Microsoft Shamelessly Attacks Both Git and Projects in GitHub, Using Plagiarism in "AI" Clothing (Exit GitHub Now!)
A mountain of plagiarism
TWO readers contacted us regarding GitHub. They contacted us yesterday because of legitimate concerns, not all this "doomsday" stuff (sensationalism which distracts from $9 billion lawsuits for plagiarism, to name just one lawsuit out of several). Ignore the propaganda mill known as OSI; Microsoft pays the OSI to lie and to support plagiarism; today's OSI is effectively contracted by Microsoft to attack the GPL (copyleft) and constantly promote GitHub, which isn't just proprietary but also a war against Free software licensing (striking at the very heart, rendering licence enforcement difficult).
Regarding the readers, they presented different angles. One of them sought to point out that the chatbots and various other plagiarism engines of Microsoft are really not as exciting as Microsoft-sponsored publishers want us to believe, quoting this recent Nitter thread:
Another reader said that Microsoft "continues to illegally harvest and regurgitate copyrighted material in its LLM and is trying to shift the focus away from that activity by blaming the chumps that interact with the results." See what we posted under "Copyright" yesterday evening, notably a post from chatbots booster Matt Rickard [1], worryingly noting that "GitHub recently said it was “re-founding” itself on Copilot instead of git" (the "Git" in "GitHub").
GitHub still lacks a business model. GitHub had several rounds of layoffs this year and even an office shutdown.
Imagine what they will try next...
Microsoft is attacking Git, as it always did, and Linus Torvalds is too scared at the wheel, seeing that some of his bosses at the Linux Foundation are active Microsoft employees, staging a coup against the target of attacks. They can have him fired at any time (see the Sam Altman saga), sans the potential outcry it may (or would) cause. The second link, from International Business Times [2], says that "Microsoft believes it should not be held responsible if people use an artificial intelligence (AI) tool like Copilot to infringe on copyrighted material."
This is the typical "the computer did it" defense, which has long made itself alluring to sociopathic executives, whether they referred to computers and programs as "AI" or something less abstract. I pointed out nearly a decade ago that companies were outsourcing "moderation" (censorship) to algorithms so as to dodge accountability, including lawsuits.
Finally, Walled Culture (Dr. Glyn Moody) [3] speaks of "the fraudulent scheme [which] netted more than $23.4 million" after it "cheated artists".
This is pretty much what all that LLM (not "AI") noise is about. With help from corrupted (bribed) media, they seek to legitimise the hoarding and privatisation (attributions and licences removed) of artists' original works, whether those works are books or paintings or whatever else exists out there, not even in the Public Domain. █
Related/contextual items from the news:
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How AI Changes Workflows
GitHub recently said it was “re-founding” itself on Copilot instead of git. GitHub has always been about the workflow — there are plenty of other hosted git providers, but GitHub was the first to put together pull requests, issues, and collaboration into a single workflow. Re-founding on Copilot is a way to acknowledge that AI will drastically change the developer workflow.
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Microsoft Says It Is Not Responsible If An AI Like Copilot Is Used To Infringe On Copyrighted Material
Microsoft believes it should not be held responsible if people use an artificial intelligence (AI) tool like Copilot to infringe on copyrighted material.
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Scammers who made $23.4 million from Content ID must pay back only $3.4 million to cheated artists
According to another TorrentFreak post, the fraudulent scheme netted more than $23.4 million. Aside from the astonishing success of such a simple scam, what is also noteworthy is that people were complaining to YouTube about it as far back in 2017, but nothing seems to have been done then.
It is only now that a court has finally ordered the scammers to pay back the money they received to the artists who have been losing out for years. Some 800 people came forward to claim restitution, and they will now be paid the princely sum of $3,365,352.85. As you may have noticed, this seems to leave the odd $20 million in the hands of the scammers. Maybe crime does pay when it’s carried out using today’s dysfunctional copyright system.