Major AI Controversies of 2021

A feature in Analytics India Magazine covers controversial topics in AI including copyright and AI inventors.

In July, Microsoft and OpenAI released the technical preview of AI-based coding assistant GitHub Copilot. Built using Codex, this assistant builds on the context of the code being written by a human coder and suggests successive lines of functions and programs. People have been calling it a game-changer even as there is a murmur about how the next softwares would take away human programmers’ jobs (Copilot inventors have addressed these concerns).

However, a few programmers have raised concerns about its copyright issues. Since the tool is trained in publicly available code repositories, many of them licensed and under copyright protection, what happens when such snippets are reproduced? Since the tool is trained on free and open-source code, can parent organisations — Microsoft, OpenAI, and GitHub — monetise it?

Read the full article at the link below.