Copilot does small-ish snippets. It does not recreate a whole project. I am on the fence about the morality, but it won't recreate elastic search for Amazon to resell as a service.
At the very least it's somewhat ironic. At worst it's plain hypocrite.
If I copy-paste your code, can I say that my computer "read your code, learned from it and later wrote something inspired and based on the knowledge it internalized"? If I take a photography of a photography, can I sell it as mine, given that my camera "observed the original and learned from it"?
My opinion is that if you read my code, learn from it and later write something inspired and based on the knowledge you internalized, then that is fine. Because you are a human. But if you do anything that it functionally an obfuscated copy-paste and pretend that you actually created that, then that is not fine.
My argument is "LLMs are not humans, therefore we should be careful with such comparisons". Do you also think that LLMs should have rights? Should it be illegal to make an LLM work 24h a day?
> I work in ML, although not LLM, and I do understand how they work.
I never meant to underestimate ML. However it feels like you underestimate humans :-).
> I don't think you can reduce LLMs to obfuscating copy-pasters. I believe they are closer to our internalizing process
Wow. If you think that LLMs are closer to humans than to copy-pasters... you must not think much of living organisms. Now I understand why ML people think that AGI is coming soon :).
I'm saying that the arguments that define this "abuse" often are.
What I specifically find hypocritical, we cannot suddenly put restrictions on what clients may or may not access, read, store and see our content. "Only a human may access my content" is just as bad as these numerous attempts of DRM that "hollywood" has tried to force down on the web.
More practically: I have a blog, with a CC-SA licence on my content. If an LLM starts spewing my exact paragraphs and articles without the same license (the SA-part asks this), I'd be pissed and have a right to call it "abuse" and could quite easily take the company behind it to court (If I wanted to).
But when that LLM merely hashes, vectorifies, trains on, and stores copies of my content so that their project can mimic my tone of voice, ideas and other content, so be it: I find it immoral to impose restrictions on what, who, where and how my content is read. Because I find DRM and such immoral.
What if I copy your article by hand? Or run it through an algorithm that translates it into another language. Can I sell it as my own? Or does it have to go through an LLM for people to sell your work as theirs?
Think about this: what if your job was to write articles, and suddenly nobody buys them anymore because they can read them cheaper on another website that serves them after the LLM laundering? Is it moral for that other website to make money out of your work?
> I find it immoral to impose restrictions on what, who, where and how my content is read.
Did you think that through? Do you find it immoral for a book author to sell their book, and to make it illegal for you to sell copies of it? It feels like you only consider your hobby-blog and ignore those who try to make a living by producing content (e.g. a photographer).
I don't.
A judge will have to decide which it is. So far, they're leaning to "it's not a copy machine"
Edit: and yes. I find it immoral when an author has a say in how I use the book after buying it. Whether I whipe my ass with the paper, or display it in a shrine is non of his business. I bought the carrier, it is mine. And under copyright law (EU), I'm free to sell my copy to a second hand bookstore, and that bookstore is free to sell it and make a profit. I understand the nuances of digital carries that can duplicate their contained knowledge much easier than a paper book can, but I find it immoral that the ebook I buy, cannot be read by my wife on her ereader without her buying it as well.
I see an LLM as a machine that takes an input and automatically gives an output. If that input is copyrighted, and the output is essentially a translation of that input, then it is a problem.
BTW using a camera to take a photo of your code, and then use text recognition to render it (with potential mistakes), and then use an algorithm to correct the mistakes, all that is not exactly "something that copies stuff": you will agree that there is a lot happening. Still you would say that it breaches the copyright "because it is exactly the same text". The thing is, "copyright" is not defined as "exactly the same text" (otherwise you could rename a few variables and be done with it).
> I find it immoral when an author has a say in how I use the book after buying it.
So you find it immoral for an author to sue you because you bought the book, copied it and sold cheaper copies on Amazon? Pretty sure you don't. You can't just ignore all the nuances that don't support your argument... I don't like DRMs either, but it does not mean that the concept of copyright is always wrong.
Group A : "Information wants to be free and we shouldn't patent algorithms"
Group B : "If you want to use our corporate stuff, you must pay"
Group A : "If that is the route you choose, we will still not charge for our stuff but if you want to use it, you must share your changes"
Group B : "If we use this tool that generates code, trained on the code that Group A created, it doesn't count as Group A's code and we can ignore their rules"
Group A : "It does count as our code, please abide by the rules."
More interesting to me would be; If I trained a LLM on leaked MS sources and built an OS or Office suite. Would MS be ok with that?
From my limited knowledge, it looks like it is just regurgitating. This is based on what I have heard about outputs, i.e. stays the same if rand function is fixed.
Also with code there are finite ways to create something functional as opposed to an opinion paper where there are a range of viewpoints and how to express those viewpoints.
You can make this argument for any artist. We study whole art movements which are periods of time where all art looks the same. Somehow, we want code production to be completely novel with no prior inspiration?
To your second point. I agree. There is limited expressivity in code implementation. As a human how would you cope with that? You can't recall any prior code you may have seen and you must write completely different code than anything in existence or face copyright litigation?
Why not?
If your implementation is serving back literal chunks of code, I'd presume not, and they can easily use copyright laws to punish you.
If your implementation uses that as "inspiration", It's hardly different from you reading that code and learning from it. Obviously, it's almost impossible to read the code, learn from it, and be 100% sure you'll never reproduce any of their code. Hence "clean room" teams and such.
>Section 102 of the U.S Copyright Act sets forth what is and what is not subject to copyright protection.[3] The first part of the statute states the eight types of works which are subject to copyright protection such as; literary works, musical works, dramatic works, pantomimes and choreographic works, pictorial, graphic, and sculptural works, audiovisual works, sound recordings; and architectural works.[4] The second part of the statute states that copyright protection does not “extend to any idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery…”[5] https://easlerlaw.com/software-computer-code-copyrighted
Which is why we have software patents in the first place.