So, this week’s post is my reflection on the seminar that we hosted last week (the recording is above). It was an eye-opener for me in a few aspects.
For the first, it was the question of ownership of things. Since AI is not a subject in legal cases, it cannot really own anything. I know, AI and computational models are not the same, but for the sake of the argument let’s assume that they are. By the end of the day, it is still a human being that presses the button and generates new source code or comments or what have you. So, the responsibility is still very much on us when we use these tools.
The second, it was the question about the community and why we have open-source software. We certainly do not put our source code openly for someone to profit from it. Attribution and recognition are very important (if not the most important) aspects of any open-source community. So, using their code to create commercial models requires at least some attribution. Why not show which code was used to train these models and show how good the communities really are?
Finally, my main point still stands – we should use these models to become better. They make us so much more productive that we should not go back to the old ways of writing software. Providing suggestions and ideas to programmers can make our software better, shipped faster and potentially more reliable.
However, we need to make sure that we change the way we attribute the software. Myself, I will start to add “co-created by Github Co-pilot and the OSS communities” to my work when I use the tool. Maybe you can do that too? At least to give some attribution back to our countless colleagues who deserve it….
