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Comment by archontes | Hacker News Reader

When are people going to get that this isn't a right folks have?

If your code is readable, the public can learn from it.

The public is not learning from it. A person or corporation is creating a derivative work of it. Training a model is deriving a function from the training data. It is not "a human learning something by reading it".

It's an extreme stretch to say that the model weights are a derivative work of the training data given the legal definition of "derivative work".

It is processed data at the end of the day. And no it is not like human reading. You can't read whole Github.

That doesn't make it a derivative work.

If I "process data" by doing a word count of a book, and then I publish the number of words in that book (not the words themself! Just a word count!) I haven't created a derivative work.

Processing data isn't automatically infringement.

It's not more a stretch than saying that re-encoding a PNG as a JPEG is a derivative work even though the process is lossy and the resulting bits look nothing alike.

I'm not sure you're being intellectually honest.

You think that a model that's capable of being prodded into producing an infringing output in addition to all the other non-infringing outputs it could produce is no different than a compression algorithm?

People aren't going to get it, because you don't get them.

People have the right to learn non-copyrightable elements from your code.

The claim is that AI learns copyrightable elements.

The comment chain you are replying to includes a request to not train an AI on one's code.

I agree it's certainly possible for AI to produce infringing output.

Nevertheless, people don't have the right to enforce a limitation on training.

And to give a concrete example, in my view it should be allowed to use any source code to train a model such that the model learns that code is bad or insecure or slow or otherwise undesirable. In other words, it should be allowed to train on anything as long as the model does NOT produce that training data verbatim.

Maybe you should update your view with 17 USC 106.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/106

What copyrightable elements of the original work persist in the model, if it is incapable of outputting them? I can derive a SHA-1 hash from a copyrighted image, and yet it would be absurd to call that a derivative work.

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