This is the fundamental issue. They don't.
You can't sneak a camera into a cinema saying "don't worry, it works just like human eyes".
Neural nets aren't neurons.
This is the what copilot does as far as I understand
In my view, artists work the same way. If you ask them to draw Mickey Mouse, they (maybe) will. It wouldn't be fair to say that they are infringing on Disney's copyright by storing images of Mickey Mouse in their brain. But their version of Mickey Mouse won't be copyrightable (unless they add parody/significant creativity etc.).
If we perform an _exact_ simulation of a human brain such that it believes it is a human, how will copyright law work? (Maybe it will own the copyright and turning the simulation off would be robocide. Okay, enough sci-fi.) If we remove consciousness and all that from the simulation, will the copyright go to its creator?
I saw in a couple other comments saying that machine learning is "just an algorithm"... But is machine learning sufficiently different from the way some parts of the human brain work to warrant being held to different standards?
My opinion is that it's reasonably similar and should have the same privileges that humans enjoy -- learning from whatever's in sight that is not explicitly marked as "for authorized personnel only".
But I think eventually we are at level of what is the minimum required duplicate to define something as duplicate. (I think this is more of a problem of music, similar songs etc)
I think main problem is we are not yet there (exact simulation of human brain), we are more like 'convince people to you are exact simulation of brain' stage.
Also another problem here is 'self trained/directed' vs 'trained/directed by someone'. Imagine I have a human artist (never seen Mickey Mouse), and in front of me some Mickey Mouse art, if I am giving directions to draw a mouse, then saying make in cartoon style, then saying make ears bigger, etc. Till I get the Mickey Mouse reasonably similar, even maybe exactly to the pixel in front of me, is it copyright violation, I wouldn't maybe 100% yes, but I am very closer to that.
If the copilot would have been trained on open source software e.g. to discover bugs, bad code style, or other things "learned" by analyzing existing code and using the results of this analysis as a metric for judging code, it wouldn't be a copyright problem. But creating new code based on what it "learned" is a much more difficult field, especially, if it is "quoting" so literally.
It might not be illegal, but for a lot of us it feels unethical. IMO licenses should list what they allow versus what they forbid. In other words, if something isn’t explicitly allowed it should be assumed to be forbidden.
We need similar protections for personal data too. Tech companies have gotten too used to ingesting data and profiting from it without asking for consent. I’m willing to bet that had GitHub asked repo owners whether GH could use their work to train a new product, most would have said no, much like what happened when Apple asked iOS users if they were ok with Facebook tracking them.
This was discussed on another thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27740001
A new license saying "this license does not permit use in training an AI" won't have any effect, because the claim by the trainers is that they don't need to license the work in the first place. Unfortunately this is likely to be something that's only settled ad hoc in court.
> In other words, I don't think using of an algorithm on copyrighted code violates copyright
It does.
If you own the copyright to a work, you need to be aware that you also have rights to derivative works. If you're considering incorporating someone else's work into your new work, you need to be aware that you may be violating the copyright to the original work.»
https://www.legalzoom.com/articles/what-are-derivative-works...
If I were a master artist, my existence wouldn’t violate copyright, but I would certainly be violating it every time I chose to reproduce a copyrighted work for a client.
Generally, when you (for example) use GANs to learn from (copyrighted) images and generate new images, I see no reason why those new images should inherit any copyrights from the original image if the resulting images look sufficiently different. (Obviously, if you just train on 1000 images of Mickey Mouse, you'll get mostly Mickey Mouse, and you wouldn't get the copyright.)
Humans work the same way -- artists train on existing images or subjects/etc., and unless they produce something that looks similar to an existing image, they get the copyright.
In other words, I don't think training on copyrighted code violates copyright (UNLESS the license explicitly disallows that; maybe there will be licenses for that soon). However, if generated code is too similar to existing code, then that could be a copyright violation. In other words, the user is responsible to make sure they aren't violating any copyrights from their usage of Copilot. It may be useful to build plagiarism checkers for this purpose. (Or maybe they already exist.)
If you use Copilot, I recommend keeping track of things that were generated automatically, just so you can go back to change those components if necessary.