Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

GitHub Copilot

copilot.github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

631–640 of 1001 posts

Re: GitHub Copilot

#631

Post by visarga »

6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: post #235
CityOfThrowaway wrote: post #59

This is very impressive! OpenAI’s tech opens an ethical Pandora’s box: 1. It’s clear that the raw inputs to all of OpenAI’s outputs originated with real, human creativity. 2. So, in a sense, OpenAI is laundering creativity. It reads in creative works, does complicated (and, yes, groundbreaking) transformations, and produces an output that is hard to trace to any particular source. 3. Yet, isn’t that effectively what…

> Yet, isn’t that effectively what human brains do too? If I want to watch a bunch of movies, I have to pay the theater for each movie, or pay netflix, or whatever. The screenplay I write afterwards belongs to me, but the learning process involved me paying for access to others' work. That's what's often missing here. But at the same time, if you train on legally public data, there's no 'theater' to be paid. (Often,…

> Maybe we'll start seeing licenses with a section saying "not for use as training data for commercial models."

Considering that the impact of a single example is extremely small in training a model, and that it is trained on an ungodly amount of examples, then I wonder if the effort of forbidding its use has any real benefits.

Re: GitHub Copilot

#632

Post by awestroke »

cbsks wrote: post #398

I don't think we need to start looking for new career paths yet. This example has a few bugs and it took me longer to track them down than it would have to write it myself: #!/bin/bash # List all python source files which are more than 1KB and contain the word "copilot". find . \ -name "*.py" \ -size +1000 \ -exec grep -n copilot {}\; "-exec grep -n copilot {}\;" needs to have a space before the semicolon otherwise f…

I read this as a criticism of bash

Re: GitHub Copilot

#633

Post by visarga »

Ensorceled wrote: post #123
fulafel wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are some ethical problems that could emerge from the box? Maybe unfair competition from having very good tools compared to other programmers, or havin irresponsibly shallow understanding of what the produced code does?

> What are some ethical problems that could emerge from the box? Being put out of job by an AI trained on your own code? It's really the same ethical problem of all automation ... and will be as long as we need a job to fulfill basic needs like food, housing and medical care.

Programmers change jobs like socks and are open to learning new things all the time. Software has been automating itself for 70 years and look how many people have jobs in this field.

Also, human desire is a bottomless pit, where automation saves we spend even more.

Re: GitHub Copilot

#634

Post by amw-zero »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #131
tux1968 wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many jobs have developers helped displace in business and industry? I don't think it's controversial that we become fair game for that same automation process we've been leading.

Indeed. It should be the goal of society to automate away as much work as possible. If there are perverse incentives working against this then we should correct them.

Human beings need something to do to have a fulfilling life. I do not agree at all that the ultimate goal of society is to automate everything that’s possible. I think that will be horrible overall for society.

Re: GitHub Copilot

#635

Post by richardanaya »

iandanforth wrote: post #619
fzaninotto wrote: post #40

I've been using the alpha for the past 2 weeks, and I'm blown away. Copilot guesses the exact code I want to write about one in ten times, and the rest of the time it suggests something rather good, or completely off. But when it guesses right, it feels like it's reading my mind. It's really like pair programming, even though I'm coding alone. I have a better understanding of my own code, and I tend to give better na…

What is the licensing for code generated in this way? GPT-3 has memorized hundreds of texts verbatim and can be prompted to regurgitate that text. Has this model only been trained on code that doesn't require attribution as part of the license?

You're using the word "memorized" in a very loose way.

Re: GitHub Copilot

#636

Post by IshKebab »

croes wrote: post #351
fzaninotto wrote: post #40

I've been using the alpha for the past 2 weeks, and I'm blown away. Copilot guesses the exact code I want to write about one in ten times, and the rest of the time it suggests something rather good, or completely off. But when it guesses right, it feels like it's reading my mind. It's really like pair programming, even though I'm coding alone. I have a better understanding of my own code, and I tend to give better na…

Maybe it's just because humans are not as creative as they think. Whatever you do, thousands of others have done the same already. So no need to pay a high level programmer, just a mediocre one and the right AI assistant gives the same results.

I think it's more that this tool is only capable of automating the non-creative work that thousands have done already.

It's still insanely impressive (assuming the examples aren't more cherry picked than I'd expect).

Re: GitHub Copilot

#637

Post by mihaifm »

I can see in their FAQ that there are plans to monetize this. So they're building an ML model that feeds on the work done by millions of people and then selling it? How is this even ethical? Not to mention we'd be feeding the model while using it. Guess this is another instance where we are becoming the product.

Re: GitHub Copilot

#638

Post by avery42 »

stwrong wrote: post #511
natfriedman wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In general: (1) training ML systems on public data is fair use (2) the output belongs to the operator, just like with a compiler. On the training question specifically, you can find OpenAI's position, as submitted to the USPTO here: https://www.uspto.gov/sites/default/files/documents/OpenAI_R... We expect that IP and AI will be an interesting policy discussion around the world in the coming years, and we're eager to…

What about privacy. Does the AI send code to GitHub? This reminds me of Kite

Yes, under "How does GitHub Copilot work?":

> [...] The GitHub Copilot editor extension sends your comments and code to the GitHub Copilot service, which then uses OpenAI Codex to synthesize and suggest individual lines and whole functions.

Re: GitHub Copilot

#639

Post by mitjak »

cbsks wrote: post #398

I don't think we need to start looking for new career paths yet. This example has a few bugs and it took me longer to track them down than it would have to write it myself: #!/bin/bash # List all python source files which are more than 1KB and contain the word "copilot". find . \ -name "*.py" \ -size +1000 \ -exec grep -n copilot {}\; "-exec grep -n copilot {}\;" needs to have a space before the semicolon otherwise f…

the main argument against Copilot for me. it takes longer to grok existing code than just write it from ground up.

Re: GitHub Copilot

#640

Post by agilob »

gpm wrote: post #284
stefanos82 wrote: post #197

Earlier 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…

> - under what license the generated code falls under? Is it even copyrighted? Generally my understand is that to be copyrightable it has to be the output of a human creative process, this doesn't seem to qualify (I am not a lawyer). See also, monkeys can't hold copyright: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput...

>Generally my understand is that to be copyrightable it has to be the output of a human creative process

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput...

Post reply on HN