TRAINING YOUR REPLACEMENTS

In November a lawyer and computer programmer named Matthew Butterick sued the tech companies GitHub, Microsoft and OpenAI, saying a tool called GitHub Copilot that automatically generates computer code is essentially plagiarizing the work of human software developers in a way that violates their licenses.

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The wronged parties in the case, in Butterick’s eyes, are the developers who worked on open-source coding projects without explicitly giving permission for their code to be used to help artificial intelligence learn to program on its own.

This is an early skirmish in the battle about how such AI tools scramble the ideas of ownership, copyright and authenticity online. These tools had a banner year in 2022, and one likely result is that conflicts such as this will begin playing out in earnest in 2023.

Silicon Valley’s current buzzword for Copilot and other tools is “generative AI.” This technology ingests large amounts of existing digital content to train itself to make similar stuff on its own. In addition to computer code, generative AI is writing essays and making videos and images. Technologists have been predicting for years that these tools were the future, and OpenAI’s releases last year of the latest versions of its image-making tool (DALL-E 2) and its text-generation tool (ChatGPT) made it seem as if the future was suddenly here. The content these tools produce isn’t always convincing—DALL-E’s images of people, for instance, often include distorted faces and extra fingers—but they’re far better than their predecessors.