Lawsuit Aims Way A.I. Is Built

Programmer sues Microsoft, GitHub and OpenAI over artificial intelligence technology that generates its own computer code.

At the end of June, Microsoft launched a new type of artificial intelligence technology capable of generating its own computer code.

Called Copilot, the tool has was designed to speed up the work of professional programmers. As they typed on their laptops, it suggested ready-made blocks of computer code that they could instantly add to theirs.

Many programmers either loved the new tool or were at least intrigued by it. But Matthew Butterick, a programmer, designer, writer and lawyer in Los Angeles, was not one of them. This month, he and a team of other lawyers filed a lawsuit seeking class-action status against Microsoft and the other leading companies that designed and deployed Copilot.

Like many A.I. peak. technologies, Copilot has developed its skills by analyzing large amounts of data. In this case, he relied on billions of lines of computer code published on the Internet. Mr Butterick, 52, likens this process to hacking, as the system fails to recognize its debt to existing work. His lawsuit claims that Microsoft and its collaborators violated the legal rights of millions of programmers who spent years writing the original code.

The lawsuit is believed to be the first legal attack on a design technique called "A.I. formation", which is a way to build artificial intelligence that is set to remake the tech industry. In recent years, many artists, writers, life experts and activists have complained that companies train their A.I. systems using data that doesn't belong to them.

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