Conservancy News

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New Committee Will Investigate Copyleft Implications of AI-Assisted Programming

Committee On AI-Assisted Programming and Copyleft To Convene in Early March; Public Discussion To Begin Immediately

February 23, 2022

Software Freedom Conservancy announces a Committee On AI-Assisted Programming and Copyleft to develop recommendations and plans for a Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) community response to the use of machine learning tools for code generation and authorship. The ethics and morality of machine learning models, which are regularly being applied to many problems, are a serious concern to policy makers. This Committee will focus on the specific issue of AI-assisted programming using models trained with FOSS, such as we've seen with GitHub's Copilot product. Microsoft, through their GitHub subsidiary, argues, without evidence, that use of Copilot (which has been trained with a large body of FOSS) is “fair use” of that FOSS, and that all output of Copilot is solely copyrighted by its users. This conclusion focuses on the legal details of issues rather than ethics and morality, and Microsoft and GitHub have refused to provide backing evidence. This Committee will focus on the ethics and morality of their position, and consider the proper policy positions for the FOSS community and copyleft activists in the advent of AI-assisted programming.