Ok, I'm afraid I must become some kind of neoluddite or I'm going to starve to death in next twenty years.
GitHub Copilot
271–280 of 1001 posts
Re: GitHub Copilot
#272hello
Re: GitHub Copilot
#273Earlier quoted context omitted.
Lots of questions: - the generated code by AI belongs to me or GitHub? - under what license the generated code falls under? - if generated code becomes the reason for infringment, who gets the blame or legal action? - how can anyone prove the code was actually generated by Copilot and not the project owner? - if a project member does not agree with the usage of Copilot, what should we do as a team? - can Copilot copy…
You should read the FAQ at the bottom of the page; I think it answers all of your questions: https://copilot.github.com/#faqs
None of the questions and answers in this section hold information about how the generated code affects licensing. None of the links in this section contain information about licensing, either.
Re: GitHub Copilot
#274Sounds like a big distraction.
Why are the green ones always angry?
I suppose you know this, but green means the account is new (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html). Angry people sometimes create new accounts to vent. That's not a good use of HN, but let's not respond as if there's something wrong with new users coming to the community. We don't want this place to become insular and brackish. New users are the community's freshwater!
Re: GitHub Copilot
#275Hi HN, we've been building GitHub Copilot together with the incredibly talented team at OpenAI for the last year, and we're so excited to be able to show it off today. Hundreds of developers are using it every day internally, and the most common reaction has been the head exploding emoji. If the technical preview goes well, we'll plan to scale this up as a paid product at some point in the future.
If I put a section in my LICENSE.txt prohibiting use as training data in commercial models, would that be sufficient to keep my code out of models like this?
Re: GitHub Copilot
#276Calling it now, there will be a "Copilot considered harmful" post. If you need to go through the suggested code to ensure it's correct, you may as well write it yourself? If you glance at it and it looks about right, you can potentially overlook bugs or edge cases, you'll lose confidence in your own code since you didn't properly conceptualise it yourself. Potentially for newer developers it robs them of active exper…
I'm not quite old enough to remember: when high level languages like C gained wide adoption, how much pushback was there from the philosophy that if you're not writing it in assembly, you're not really writing code?
Re: GitHub Copilot
#277This is where microsoft's billion dollars went in OpenAI.
Clever
Re: GitHub Copilot
#278The utility and quality of this will likely depend on language use:
Re: GitHub Copilot
#279I prefer the wingman
Re: GitHub Copilot
#280So if it was trained using "source code from publicly available sources, including code in public repositories on GitHub." was it also GPLv2? So everything generated also GPLv2?
> So everything generated also GPLv2?
Almost certainly not everything.
But possibly things that were spit out verbatim from the training set, which the FAQ mentions does happen about .1% of the time [1]. Another comment in this thread indicated that the model outputs something that's verbatim usable about 10% of the time. So, taking those two numbers together, if you're using a whole generated function verbatim, a bit of caveat emptor re: licensing might not be the worst idea. At least until the origin tracker mentioned in the FAQ becomes available.
[1] https://docs.github.com/en/early-access/github/copilot/resea...
[2] "GitHub Copilot is a code synthesizer, not a search engine: the vast majority of the code that it suggests is uniquely generated and has never been seen before. We found that about 0.1% of the time, the suggestion may contain some snippets that are verbatim from the training set. Here is an in-depth study on the model’s behavior. Many of these cases happen when you don’t provide sufficient context (in particular, when editing an empty file), or when there is a common, perhaps even universal, solution to the problem. We are building an origin tracker to help detect the rare instances of code that is repeated from the training set, to help you make good real-time decisions about GitHub Copilot’s suggestions."