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Suspend all knowledge of copyright law as it exists today for a moment and approach this hypothetical on first principles: a lot of GPL copyleft data is used in the making of an AI tool, that when asked for it, can itself recreate code similar to what was input... also, the creator of that AI tool will reap in all the profits without giving a single penny or even recognition of the value it guzzled from GPL data it was trained on to creators of original copyleft data. Is this fair? What do your scruples tell you?

No, of course not. We should probably revisit copyright law, given that it was written at a time when no-one foresaw modern AI tools, its capabilities, and its effects on creators and societies.



Have you used Copilot? It is generally not creating code similar to GPL code, it is creating code similar to the surrounding context file.

Transformers predict the most likely next token, the most likely next token is usually related to the surrounding context.

So yes it can create code similar to GPL code but it can only do that consistently when the GPL code is included in the context. So don’t do that.


The GPL was never about money, recognition or even abut the creators at all. Copy Left was created “to promote computer user freedom”

Free Software already views all proprietary software as inherently immoral. So there is no need to take a detour of what went into making the software to reach that conclusion from that angle.




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