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GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

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Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#61

Post by falcolas »

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…

As per some of the other twitter replies, Co-pilot has offered to fill in the GPL disclaimer in new files.

Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#62

Post by throwaway3699 »

VMtest wrote: post #33

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

What's the point? Linux is already open under GPL 2.

Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#63

Post by salawat »

Dracophoenix wrote: post #49

This goes into one of my favorite philosophical topics: John Searle's Chinese Room. I won't go into it here, but the question of whether an AI is actually learning how to code or simply substituting information based on statistically common practices (or if there really is a difference between either) is going to be one hell of a problem for the next few decades as we start to approach fine points of what AI is and h…

That's John Searle's thought experiment actually. Hilary Putnam had some thoughts in reference to it along the lines that a brain in a vat might think in a language similar to what we would speak, but the words of that language would necessarily encode different meanings due to the different experience of the external world and sensory isolation.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chinese-room/

Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#64

Post by Dracophoenix »

salawat wrote: post #63
Dracophoenix wrote: post #49

This goes into one of my favorite philosophical topics: John Searle's Chinese Room. I won't go into it here, but the question of whether an AI is actually learning how to code or simply substituting information based on statistically common practices (or if there really is a difference between either) is going to be one hell of a problem for the next few decades as we start to approach fine points of what AI is and h…

That's John Searle's thought experiment actually. Hilary Putnam had some thoughts in reference to it along the lines that a brain in a vat might think in a language similar to what we would speak, but the words of that language would necessarily encode different meanings due to the different experience of the external world and sensory isolation. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chinese-room/

Thanks for the correction. I made it known in my edit.

Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#65

Post by KMnO4 »

koonsolo wrote: post #54

I propose we as developers, start a secret society where we let the AI write the code, but we still claim to write it manually. In combination with the new working from home policies, we can lay at the beach all day and still be as productive as before. Who is in favor of starting it? ;)

This would be the demise of the human race. I’m not entirely opposed to that, though. When AI inevitably outperforms humans on almost all tasks, who am I to say humans deserve to be given those tasks?

Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#67

Post by mrosett »

The second tweet in the thread seems badly off the mark in its understanding of copyright law.

> copyright does not only cover copying and pasting; it covers derivative works. github copilot was trained on open source code and the sum total of everything it knows was drawn from that code. there is no possible interpretation of "derivative" that does not include this

Copyright law is very complicated (remember Google vs Oracle?) and involves a lot of balancing different factors [0]. Simply saying that something is a "derivative work" doesn't establish that it's copyright infringement. An important defense against infringement claims is arguing that the work is "transformative." Obviously "transformative" is a subjective term, but one example is the Supreme Court determining that Google copying Java's API's to a different platform is transformative [1]. There are a lot of other really interesting examples out there [2] involving things like if parodies are fair use (yes) or if satires are fair use (not necessarily). But one way or another, it's hard for me to believe that taking static code and using it to build a code-generating AI wouldn't meet that standard.

As I said, though, copyright law is really complicated, and I'm certainly not a lawyer. I'm sure someone out there could make an argument that Copilot is copyright infringement, but this thread isn't that argument.

[0] https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/fair-use-the-four-fa...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_LLC_v._Oracle_America,_...

[2] https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/fair-use-what-transf...

Edit: Note that the other comments saying "I'm just going to wrap an entire operating system in 'AI' to do an end run around copyright" are proposing to do something that wouldn't be transformative and therefore probably wouldn't be fair use. Copyright law has a lot of shades of grey and balancing of factors that make it a lot less "hackable" than those of us who live in the world of code might imagine.

Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#68

Post by jackbeck »

throwaway3699 wrote: post #62
VMtest wrote: post #33

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

What's the point? Linux is already open under GPL 2.

He mentioned that the Linux-like kernel will be closed source which violates GPL

Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#69

Post by invokestatic »

jordemort wrote: post #56

What happens when someone puts code up on GitHub with a license that says "This code may not be used for training a code generation model"? - Is GitHub actually going to pay any attention to that, or are they just going to ingest the code and thus violate its license anyway? - If they go ahead and violate the code's license, what are the legal repercussions for the resulting model? Can a model be "un-trained" from a…

By uploading your content to GitHub, you’ve granted them a license to use that content to “improve the Service over time”, as specified in the ToS[1].

That effectively “overrides” any license or term that you’ve specified for your repository, since you’ve already licensed the content to GitHub under different terms. Of course, people who are not GitHub are beholden to the terms you specify.

[1] https://docs.github.com/en/github/site-policy/github-terms-o...

Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#70

Post by GuB-42 »

schnebbau wrote: post #25

Newsflash everyone, if you open source your code it's going to be copied or paraphrased anyway.

Yes that's the point.

But if I do it under a copyleft license like GPL, I expect those who copy to abide by the license and open source their own code too.

But sure, people shit on IP rights all the time, and I am guilty of it too. Let's say I didn't pay what I should have paid for every piece of software I have used.

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