I sense a sleigh of bitterness in the programming community after Copilot ;) It’s the rumbling sound of the imagination of a thousand people throwing the towel saying “What now”.
Yeah, why would anyone be bitter about a giant corporation creating a commercial code laundering machine that digests a massive amount of copyrighted code and spits out "clean" code free of all the burdens of its inputs?
The same as million of people who unvoluntarily give their real-time GPS coordinate to Google so they can tell everyone where the jams are? The same as CC owners (everybody) whose data gets constantly harvested to produce models for Walmart? We benefit from wages for our programmer and AI skills in a way that is often used unethically by companies, it’s quite fair that we feel the heat.
I don’t know, GitHub Copilot was an expected result (why would anyone propose to host most of civilization’s open source projects for free? SourceForge did worse with shipping malware into people’s binaries.)
It is a bit disgusting, but we programmers have done it to the rest of the world.
Hey, speak for yourself. I've been speaking out against such practices for years in the same way that I'm speaking out against Copilot.
If you use "but there are other horrible things!" as a justification to trivialize one horrible thing, what do you think the outcome is when that strategy is applied to the world at large? Bingo, "nothing matters" and no consequences ever follow malicious behaviour, because there's always something else that's also bad.
I am pretty sure that neither my GPS coordinate information or credit card details are copyrightable works.
And I'm pretty sure I've done none of those things, so I don't really know where this "programmers are the scum of the earth" generalisation is coming from.
