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GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

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Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#31

Post by vsareto »

pyentropy wrote: post #5
corobo wrote: post #3

If 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…

>how do we even prove it if we're only given the trained model and it generalizes well?

Someone's going to have to audit the model the training and the data that does it. There's a documentary on black holes on Netflix that did something similar (no idea if it was AI) but each team wrote code to interpret the data independently and without collaboration or hints or information leakage, and they were all within a certain accuracy of one-another for interpreting the raw data at the end of it.

So, as an example, if I can't train something in parallel and get similar results to an already trained model, we know something is up and there is missing or altered data (at least I think that's how it works).

Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#32

Post by giansegato »

goodpoint wrote: post #27

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.

This feature is effectively impossible to replicate. Only Microsoft positioned itself to have: - dataset (GitHub) - tech (openai) - training (azure) - platform (vscode)

I'm impressed. They did an amazing job from a corporate strategy standpoint. Also directionally things are getting interesting

Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#33

Post by VMtest »

gonna develop my own linux-like kernel soon, with my own AI model trained on public repositories

wanna see the source code of my AI model? oh, it's closed source

it's just coincidence that nearly 100% of my future linux-like kernel code looks the same as linux the kernel, bear in mind that my closed-source AI model takes inspiration from GitHub Copilot, there is no way that it will copy any source code

Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#34

Post by Hamuko »

The potential inclusion of GPL'd code, and potentially even unlicensed code, is making me wary of using it. Fair Use doesn't exist here and if someone was to accuse me of stealing code, saying "I pressed a button and some computer somewhere in the world, that has potentially seen your code as well, generated it for me" is probably not the greatest defense.

Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#35

Post by treis »

bogwog wrote: post #30
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"…

>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.

But since now APIs are unprotected you could feed it all of the class structure and method signatures to have it fill in the blanks. I don't know if that gets you a working operating system but it seems like it will get you quite a long way

Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#36

Post by int_19h »

freshhawk wrote: post #28
Enhex wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 cu…

The real question is whether it constitutes derived work, though. And that is not a question of similarity so much so as provenance - if you start with a codebase that is GPL originally, and it gets gradually modified to the point where it doesn't really look anything like the original, it's still a derived work, and is still subject to the license.

Similarity can be used to prove derivation, but it's not the only way to do so. In this case, all the code that went into the model is (presumably) known, so you don't really need any sort of analysis to prove or disprove it. It is, rather, a legal question - whether the definition on the books applies here, or not.

Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#37

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

edenhyacinth wrote: post #15
notkaiho wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's super cool. As long as you do the things you specify at the bottom of that doc (provide attribution if copied so people can know if it's OK to use) then a lot of the concerns of people on these threads are going to be resolved.

Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#38

Post by djrogers »

giansegato wrote: post #32
goodpoint wrote: post #27

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.

This feature is effectively impossible to replicate. Only Microsoft positioned itself to have: - dataset (GitHub) - tech (openai) - training (azure) - platform (vscode) I'm impressed. They did an amazing job from a corporate strategy standpoint. Also directionally things are getting interesting

The dataset is all freely available open source code, right? Just because GH hosts it doesn’t mean the rest of the world can’t use it for the same purpose.

Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#39

Post by Bombthecat »

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…

I expect nothing less. The 0,01 will be super rich.

You could call it endgame

Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#40

Post by bogwog »

freshhawk wrote: post #21
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…

That would be interesting:

* Someone leaks Windows 10/11 source code

* Copilot picks it up in its training data

* Someone uses copilot to generate a Windows clone and starts selling it

I wonder how Microsoft would react to that. I wonder if they've manually blacklisted leaked source code from Windows (or other Microsoft products) so that it doesn't show up in Copilot's training data. If they have, that means Microsoft recognizes the IP risks of having your code in that data set, which would make this Copilot thing not just the result of poor planning/maybe a little incompetence, but something much more devious and malicious.

If Microsoft is going to defend this project, they should introduce all of their own source code into the training data.

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