Artificial intelligence is rapidly changing many aspects of how we work and live. (How many stories did you read last week about self-driving cars and job-stealing robots? Perhaps your holiday shopping involved some AI algorithms, as well.) But despite the constant flow of news, many misconceptions about AI remain.
AI doesn’t think in our sense of the word at all, Scriffignano explains. “In many ways, it’s not really intelligence. It’s regressive.”
IT leaders should make deliberate choices about what AI can and can’t do on its own. “You have to pay attention to giving AI autonomy intentionally and not by accident,”
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Tomi Engdahl says:
https://docs.github.com/en/billing/managing-billing-for-github-copilot/about-billing-for-github-copilot
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://www.uusiteknologia.fi/2024/04/25/samsung-luottaa-tekoalypiireihin-televisiotekniikoissa/
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/quickstart
Tomi Engdahl says:
Microsoft announces new Copilot Copyright Commitment for customers
https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2023/09/07/copilot-copyright-commitment-ai-legal-concerns/
01.05.2024 Update: On November 15, 2023, Microsoft announced the expansion of the Copilot Copyright Commitment, now called the Customer Copyright Commitment, to include commercial customers using the Azure OpenAI Service.
Microsoft’s AI-powered Copilots are changing the way we work, making customers more efficient while unlocking new levels of creativity. While these transformative tools open doors to new possibilities, they are also raising new questions. Some customers are concerned about the risk of IP infringement claims if they use the output produced by generative AI. This is understandable, given recent public inquiries by authors and artists regarding how their own work is being used in conjunction with AI models and services.
To address this customer concern, Microsoft is announcing our new Copilot Copyright Commitment. As customers ask whether they can use Microsoft’s Copilot services and the output they generate without worrying about copyright claims, we are providing a straightforward answer: yes, you can, and if you are challenged on copyright grounds, we will assume responsibility for the potential legal risks involved.
This new commitment extends our existing intellectual property indemnity support to commercial Copilot services and builds on our previous AI Customer Commitments. Specifically, if a third party sues a commercial customer for copyright infringement for using Microsoft’s Copilots or the output they generate, we will defend the customer and pay the amount of any adverse judgments or settlements that result from the lawsuit, as long as the customer used the guardrails and content filters we have built into our products.
You’ll find more details below. Let me start with why we are offering this program:
We believe in standing behind our customers when they use our products. We are charging our commercial customers for our Copilots, and if their use creates legal issues, we should make this our problem rather than our customers’ problem. This philosophy is not new: For roughly two decades we’ve defended our customers against patent claims relating to our products, and we’ve steadily expanded this coverage over time. Expanding our defense obligations to cover copyright claims directed at our Copilots is another step along these lines.
We are sensitive to the concerns of authors, and we believe that Microsoft rather than our customers should assume the responsibility to address them. Even where existing copyright law is clear, generative AI is raising new public policy issues and shining a light on multiple public goals. We believe the world needs AI to advance the spread of knowledge and help solve major societal challenges. Yet it is critical for authors to retain control of their rights under copyright law and earn a healthy return on their creations. And we should ensure that the content needed to train and ground AI models is not locked up in the hands of one or a few companies in ways that would stifle competition and innovation. We are committed to the hard and sustained efforts that will be needed to take creative and constructive steps to advance all these goals.
We have built important guardrails into our Copilots to help respect authors’ copyrights. We have incorporated filters and other technologies that are designed to reduce the likelihood that Copilots return infringing content. These build on and complement our work to protect digital safety, security, and privacy, based on a broad range of guardrails such as classifiers, metaprompts, content filtering, and operational monitoring and abuse detection, including that which potentially infringes third-party content. Our new Copilot Copyright Commitment requires that customers use these technologies, creating incentives for everyone to better respect copyright concerns.
More details on our Copilot Copyright Commitment
The Copilot Copyright Commitment extends Microsoft’s existing IP indemnification coverage to copyright claims relating to the use of our AI-powered Copilots, including the output they generate, specifically for paid versions of Microsoft commercial Copilot services and Bing Chat Enterprise. This includes Microsoft 365 Copilot that brings generative AI to Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and more – enabling a user to reason across their data or turn a document into a presentation. It also includes GitHub Copilot, which enables developers to spend less time on rote coding, and more time on creating wholly new and transformative outputs.
Tomi Engdahl says:
GitHub Copilot copyright case narrowed but not neutered
Microsoft and OpenAI fail to shake off AI infringement allegations
https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/12/github_copilot_copyright_case_narrowed/
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://hackernoon.com/copyright-issues-in-github-copilot
Tomi Engdahl says:
Blog: Will you get in legal trouble for using GitHub Copilot for work?
https://www.vincit.com/blog/will-you-get-in-legal-trouble-for-using-github-copilot-for-work
GitHub Copilot is a tool for generating source code that has garnered a lot of interest. The tool has been trained on using selected English-language source material and publicly available source code, including code in public repositories on GitHub. It uses this source data as a basis for suggestions, generating code based on textual description, function name or similar context in source code. There has been a lot of thought and discussion related to if there could be legal implications in using the tool commercially. In this blog, we will look more closely at what it means to include the snippets Copilot generates in source code that is produced by programmers in the legal context of the European Union.
Immaterial rights related to source code
Computer software in general can be protected legally using three distinct mechanisms: copyright, patents and as trade secrets. In our case, trade secrets do not apply as we’re talking about public code here. Software patents can apply if something you’re doing is infringing on a patent – but as software patents focus more on “solutions” than specific source code, that risk is not directly related to the use of Copilot, and Copilot should not add extra dimension to watch out for. Our focus here is on copyright.
When immaterial rights of the source code GitHub Copilot uses were discussed, then-CEO of GitHub, Nat Friedman, responded in Twitter with the following:
So the argument is twofold: training of the model is fair use, and output belongs to the operator of the tool. Let’s take a look at these arguments.
Microsoft Announces Copilot Copyright Commitment to Address IP Infringement Concerns
https://www.infoq.com/news/2023/09/copilot-copyright-commitment/
Microsoft recently published the Copilot Copyright Commitment to address concerns about potential IP infringement claims from content produced by generative AI. Under this commitment, which covers various products, including GitHub Copilot, Microsoft will take responsibility for potential legal risks if a customer faces copyright challenges.
The commitment covers third-party IP claims based on copyright, patent, trademark, trade secrets. It covers the customer’s use and distribution of the output content generated by Microsoft Copilot services and requires the customer to use the content filters and other safety systems built into the product.
The Copilot Copyright Commitment extends the existing Microsoft IP indemnification coverage to the use of paid versions of Bing Chat Enterprise and commercial Copilot services, including Microsoft 365 Copilot and GitHub Copilot. According to the pledge, Microsoft will pay any legal damages if a third party sues a commercial customer for infringing their copyright by using those services.