collecting the coupons for a free Butlerian Jihad (e.g. https://dune.fandom.com/wiki/Butlerian_Jihad )

As a blanket statement? I don't think so. The reason we even think of anything as "dubious" now, is a moral compass, that has (at the large scale) been staggeringly readjusted for increased human well-being.

It's also why these days I do not host any of my code on Github. Only then did I realize how much of an iron grip it has on the ecosystem. People expect Github Actions, Pull requests and well now people want to use CoPilot for all their work.

It is extremely worrying.

Me neither. I moved to Source Hut. I'll be restarting my work on my previous research and pondering on whether I should keep its code at a Forgejo instance buried under a VPN, until it's ready to release.

Same here, I moved to SourceHut. There are other alternatives that look much more like GitHub for those who like that (like Forgejo).

That's the "extend" part of the embrace, extend, extinguish game plan.

Or, like many IP lawyers, they don't believe it's a copyright violation. It will come down to the courts and legislatures.

Being non-profit, or non-commerciality in general, has relatively little to do with fair use.

It seems like we need a new licensing model to prevent AI from training on open source code?

That's useless. Only courts can help.

NYTimes is suing OpenAI because it siphoned paid articles and reproduced in verbatim.

That's basically the same thing it does to open source code, so if NYTimes wins, there might be some hope.

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