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A comment on Microsoft will assume liability for legal copyright risks of Copilot. Parent comment

Re:Microsoft will assume liability for legal copyright risks... by nickpsecurity on Thursday September 07, 2023 @10:06PM (#37428391)
The foundational models most coding models are built on May have comments and code in them. They’re almost certainly built on a number of legal violations, including copyright infringement. I have details in “Proving Wrongdoing” section here:

https://www.heswithjesus.com/tech/exploringai/index.html

I’ve also seen GPT spit out proprietary content word for word that’s not licensed for commercial use that I’m aware of. They probably got it from web crawling without checking licenses.

What I want more than anything in this space right now are two models: all public domain books (eg Gutenberg); permissive code in at least Python, JavaScript, HTML/CSS, C, C++, and ASM’s. One layered on the other but released individually. We can keep using that to generate everything from synthetic data to code to revenue-producing deliverables. All with nearly zero, legal risk.

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Re:Microsoft will assume liability for legal copyright risks... by spott on Thursday September 07, 2023 @11:31PM (#37428902)
The problem with this line of thinking is that a person can also cut and paste code that they don’t have a license to use… but until they do, they haven’t done anything wrong by reading the code.

So either we carve out an explicit exception that machines aren’t allowed to do things that are remarkably similar to what humans do… which would be a massive setback for AI in the US.

Or we agree that generative models are subject to the same rules that humans are — they can’t commit copyright infringement, but are able to appropriately consume copyrighted material that a human would be able to consume.

The second option seems to me to be much simpler, nicer, and more appropriate than the first.

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Re:Microsoft will assume liability for legal copyright risks... by nickpsecurity on Friday September 08, 2023 @10:37AM (#37434070)
I agree with you. In fact, the latter is in my Alternative Models section.
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