Comment by skytrue | Hacker News Reader

Comment by skytrue | Hacker News Reader

It's always interesting to see the buzz that occurs when Copilot is brought up as a topic. This place is called "HackerNews", yet routinely people forget that a "hacker" is somebody using technology to overcome novel problems. Doesn't GitHub Copilot fall into this category? Why is there such an outcry over a technology that has been in the public's hands for less than a year? I'm almost certain that the team responsible for Copilot is going to try to figure out how to avoid spitting out code verbatim, as that's obviously not a good look.

It's most likely the case that in 1, 3, 5 years, Copilot won't be spitting out code blocks verbatim. It will generate rightsize code, trained on lots of publicly available code, and start reducing the surface area required to code/develop.

Stable Diffusion doesn't get in trouble right now because the artwork looks like permutations of different works; text is easy to copyright, style is more challenging, but artists are facing up against the same reality. There's no rolling this back; ML models are going to remove a ton of cruft from creative/labor based endeavors, and people are going to need to evolve to stay relevant.

Plenty of people approve of individuals doing things they disapprove of large corporations doing.

For example, I wouldn't care if a small YouTuber used a copyright song in the background. I would care if Disney stole a small YouTuber's original song and used it in a movie.

This is entirely consistent within my ethical framework: scale and power matters.

I think it's cool that Copilot exists and it's a worthwhile scientific discovery. However Microsoft is re-selling this to companies and claiming that they can use that and owe nothing to the authors of the code, whose license terms they can ignore, and that is where the problem lies.

When a hacker finds a new way to get into systems or root their phone it's cool. When someone uses that technology to steal money or personal information or encrypt your files it's criminal.

Nothing new in this case.

Personally, all my code open source is in public domain (CC0). SO it's a free game. However taking any other code without any regard to license,or author's permissions, is unethical and undesirable.

At the very least add a comment in the generated snipped where the code originates from. That won't suffice in all cases but it's disingenuous to profit from others' work without any credit/permission.

Fedora no longer accepts the CC0 license for code. If it's public domain code, you should be using 0BSD.

Nothing is in the publics hands; they have taken the public data and given back nothing but a blackbox that you pay money for.

They don't even trust the thing to train it on their own code, yet their boss is over here telling us they are "learning". It's a damned insult.

I won't shed any tears for Microsoft if people liberate or reverse engineer the model weights.

I think main argument that it's a proprietary piece of software that piggy backs on hacker (GPL) culture for profit. If they released open source copilot it would be less of an issue and theft of GPL code would be less painful. Some people worry that this will kill the GPL and hacker culture which is already extremely difficult to protect.

That assumes that the open source community is going to be the same in the future...still generating code just to have it frozen, dehumanized and capitalized upon by Copilot:

> Meanwhile, we open-source authors have to watch as our work is stashed in a big code library in the sky called Copilot. The user feedback & contributions we were getting? Soon, all gone

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