Comment by ckiely
6 days ago
The argument that programmers are into piracy and therefore should shut up about theft is nonsensical. Not defending piracy, but at least an artist or creator is still credited and their work is unadulterated. Piracy != plagiarism.
It's also ignoring the fact that much plagiarized code is already under permissive licenses. If Star Wars or Daft Punk were CC-BY-SA nobody would need to pirate them, and there may even be a vibrant remix culture... which is kind of the whole point of open source, is it not?
These LLMs don't respect those permissive licenses, though. Especially the GPL, but even MIT requires attribution through inclusion of a copyright notice.
Yes, exactly, that is my point.
I'll add it's not true for programmers with morality. For instance, people who follow Jesus Christ are commanded to obey the law and treat people right. Many think respecting copyright is both. While I oppose copyright law, I do uphold it and like supporting content creators.
Also, I think there's an argument similar to cryptocurrency companies that run like pyramid schemes. I could've made easy money doing security work for them. Yet, I felt like I'd be participating in helping them rob people or advancing their con. (Some jobs, like building assurance tools, might be OK.) Likewise, using tools built on massive, copyright infringement might be supporting or promoting that.
So, I gotta use legally-trained models or wait for legal reforms that make LLM training legal. Especially the data sets they distribute which is currently illegal, file sharing.
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