The machine alone doesn't do anything. The user and machine together constitute a larger system, and with autocomplete, the user is charge. What's the user's intent?
I suspect that a lot of copyright violations are enabled by cut-and-paste and screenshot-taking functionality, and maybe we need to be careful with autocomplete, too? It's the user's responsibility to avoid this. We should be careful using our tools. Do users take enough care in this case? Is it possible to take enough care while still using CoPilot?
I've switched from CoPilot to Cody, but I use them the same way, to write my code. There's no particular reason to use CoPilot's output verbatim and lots of good reasons not to. By the time I've adapted it to my code base and code style and refactored it to hell and back, it's an expression of how I want to solve a problem, and I'm pretty confident claiming ownership.
Is that confidence misplaced? Are other people more careless?
By the same token, the machine alone can't download pirated movies. Yet the sites hosting those movies are targeted as the infringers.
There's a point at which foisting this responsibility on the users is simply socializing losses. Ultimately Copilot is the one serving the code up - regardless of the user's request. If the user then goes on to republish that work as their own it becomes two mistakes. It'll be interesting to see if any lawyers are capable of articulating that well enough in any of these lawsuits.
> Is that confidence misplaced? Are other people more careless?
I would say yes, for two reasons. One is that using code of unknown provenance means you're opening yourself to unknown legal risks. The second is if you're rewriting it fully (so as not to run afoul of easily spotted copyright) that's not actually "clean room" and you're still open to problems. I'd also wonder what the point of using a code writing LLM is anyways if you're doing all the authorship yourself. It seems like doing double the work.
I suspect that a lot of copyright violations are enabled by cut-and-paste and screenshot-taking functionality, and maybe we need to be careful with autocomplete, too? It's the user's responsibility to avoid this. We should be careful using our tools. Do users take enough care in this case? Is it possible to take enough care while still using CoPilot?
I've switched from CoPilot to Cody, but I use them the same way, to write my code. There's no particular reason to use CoPilot's output verbatim and lots of good reasons not to. By the time I've adapted it to my code base and code style and refactored it to hell and back, it's an expression of how I want to solve a problem, and I'm pretty confident claiming ownership.
Is that confidence misplaced? Are other people more careless?