VSCode feels like it’s in the “brand withdrawal” phase of its lifespan. I’ve turned off the sneakily named “Chat” and yet it still shows the chat sometimes when I toggle the bottom bar visibility.

> We will work with the creators, writers, and artists, instead of ripping off their life's work to feed the model.

I’m not sure I have an idea of what this might look like. Do they want money? What might that model look like? Do they want credit? How would that be handled? Do they want to be consulted? How does that get managed?

It probably starts with a reexamination of copyright law, which has always been a pragmatic rather than a principled system, but has not noticeably changed since the digital revolution.

Copyright is meant to encourage more publication by providing publishers with (temporary) control over their products after having released them to the public. Once the copyright expires, the work enters the public domain, which is really the end goal of copyright law. If publishers start to feel like LLMs are undermining that control, they might publish less original work, and therefore less stuff will eventually enter the public domain, which is considered bad for society. We're already seeing some effects of this as traffic (and ad revenue) to various websites has fallen significantly in the wake of LLM proliferation, which lowers the incentive to publish anything original in the first place.

Anyway, I'm not sure how best to adapt copyright law to this new world. Some people have thought about it though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_alternatives