I do think they should pay the folks whose code they used to train the AI. Something like how Spotify pays artists based on how much their music/content is listened to.
perhaps they can reimburse them with free access to an IDE and perpetual hosting of their repos
/snark! I think it'd be great if AI could tag its sources and distribute money accordingly, but I expect some perverse incentives to pop up in doing so...
The verb "should" does a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence.
Because, if they don't pay these folks... I mean, who does that hurt? The concept of intellectual property exists to incentivize creating valuable art/literature/code. In theory at least, we agree to uphold IP laws because we recognize that more value gets created when they're a state enforced monopoly on the person who came up with that piece of art/literature/code.
But we also recognize that sometimes these laws go too far; eg that there are patent trolls and corporations fighting public domain and game publishers going after anyone who makes a let's-play of their video.
In those case, it's reasonable to think the world would be better off if we all shrugged and told the IP holders "too bad, someone else is going to create value off your work and you're not going to get a cent from it, we just think it's not worth building and maintaining a nightmare bureaucracy just so you can tax them".
And from that point of view... Copilot is fine? It's not like the people posting code on Github or StackOverflow were thinking "I'm only doing this because I know a future AI 10 years from now won't scrap the code I wrote to train a neural network to create a code completion engine". Yeah, yeah, this breaks the spirit of the GPL and Stallman's vision, etc, etc.
But... I mean, at some point, you got to stop debating semantics and wonder what we're coding for. What Microsoft has created is a tool that can collectively save developers billions of man-hours. It's a net good for humanity. As far as I'm concerned, the fact that this net good was developed is infinitely more important than the fact that Microsoft didn't pay royalties to a nebulous amount of developers who wouldn't have noticed anything if Microsoft hadn't developed Copilot.
tldr MIT license is great, piracy is great, fanfiction is great, screw the very concept of intellectual property.
