What bothers me more is that it’s more like “this isn’t amazing because it’s just xyz,” when in fact it’s amazing that it is just xyz yet does what it does. The fact we’ve produced a (perhaps poor) simulacrum of the collective mind of humanity by feeding it the collective online works of humanity is frankly amazing. Anyone who argues about stochastic parrots has lost the capacity to dream.
I’m also a bit of a hippy in that I’m not sure I believe in intellectual property in this way. I am an old free software in the rms sense guy (http://www.jwz.org/hacks/why-cooperation-with-rms-is-impossi...). I believe in trademark and copyright protection to the extent artists and authors and creators can monetize their work without plagiarism or worse unrewarded reproduction. But I also think remixing music, publishing excerpts, quoting, indexing, and, yes, training models in aggregate on otherwise trademark and copyrighted material is fair use.
I know these models can produce stuff that would violate fair use, however the use of that production from the model is what is the violation not that the model can violate fair use. Photocopiers can also violate fair use in similar ways if done in a way that violates fair use.
An issue people bring up is the model can’t attribute material produced to a copyright or license. That’s fair, and I think for code licensing it is the thorniest. But that isn’t the model itself that’s in violation. It’s the use of its output without any attempt to verify whether it’s encumbered or not. That to my mind is a second order problem that companies offering code authoring products need to tackle, and is frankly a simple information retrieval problem.
“People usually consider walking on water or in thin air a miracle. But I think the real miracle is not to walk either on water or in thin air, but to walk on earth. Every day we are engaged in a miracle which we don't even recognize: a blue sky, white clouds, green leaves, the black, curious eyes of a child—our own two eyes. All is a miracle.” ― Thich Nhat Hanh
I’m also a bit of a hippy in that I’m not sure I believe in intellectual property in this way. I am an old free software in the rms sense guy (http://www.jwz.org/hacks/why-cooperation-with-rms-is-impossi...). I believe in trademark and copyright protection to the extent artists and authors and creators can monetize their work without plagiarism or worse unrewarded reproduction. But I also think remixing music, publishing excerpts, quoting, indexing, and, yes, training models in aggregate on otherwise trademark and copyrighted material is fair use.
I know these models can produce stuff that would violate fair use, however the use of that production from the model is what is the violation not that the model can violate fair use. Photocopiers can also violate fair use in similar ways if done in a way that violates fair use.
An issue people bring up is the model can’t attribute material produced to a copyright or license. That’s fair, and I think for code licensing it is the thorniest. But that isn’t the model itself that’s in violation. It’s the use of its output without any attempt to verify whether it’s encumbered or not. That to my mind is a second order problem that companies offering code authoring products need to tackle, and is frankly a simple information retrieval problem.