It certainly seems to be a laundering enabler. Say that you want to un-GPL-ify some famous copylefted code that is on the training database. You type a first innocuous characters of it, then the co-pilot keeps completing the rest of the same exact code, for it offers a perfect match. If the completion is not exact, you "twiddle" it a bit until it becomes. Bang! you have a non-gpl copy of the program! Moreover, it is 100% yours and you can re-license it as you want. This will be a boon for copyleft-allergic developers!
GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?
11–20 of 473 posts
Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?
#12If I as an alleged human have learned purely from GPL code would that require code I write to be released under the GPL too? We should probably start thinking about AI rights at some point. Personally I'll be crediting GPT-3 as any other contributor because it sounds cool but maybe morally too in future
A machine learning isn't really the same as a person learning - people generally can code at a high level without having first read TBs of code, nor can you reasonably expect a person to have memorised GPL code to reproduce it on demand.
What you can expect a person to do is understand the principles behind that GPL code, and write something along the same lines. GitHub Co-Pilot is not a general ai, and it's not touted as one, so we shouldn't be considering whether it really knows code principles, only that it can reliably output code that fits a similar function to what came before, which could reasonably include entire blocks of GPL code.
Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?
#13If I as an alleged human have learned purely from GPL code would that require code I write to be released under the GPL too? We should probably start thinking about AI rights at some point. Personally I'll be crediting GPT-3 as any other contributor because it sounds cool but maybe morally too in future
That's what I wanted to ask, where do we draw the line of copyright when it comes to inputs of generative ML? It's perfectly fine for me to develop programming skills by reading any code regardless of the license. When a corp snatches an employee from competitors, they get to keep their skills even if they signed an NDA and can't talk about what they worked on. On the other hand there's the no-compete agreement, wher…
> It's perfectly fine for me to develop programming skills by reading any code regardless of the license.
I'd be inclined to agree with this, but whenever a high profile leak of source code happens, reading that code can have dire consequences for reverse engineers. It turns clean room reverse engineering into something derivative, as if the code that was read had the ability to infected whatever the programmer wrote later.
A situation involving the above developed in the ReactOS project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReactOS#Internal_audit
Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?
#14Well this would not be hard to verify though.
You can automate this process by providing existing GPL source code and see what CoPilot comes up next.
I am sure at some point it WILL produce exact the same code snippet from certain GPL project, provided that you have attempted enough times.
Not sure what the legal interpretation would be though, it is pretty gray-ish in that regard.
There would always be risk for CoPilot, had it digested certain PII information and people found it out...it would be much more interesting to see the outcome.
Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?
#15If I as an alleged human have learned purely from GPL code would that require code I write to be released under the GPL too? We should probably start thinking about AI rights at some point. Personally I'll be crediting GPT-3 as any other contributor because it sounds cool but maybe morally too in future
Unless you were using structures directly from said code, probably not? Compare if you had only learned writing from, say, the Bible. You would probably write in a very Biblical manner, but would you write the Psalms exactly? Most likely not.
We have seen Co-Pilot directly output (https://docs.github.com/en/github/copilot/research-recitatio...) the zen of python when prompted - there's no reason it wouldn't write the Psalms exactly when prompted in the right manner.
Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's what I wanted to ask, where do we draw the line of copyright when it comes to inputs of generative ML? It's perfectly fine for me to develop programming skills by reading any code regardless of the license. When a corp snatches an employee from competitors, they get to keep their skills even if they signed an NDA and can't talk about what they worked on. On the other hand there's the no-compete agreement, wher…
Take it further. You could easily imagine taking a service like this as an invisible middleware behind a front-end and start asking users to pay for the service. Some could argue it's code generation attributable to those who created the model, but reality is that the models were trained by code written by thousand of passionate users at no pay with the intent of free usage.
> but reality is that the models were trained by code written by thousand of passionate users at no pay with the intent of free usage.
I hope you're actually reading those LICENSE files before using open source code in your projects.
Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?
#17If I as an alleged human have learned purely from GPL code would that require code I write to be released under the GPL too? We should probably start thinking about AI rights at some point. Personally I'll be crediting GPT-3 as any other contributor because it sounds cool but maybe morally too in future
A machine learning isn't really the same as a person learning - people generally can code at a high level without having first read TBs of code, nor can you reasonably expect a person to have memorised GPL code to reproduce it on demand. What you can expect a person to do is understand the principles behind that GPL code, and write something along the same lines. GitHub Co-Pilot is not a general ai, and it's not tout…
Well if it is actually straight up outputting blocks of existing code then get it in the bin as a failed attempt to sprinkle AI on development and use this instead
Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?
#18Should we be changing our open source licenses to explicitly prevent training such systems using our code?
Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?
#19Well this would not be hard to verify though. You can automate this process by providing existing GPL source code and see what CoPilot comes up next. I am sure at some point it WILL produce exact the same code snippet from certain GPL project, provided that you have attempted enough times. Not sure what the legal interpretation would be though, it is pretty gray-ish in that regard. There would always be risk for CoPi…
it doesn't have to be exact to be copyright infringement, see non-literal copying.
basic idea behind it is if you copy paste code and rename variables that doesn't mean its new code.
Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?
#20Should we be changing our open source licenses to explicitly prevent training such systems using our code?
Good idea, but if carved up into small enough chunks, it may be considered fair use.
What is confusing is that the neural net may take lots of small chunks and link them to one another, and then reproduce them in the same order verbatim.