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GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

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Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#71

Post by Deathmax »

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.

You get to make changes without having to respect the GPL and thus no longer obligated to provide those changes to your end users, as you have effectively laundered the kernel source code by passing it through an "AI" and get to relicense the end result.

Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#72

Post by AJ007 »

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…

And this applies to everything, not just source code.

I’m just presuming we have a future where you can consume unique content indefinitely. Such as instead of binge watching Star Trek on Netflix you press play and new episodes are generated and played continuously, 24/7, and they are actually really good.

Thus intellectual property becomes a commodity.

Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#73

Post by rjp0008 »

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…

I would bet this as applicable as the Facebook posts of my parents friends something like, 'All my content on this page is mine alone and I expressly forbid Facebook INC usage of it for any purpose.'

Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#75

Post by merpnderp »

gutino wrote: post #22
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 hum…

If AI can replace us with difficult tasks, it can repress us. How are you going to agitate for a UBI when AI has identified you as a likely agitator and sends in the robots to arrest you?

Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#76

Post by tyingq »

"We found that about 0.1% of the time, the suggestion may contain some snippets that are verbatim from the training set"

If it's spitting out verbatim code 0.1% of the time, surely it's spitting out copied code where only trivial things are different at a much higher rate.

Trivial things meaning swapped order where order isn't important, variable/function names, equivalent ops like +=1 vs ++, etc.

Surely it's laundering some GPL code, for example, and effectively removing the license in a way that sounds fishy.

Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#77

Post by Kaze404 »

gutino wrote: post #22
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 hum…

So we give away the world to the 1% and are supposed to be satisfied with the "privilege" of being able to eat?

Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#78

Post by antattack »

invokestatic wrote: post #69
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.co…

That does not mean that you give them license to your code. In fact some or all of the code may not be yours to give in a first place.

Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#79

Post by imranhou »

mrosett wrote: post #67

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…

Google copied an interface(declarative), not code snippets/functions(implementation). Copilot is capable of copying only Implementation. IMO that is quite different and easily a violation if it was copied verbatim.

Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#80

Post by briefcomment »

gutino wrote: post #22
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 hum…

The problem with this is that you increasingly have to put your trust in the hands of a shrinking group of owners (people who have the rights to the automated productivity). At some point, those owners are just going to stop supporting everyone else (will probably happen when they have the ability to create everything they could ever want with automation - think robot farms, robot security forces, all encompassing automated monitoring, robot construction, etc.)
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