[liamwire]

> My explanation will not be popular here on HN How is this better than ’bring on the downvotes’?

Moving on, I’ll put this to you: you claim training a ML model against copyrighted text is in violation of the ‘permission’ granted by the rights holder. However, flip this on its head for a moment – that’s basically all human brains do. Clearly, the greatest writers of our time haven’t written their works in a vacuum. Rather, that historical reading and inspiration becomes sufficiently obfuscated that we deem something adequately creative enough to be granted its own copyright.

Fundamentally, how does Copilot differ, other than perhaps being a poor implementation? Is it by not being ‘adequately creative’ enough? Is there some future version you could envision that would be, or is it the principle you’re arguing against?

[heavyset_go]

Human beings commit copyright infringement all of the time. People have been lifting riffs from music, sometimes unconsciously, forever. This is why clean room implementations are done sometimes when writing software.

Also, you're taking the machine learning metaphor literally. AI models do not "learn", they're just statistical models, they don't understand anything. There is no comparison to human learning that isn't superficial or metaphorical.

The real question is how Copilot is any different than a compiler, or lossy encoding or compression.

[dylan604]

I don't agree to your premise. Humans can consume creative works and be influenced, this is not in question. Unless one is an impressionist, they aren't going to try to recreate exactly the works done by the artists they have been influenced by. Even if an artist does something inspired/influenced by, they have pretty much stated that. Musicians cite prior bands, as do writers, painters, etc all credit those influences.

I'm probably just a curmudgeon, but I don't understand the point of Copilot. So I'm probably not the best to opine about it. However, I am very opinionated about copyright in manner that typical flows against HN group think.

[TchoBeer]

Copilot isn't intending to copy entire code bases either.

[dylan604]

>> My explanation will not be popular here on HN How is this better than ’bring on the downvotes’?

I totally missed the non-wrapped question.

Because I don't give a crap about down-votes/up-votes. I just know from experience my views on copyright do not gel with the majority views on HN. I was just acknowledging that fact. Conversations can be had regardless of votes. My views on Napster/MP3 trading are in the same realm (and somewhat related with copyright issues). I was a co-owner of a small music site when Napster was in its heyday, and we saw direct repurcussions of people not buy music because they got it from mp3 trading. Group think here is all "things for free when I want it, how i want it", yet I still have conversations. I'm not afraid of a measly -4 points because my thoughts are contrary to group think.

At the same time, if something like this gets your goad, how is asking how something is better being better in and of itself?