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GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

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Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#281

If someone could show that the "copilot" started "generating" code verbatim (or nearly verbatim) from some GPL-licensed work, especially if that section of code was somehow novel or specific to a narrow domain, I suspect they'd have a case. I don't know much about OpenAICodex, but if it's anything like GPT-3, or uses that under the hood, then it's very likely that certain sequences are simply memorized, which seems l…

But what would we think to the legal start-up that automatically checked all of github to see whether the ai could be persuaded to spit out a significant amount of any project code verbatim?

Somehow p-hacking springs to mind

Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#282
I mean this is already happening. When you hire a specialist in C# servers, you're copying code that they already wrote. I find people tend to write the same functions and classes again and again and again all the time.

We have a guy that brought his task manager codebase (he re-wrote it) but it's the same thing he used at 2 other companies.

I have written 3 MPIs (master person/patient index) at this point all with the same fundamental matching engine.

I mean, one thing we can all agree on is that ML is good at copying what we already do.

Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#283

An interesting impact of this discussion is, for me: within my team at work, we're likely to forbid any use of Github co-pilot for our codebase, unless we can get a formal guarantee from Github that the generated code is actually valid for us to use. By the way, code generated by Github co-pilot is likely incompatible with Microsoft's Contribution License Agreement [1]: "You represent that each of Your Submission is…

> This means that, for most open-source projects, code generated by Github co-pilot is, right now, NOT acceptable in the project. For this scenario, how is using Co-Pilot generated code different from using code based on sample code, Stack Overflow answers, etc.?

A number of company, including Google and probably Microsoft forbid copying code from Stack Overflow because there is no explicit license

Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#284
not a fan of this argument.

musicians, artists, all kinds of athletes, all grow by watching observing and learning from others. as if all these open source projects got to where they are without looking at how others did things.

i don't think a single function, similar syntax or basic check function is worth arguing about, its not like co-pilot is stealing an entire code base and just plopping it out by reading your mind and knowing what you want. i know developers that have certainly stolen code and implementation details from past employers and that was just fine.

Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#285
post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hate to break it to you, but that wouldn’t lead to communism. The people it replaces are useless to the ruling class. At best we’d go back to feudalism, at worst we’d be deemed worthless and a drain on the planet.

I'm always confused when I see people talking about automated luxury communism. Whoever owns the "means of production" isn't going to obtain or develop them for free. Without some omnipotent benevolent world government to build it out for all, I just don't see it happening. It's a beautiful end goal for society, but I've never seen a remotely plausible set of intermediate steps to get there

The very concept of ownership is a social artifact, and as such, is not immutable. What does it mean for the 0.1% to own all the means of production? They can't physically possess them all. So what it means in practice is that our society recognizes the abstract notion of property ownership, distinct from physical possession or use - basically, the right to deny other people the use of that property, or allow it conditionally. This recognition is what reifies it - registries to keep track of owners, police and courts to enforce the right to exclude.

But, again, this is a construct. The only reason why it holds up is because most people support it. I very much doubt that's going to remain the case for long if we end up in a situation where the elites own all the (now automated) capital and don't need the workers to extract wealth from it anymore. The government doesn't even need to expropriate anything - just refuse to recognize such property rights, and withdraw its protection.

I hope that there are sufficiently many capitalists who are smart enough to understand this, and to manage a smooth transition. Because if they won't, it'll get to torches and pitchforks eventually, and there's always a lot of collateral damage from that. But, one way or another, things will change. You can't just tell several billion people that they're not needed anymore, and that they're welcome to starve to death.

Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#286
I don't see the point of this tool, independent of the resulting code being derivative of GPL code or not.

being able to produce valid code is not the bottleneck of any developer effort. no projects fail because code can't be typed quickly enough.

the bottleneck is understanding how the code works, how to design things correctly, how to make changes in accordance with the existing design, how to troubleshoot existing code, etc.

this tool doesn't make anything any easier! it makes things harder, because now you have running software that was written by no one and is understood by no one.

Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#287

An interesting impact of this discussion is, for me: within my team at work, we're likely to forbid any use of Github co-pilot for our codebase, unless we can get a formal guarantee from Github that the generated code is actually valid for us to use. By the way, code generated by Github co-pilot is likely incompatible with Microsoft's Contribution License Agreement [1]: "You represent that each of Your Submission is…

> This means that, for most open-source projects, code generated by Github co-pilot is, right now, NOT acceptable in the project. For this scenario, how is using Co-Pilot generated code different from using code based on sample code, Stack Overflow answers, etc.?

I'd say that it depends on the license; for StackOverflow, it's CC-BY-SA 4.0 [1]. For sample code, that would depend on the license of the original documentation.

My point is: when I'm copying code from a source with an explicit license, I know whether I'm allowed to copy it. If I pick code from co-pilot, I have no idea (until tested by law in my jurisdiction) whether said code is public domain, AGPL, proprietary, infringing on some company's copyright.

[1] https://stackoverflow.com/legal/terms-of-service#licensing

Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#288
post #88
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…

If you can read open source code, learn from it, and write your own code, why can't a computer?

I think the core argument has much more to do about plagiarism than learning.

Sure, if I use some code as inspiration for solving a problem at work, that seems fine.

But if I copy verbatim some licensed code then put it in my commercial product, that's the issue.

It's a lot easier to imagine for other applications like generating music. If I trained a music model on publicly available Youtube music videos, then my model generates music identical to Interstellar Love by The Avalanches and I use the "generated" music in my product, that's clearly a use that is against the intent of the law.

Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#289

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…

Good point, to me that explains why this is a GitHub product instead of a Microsoft (or VSCode) product.

Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#290
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You'd have to hit rate limiting multiple times no?

https://console.cloud.google.com/marketplace/product/github/...

BigQuery used to have a dataset updated weekly, looks like it hasn't been updated since about a year after the acquisition by Microsoft.

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