"People who are accustomed to lifting other people's code and then taking credit for it would certainly appreciate Copilot, a violation-enabling laundering machine that calls "stolen" code just "HEY HI" (AI) to reduce a sense of guilt. Maybe even reduce the risk of getting sued."To say that Copilot is becoming a liability to Microsoft would be an understatement, but bear in mind that the idea came from Nat Friedman, though it wasn't even original. Copilot is just a lot of marketing and hype, it's hardly a new idea. Plagiarism, as we noted here before, was already in the blood as Balabhadra (Alex) Graveley is a ripoff artist.
Life imitating art or art imitates/follows the artist might come to mind. People who are accustomed to lifting other people's code and then taking credit for it would certainly appreciate Copilot, a violation-enabling laundering machine that calls "stolen" code just "HEY HI" (AI) to reduce a sense of guilt. Maybe even reduce the risk of getting sued.
Thankfully our series has been read by a lot of people, maybe 100,000 directly and indirectly. Readers therefore let us know more. One reader informed us that the company/project of Graveley, Hackpad, is not original at all. As this page explains: "Hackpad was a web-based collaborative real-time text editor forked from Etherpad.[1] In April 2014, Hackpad was acquired by Dropbox.[2][3] In April 2015, it was announced that Hackpad would be released as open source[4] and source code was published on GitHub in August 2015,[5] under the Apache license 2.0.[6] On April 25, 2017, Hackpad announced that it is to shut down on July 19, 2017, permanently migrating to Dropbox Paper.[7]"
"With stuff like Copilot, Graveley would possibly claim to have developed it all on his own using "HEY HI" (AI). This is a typical Microsoft mindset, taking other people's companies/projects (or copying the whole thing), then dubbing that innovation and pursuing software patents on the lousier imitations. Never mind prior art, never mind plagiarism."So he just took someone else's code. Dropbox would later sack him; no wonder as apparently he was being aggressive to other people, not just women he casually suffocates.
As a sort of anecdote, we thought this would be worth pointing out as part of the main series. "I have news for you that is a little more aligned with your primary interest," a reader explained. "I thought I had seen this somewhere before and mentioned it, but yes, Hackpad was forked from an open source project. So really had no original ideas..."
With stuff like Copilot, Graveley would possibly claim to have developed it all on his own using "HEY HI" (AI). This is a typical Microsoft mindset, taking other people's companies/projects (or copying the whole thing), then dubbing that innovation and pursuing software patents on the lousier imitations. Never mind prior art, never mind plagiarism. Monopolistic, unethical behaviour is the modus operandi. ⬆