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Comment by mtkhaos | Hacker News Reader

Technically just advanced indexing of code snippets

Precisely. I don't see a difference between what Google indexes on its search engine, and what CoPilot can recommend. Google has been and still does get slapped on the wrist when they don't respond to take down requests. It seems this is missing from CoPilot currently, and will open them up to a number of lawsuits in the future if it continues to operate as it does.

Except Google isn’t creating anything new, Copilot is. I’ve had it kick out some very interesting short stories based on Sherlock Holmes, so if I published those would they infringe?

You have no idea where they came from, or whether they are as new as you assume. Maybe they'd infringe, maybe they wouldn't!

Google returned nothing which contained exact matches of some of the more interesting dialogue. It would be a serious find - worthy of a paper - to disprove that GPT-3 is generating novel text/code.

It's easy to prove that it sometimes regurgitates text verbatim — just play with it for a while. Having certainty that any given span of text/code is novel is extraordinarily difficult.

Where does human creativity come from?

> I don't see a difference between what Google indexes on its search engine, and what CoPilot can recommend.

That is an extremely disingenuous take. It produces novel output, so is not merely an “index” in any sense of the word.

Each search results page is novel and unique. Even two different users making the same query will get different results thanks to the "search personalization" Google is doing these days.

Google search doesn't synthesize anything. It collects results and orders them according to an algorithm. Copilot and similar language models can synthesize new text. That's clearly different than just presenting existing text.

Copilot can't create new novel concepts. In the end it is just an complex mathematical formula that return a set of code references with a set of length determined by the math.

The illusion of creativity is similar to that of technology. Sufficient advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, and sufficient advanced math is indistinguishable from intelligence. The relation between AI and math is the same as the relation between magic and technology.

All of the large language models can emit text that has never been seen in the training set (unless you go so far to consider each character to be a snippet).

They can also emit text that it verbatim copied.

Infringement isn't about how the infringing system works, it's about the product of that work.

> Infringement isn't about how the infringing system works, it's about the product of that work.

Exactly this. It makes zero difference that you produced your infringing work with the help of a program that happens to be extremely complex and marketed as "AI".

So do smaller models and I have to note smaller models are better at that.

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