Microsoft CEO of AI: Online content is 'freeware' for models
www.theregister.comUnless you've got a lawyer, that is
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Friends don’t let Friends use Microsoft products. If you’re using Windows you’re finding this awful organisation. Shame on you.
Man it’s crazy how these fuckers basically get to ignore copyright law whenever it’s inconvenient to them but if you have one too many Windows machines provisioned they’ll send the Spanish Inquisition after you.
Sure thing…now GPL/Creative Commons all your code involved in any way for your models, documentation, parameters, data sets, and allow full unlimited integration and modification by any parties to any portion of it.
The social contract? Tf. The social contract still required attribution in almost all cases for creative work unless explicitlf stated otherwise—especially in the case of comercial products like ChatGPT—so I don’t know where this joker is getting his ideas.
So Windows XP source code leak is now freeware?
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I look forward to the lawsuits that will ultimately cost this man his job.
I went into a smidge more detail over on my Mastodon last night, but my response is summed up as “WTAF? No! Freeware is an explicit license, as anyone from the BBS days will recall.”
Would you mind sharing a link to it here if it’s not any trouble? (Or your handle if that’s easier for you) I’m always looking for new stuff to check out and new people to follow on Mastodon
From the article:
They can argue about it not being a copy all they want. If there is a single GPL licenced line of code scraped then anything they produce is a derivative work & must be licenced GPL.
nice.
I’ll play the uniformed devils advocate here:
I’m torn about my personal opinion about copyrights and software licensing in general. I think the main problem is the huge power imbalance between people and corporations, not so much the fact a company analyzed a bunch of available data to solve programming problems.
They don’t copy the data and sell it verbatim to others which would be a legal issue and in my mind also a moral issue, as they don’t add any additional value.
1: yes
2: Normally derivative works are patched or modified versions of the original. I think the common English meaning would apply & chatGPT et al are fucked. I doubt there is a precedent for this yet.
The only way I can see them weaseling out of this is by keeping the program running the model made in-house and proprietary while releasing the model in a format unusable without the base (proprietary) program. But maybe the GPL forbids such obfuscstion efforts (I don’t know, I haven’t studied it in detail)
GPL v2 don’t, which lead to tivoization. But Linus himself didn’t agree with that standing.
You heard it here folks. Microsoft says if you find something online, it’s free.
Always was.
@JCreazy @sabreW4K3 I have found a key for windows 11 together with its source code that means that its free now right? :ablobcatreach:
Which is why I boycott as hard as I can every service this evil corporation provides (migrate your MS GitHub project away now so I can delete this account too)
Microsoft is in a death spiral.
Even my coworkers who are complete idiots with technology, who actively sabotage themselves every time they touch any piece of hardware and software, have soured entirely on nearly every Microsoft product across the board.
Its funny how quickly people change their minds when they dont understand the technology on a deeper level. Its just: “this is frustrating now I hate it” and no further thought.
@Rekorse @toastal They just reach the same point as professionals, only 10 years later (+/- 2 years)
He seems to be confusing “freeware”, which is basically a license for copyrighted work, with “public domain”, which is the absence of a copyright.
Yeah, but anything you create automatically has a copyright, so for example this comment is not in the public domain. Its use is limited to the context I am using it in; that is, I expect it to be copied for federation purposes, but I wouldn’t say that AI is covered in this context, just genuine readership, moderation, and bots that are ‘part of the community’.
At least that’s the EU stance afaik. Like if I saw this comment on a billboard somewhere I’d see that as a clear breach of copyright and even privacy.
Thats a great way to put it in a simple way: its wrong to use other peoples content for things they did not expect they would be.
Well, it’s one thing to say an ‘artificial agent’ looks at someone’s work on deviant art and learns from it. It’s another to use that to make money, as I personally can’t imagine many of the posters would have been on board with that.
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I’m fine with that, but let’s put some rules against this.
What you’re asking for is literally impossible.
A neural network is basically nothing more than a set of weights. If one word makes a weight go up by 0.0001 and then another word makes it go down by 0.0001, and you do that billions of times for billions of weights, how do you determine what in the data created those weights? Every single thing that’s in the training data had some kind of effect on everything else.
It’s like combining billions of buckets of water together in a pool and then taking out 1 cup from that and trying to figure out which buckets contributed to that cup. It doesn’t make any sense.
Sounds like homeopathy lol
It’s not impossible lol. All a company would need to do is keep track of where they were getting content. If I use a script to download as much of the internet as possible and end up with a bunch of copyrighted content I could still get in trouble, hell there was even a guy arrested for downloading jstor without authorization.. Stop letting these guys get away with crimes just because you like the idea of the end product
Respectfully, I worked for Alexa AI on compositional ML, and we were largely able to do exactly this with customer utterances, so to say it is impossible is simply not true. Many companies have to have some degree of ability to remove troublesome data, and while tracing data inside a model is rather difficult (historically it would be done during the building of datasets or measured at evaluation time) it’s definitely something that most big tech companies will do.
Sorry, I misinterpreted what you meant. You said “any AI models” so I thought you were talking about the model itself should somehow know where the data came from. Obviously the companies training the models can catalog their data sources.
But besides that, if you work on AI you should know better than anyone that removing training data is counter to the goal of fixing overfitting. You need more data to make the model more generalized. All you’d be doing is making it more likely to reproduce existing material because it has less to work off of. That’s worse for everyone.
Wow the head of AI for MS doesn’t know what the word freeware means.
The definition is being changed by Microsoft
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