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GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

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Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#21

Post by freshhawk »

enriquto wrote: post #11

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…

I suppose someone should make a OS-generating AI, conceptually it can just have windows, osx and some linux distros in it and output one based on a question about favorite color or something.

You'd just have to wrap it in a nice complex model representation so it's a black box you fed example OS's with some meta-data into and it happens to output this very useful data.

After all, once you use something as input to a machine learning model apparently the license disappears. Sweet.

Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#22

Post by gutino »

thundergolfer wrote: post #8

Attempts to litigate any license violation are going to get precisely nowhere I bet, but I find the actual license violation argument persuasive. This is an excellent example of how the AI singularity/revolution/whatever is a total distraction and that a much bigger and more serious issue is how AI is becoming so effective at turning the output of cheap/free human mental labour into capital. If AI keeps getting bette…

But the rate of product/services that machinery will produce will make that even a small tax to corporations producing everything autonomously will be enough to feed and give a quality of life to everyone with an UBI or partial time jobs.

You really want to push for high productivity across all industries, even if that means sacrificing jobs in the short term, because history demonstrated after that, new and more human jobs emerge latter.

Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#23

Post by methyl »

enriquto wrote: post #11

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…

What stops you to do the same, without the AI part?

Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#24

Post by shadilay »

enriquto wrote: post #11

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…

Would it be possible to do this in reverse assuming the AI has some proprietary code in its training data?

Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#26

Post by bencollier49 »

karmasimida wrote: post #14

Well 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…

This question about the amount of code required to be copyrightable starts to sound familiar to the copyright situation with music, where currently the bar seems to be set too low, legally, to prove plagiarism.

Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#27

Post by goodpoint »

What is more concerning is that the training kernel belongs exclusively one private company. Microsoft.

It can become a massive (and unfair) competitive advantage.

Furthermore, Copilot will not work with less popular languages and also prevent popular languages from evolving.

Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#28

Post by freshhawk »

Enhex wrote: post #19
karmasimida wrote: post #14

Well 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.

Yeah, you'd have to assume they are parsing and normalizing this data in some way. There would still be some AST patterns or something similar you could look for in the same way, but it would be much trickier.

Plus considering this is a legal issue ... good luck with "there is a statistically significant similarity in AST outputs related to the most unique sections of this code base" type arguments in court. We're currently at the "what's an API" stage of legal tech understanding.

Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#29

Post by bencollier49 »

karmasimida wrote: post #14

Well 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…

Regarding PII, I think you have a very good point. I wouldn't be surprised to see working AWS_SECRET_KEY values appear in there. Indeed, given that copypaste programmers may not understand the code they're given, it's entirely possible that someone may run code which uses remote resources without the programmer even realising it.

Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#30

Post by bogwog »

enriquto wrote: post #11

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…

Yes this is a concern, but I'm not sure if the AI is actually able to "generate" a non-trivial piece of code.

If you tell it to generate "a function for calculating the barycentric coordinates of a ray-triangle intersection", you might get a working implementation of a popular algorithm, adapted to your language and existing class/function/variable names.

But if you tell it to generate "a smartphone operating system", it probably won't work...and if it does, it would most likely use giant chunks of Android's codebase.

And if that's true, it means that copilot isn't really generating anything. It's just a (high-tech) search engine that knows how to adapt the code it finds to fit your codebase. That's still a really cool technology and worth exploring, but it doesn't do enough to justify ignoring software licenses.

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