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GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

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Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#181

Post by anfelor »

vbezhenar wrote: post #89
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 expect them to check /LICENSE file and if it deviates from standard open source license, they'll skip that repository.

They don't do that it seems. In the footnotes of https://docs.github.com/en/github/copilot/research-recitatio... they mention two repositories from the training set none of which specify a license.

Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#182

Post by _greim_ »

As a human programmer, I've also been trained on thousands of lines of other people's code. Is there anything new here, from a code copying perspective? Aren't I liable if segments of my own code exactly match someone else's code, even if I didn't knowingly copy/paste it?

Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#183

Post by cmiga »

ballenf wrote: post #171

I think the distraction is against how disconnected reality is becoming from copyright/intellectual property regulations. It's still amazing to me that (US-centric context here), it's well established that instructions how to turn raw ingredients into a cake are not protectable but code that results in transforming one set of numbers into another are protectable. AI is just making the silliness of that distinction mo…

Humans are just sets of atoms, so protecting them is disconnected from reality?

These reductionist arguments lead nowhere. Fortunately, IP lawyers -- including Microsoft's who are fiercely pro IP when it suits them -- think in a more humanistic way and consider the years of work of the IP creator.

Food recipes are irrelevant; the often go back centuries and it's rather hard to identify individual creators. Not so in software.

Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#184

Post by Supermancho »

MadcapJake wrote: post #178
ballenf wrote: post #171

I think the distraction is against how disconnected reality is becoming from copyright/intellectual property regulations. It's still amazing to me that (US-centric context here), it's well established that instructions how to turn raw ingredients into a cake are not protectable but code that results in transforming one set of numbers into another are protectable. AI is just making the silliness of that distinction mo…

Code is not the same as a recipe. Recipes are more like specifications. They leave out the implementation. Code has structural and algorithmic details that just have no comparable concept in recipes.

> Code has structural and algorithmic details that just have no comparable concept in recipes.

Why do you think that? A compiler uses human readable code to create machine code, with arbitrary optimizations and choices.

Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#185

Post by [deleted] »

MadcapJake wrote: post #178
ballenf wrote: post #171

I think the distraction is against how disconnected reality is becoming from copyright/intellectual property regulations. It's still amazing to me that (US-centric context here), it's well established that instructions how to turn raw ingredients into a cake are not protectable but code that results in transforming one set of numbers into another are protectable. AI is just making the silliness of that distinction mo…

Code is not the same as a recipe. Recipes are more like specifications. They leave out the implementation. Code has structural and algorithmic details that just have no comparable concept in recipes.

[deleted]

Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#186

Post by abeppu »

The core problem which would allow laundering (that there isn't a good way to draw a straight, attributive line between generated code and training examples) to me also presents a potential eventual threat to the viability of co-pilot/codex. It seems like the same thing would prevent it from knowing which published code was written by humans vs which was at least in part an output from the system. Training on an undifferentiated mix of your model's outputs and human-authored code seems like it could eventually lead the model into self-reinforcing over-confidence.

"But snippet proposals call out to GH, so they can know which bits of code they generated!". Sometimes; but after Bob does a co-pilot assisted session, and Alice refactors to change a snippet's location and rename some variables and some other minor changes and then commits, can you still tell if it's 95% codex-generated?

Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#187

Post by Timwi »

I agree that this is different from humans learning to code from examples and reproducing some individual snippets. However, I disagree with the author’s argument that it's because of humans’ ability to abstract. We actually know nothing about the AI’s ability to abstract.

The real difference is that if one human can learn to code from public sources, then so can anyone else. Nobody is explicitly barred from accessing the same material. The AI, however, is kept proprietary. Nobody else can recreate it because people are explicitly barred from doing so. People cannot access the source code of the training algorithm; people cannot access enough hardware to perform the training; and most people cannot even access the training data. It may consist of repos that are technically all publicly available, but try downloading all of GitHub and see if they let you do that quickly, and/or whether you have enough disk space.

This puts the owners of the AI at a significant advantage over everyone else. I think this is the core of the concern.

Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#188

Post by Supermancho »

cmiga wrote: post #183
ballenf wrote: post #171

I think the distraction is against how disconnected reality is becoming from copyright/intellectual property regulations. It's still amazing to me that (US-centric context here), it's well established that instructions how to turn raw ingredients into a cake are not protectable but code that results in transforming one set of numbers into another are protectable. AI is just making the silliness of that distinction mo…

Humans are just sets of atoms, so protecting them is disconnected from reality? These reductionist arguments lead nowhere. Fortunately, IP lawyers -- including Microsoft's who are fiercely pro IP when it suits them -- think in a more humanistic way and consider the years of work of the IP creator. Food recipes are irrelevant; the often go back centuries and it's rather hard to identify individual creators. Not so in…

> Food recipes are irrelevant; the often go back centuries and it's rather hard to identify individual creators.

That's not correct. Food recipes are created all the time and are attributed. From edible water bottles to impossible burgers, et al.

Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#189

Post by not2b »

akerl_ wrote: post #133
belter wrote: post #101

One interesting aspect, that I thing will make it difficult for GitHub to argue and justify its not a a license violation would be the answer to the following question: Was Copilot trained using Microsoft internal source code or will it be in the future ? As GitHub is a Microsoft company and OpenAI although a non-profit just got a massive one billion investment from Microsoft (presumably not for free), will it start…

Without weighing in on the overall question of “is this a license violation”, you’ve created a false dichotomy. “GitHub included Microsoft proprietary code in the training set because they view the results as non-derivative” and “GitHub didn’t include Microsoft proprietary code because they view the results as derivative” are clearly not the only options. They could have not included Microsoft internal code because i…

Or: they used the entire open source corpus because they thought it was free for the taking, and when people point out that it is not (that there are licenses) they spin that (claim that only 0.1% of output is directly copied, but that would mean 100 lines in 100k program) and pass any risk onto the user (saying it is their responsibility to vet any code they produce). So they aren't saying that users are in the clear, just that it isn't their problem.

Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#190

Post by brundolf »

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 was somewhat worried about that until I saw this: https://twitter.com/nickjshearer/status/1409902649625956361?...

I think programming is one of the many domains (including driving) that will never be totally solved by AI unless/until it's full AGI. The long tail of contextual understanding and messy edge-cases is intractable otherwise.

Will that happen one day? Maybe. Will some kinds of labor get fully automated before then? Probably. But I think the overall time-scale is longer than it seems.

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