Hacker News Reader

Comment by underyx | Hacker News Reader

OP’s rhetoric, and most discussion I see, asserts that training a model on copyrighted data is a copyright violation. Personally I don’t find this to be so obviously the case. Think back to when we were listening to AI generated pop music, for instance. I don’t recall any concern in HN comments about the copyright holders’ music being used for learning.

View on HN

Did you miss the bit where copilot reproduced exactly a function including the comments? That's not some mashup or reinterpretation or inspiration it meets the definition of plagiarism in universities and is just copying.

I didn’t miss that, this still doesn’t make the answer obvious to me. I’m pretty sure I’ve unknowningly replicated licensed code as well during my time as an engineer, and I’ve written way less code over my 8 years than Copilot has.

Then if you were discovered using it in a commercial project you can fairly be sued for it. Unless you're trying to argue that you should for some reason get an exemption?

Would I be found guilty if I could prove that I didn’t explicitly copy that code but rather just happened to write the same code by arriving at the same solution as the original one I had seen years before?

Nobody can answer this because it depends on the code and the resources of the entity suing you, but in general yes. This is why clean room design is a well-defined strategy: depending on the code and company, you would indeed not be allowed to work on the project because of the fact you'd seen a competitors solution previously.

You mean like https://www.theburnin.com/technology/artificial-intelligence... ?

If one of the three largest record labels uses their own catalog to train an AI, copyright seems less important to discuss. I suspect the discussion would be a bit different if a company scraped youtube and used that as a training set for AI music and successfully sold it.

> Think back to when we were listening to AI generated pop music, for instance. I don’t recall any concern in HN comments about the copyright holders’ music being used for learning.

Were those products sold to help people write commercial pop music faster? If not, I don't think your point is valid.

I'd be surprised if nobody brought up those 'what-if' scenarios at the time.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com