Why is Copilot so bad?

Posted Jul 20, 2022 14:49 UTC (Wed) by ghane (guest, #1805)
In reply to: Why is Copilot so bad? by NYKevin
Parent article: Software Freedom Conservancy: Give Up GitHub: The Time Has Come!

> If I count the number of "E"s in a novel, and publish that number on a website, surely the number is not a derivative work of the novel, despite the fact that it has been "transformed" from the novel.

I have a question, sparked by your comment above.

1. Would an index of a work be a Derivative?

2. Would a concordance of a work be a Derivative?

In my mind, this is a single question :-)

Note that both of these can be done by a human or a program, with the exact same output.

Surely this must have been litigated somewhere already.

ISTR that because of the delays in publishing the Dead Sea Scrolls, a group in the 1990s published a complete Conocrdance, thus making the texts substantially available to researchers.

Why is Copilot so bad?

Posted Jul 20, 2022 15:13 UTC (Wed) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (1 responses)

I suspect both the index and the concordance would be classed as a database, and thus not subject to copyright (but subject to other laws certainly as far as the EU is concerned).

Failure to publish is another major problem, because I believe most copyright laws apply to *legally* *published* work, from *the date of publication*.

There are plenty of cases of unpublished works being kept out of the public eye, and I can think of at least one where somebody published excerpts of a 200-yr-old work. But because he owned the original, nobody could get their hands on the complete work.

Another famous example of this sort of thing is Queen Victoria's diaries. She published the early ones unexpurgated. But when she died, her daughter and literary executor published "sanitised" and heavily edited versions, destroying the originals. Her nephew, George V, was horrified at such vandalism but was powerless. So the later diaries are missing roughly 2/3rds their original content :-(

But certainly as far as Co-Pilot is concerned, I think your references to indices and concordances misses the point. They may be new works of scholarship, but they are intended to direct you back to the original. Co-Pilot, it seems, hides the original from you so are "quoting blind" if you use its output.

Cheers,
Wol

Why is Copilot so bad?

Posted Jul 20, 2022 16:10 UTC (Wed) by ghane (guest, #1805) [Link]

Thank you for your inputs.

I have found a reference to what I remembered: https://www.nytimes.com/1991/09/05/world/computer-breaks-...

I was specifically not referring to Copilot, but asking in general. However,

> But certainly as far as Co-Pilot is concerned, I think your references to indices and concordances misses the point. They may be new works of scholarship, but they are intended to direct you back to the original. Co-Pilot, it seems, hides the original from you so are "quoting blind" if you use its output.

Note that the reconstructed text from mining the concordance and indexes was useful precisely because the original was not available. If it had been, the reconstructed text would be useless. They specifically claimed that the reconstructed text was not new in any way, it had been done by a computer(!). The original text guys, paradoxically, while calling them "pirates", claimed the reconstructed text was not the same as the original, and hence had no value.