In November a lawyer and computer programmer named Matthew Butterick sued the tech companies GitHub, Microsoft and OpenAI, saying a tool called GitHub Copilot that automatically generates computer code is essentially plagiarizing the work of human software developers in a way that violates their licenses. The wronged parties in the case, in Butterick’s eyes, are the developers who worked on open source coding projects without explicitly giving permission for their code to be used to help artificial intelligence learn to program on its own.
This is an early skirmish in the battle about how such AI tools scramble the ideas ...