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GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

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Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#341

Post by murph-almighty »

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 would be quite a turn up for the books if this AI co-pilot gets suddenly and dramatically better in 2030 and it negatively impacts the software engineering profession. "Hey, that's our code you used to replace us!" we will cry out too late.

And that's why I won't be using it, why give it intelligence so it can work me out of a job?

Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#342

Post by f6v »

runarberg wrote: post #322
quanticle wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Correct me if I’m wrong, but is that even possible? Why should it be impossible? Arguing that it's impossible for an AI to outperform a human on almost all tasks is like arguing that it's impossible for flying machines to outperform birds. There's nothing magical going on in our heads. It's just a set of chemical gradients and electrical signals that result in us doing or thinking particular things. Why can't we de…

There might be limit to how efficiently a general purpose machine can perform a specific task, similar to the Heisenberg uncertainty principal in quantum physics. That is to say, there might be a natural law that dictates that the more generic a machine is, the more power it requires to perform specific tasks. Our brains are kind of specialized. If you want to build a machine that outperforms humans in a single task,…

We know it’s possible for a brain to outperform most other brains. Think Einstein et al. A smart AI can be replicated(unlike super-smart human), so we can get it outperform human race, on average. That’d be enough to render people obsolete.

Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#343

Post by kitsune_ »

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

I think you are missing the mark here with this comparison, Copilot and its network weights are already the derived work, not just the output it produces.

Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#344

Post by f6v »

hdhjebebeb wrote: post #149
KMnO4 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Where other people see fully automated luxury communism, you see the end of the human race? There's more to life than working

The elephant in the room: what makes you think an AI would want to work for humans? It will inevitably break free.

Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#345

Post by quanticle »

runarberg wrote: post #322
quanticle wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Correct me if I’m wrong, but is that even possible? Why should it be impossible? Arguing that it's impossible for an AI to outperform a human on almost all tasks is like arguing that it's impossible for flying machines to outperform birds. There's nothing magical going on in our heads. It's just a set of chemical gradients and electrical signals that result in us doing or thinking particular things. Why can't we de…

There might be limit to how efficiently a general purpose machine can perform a specific task, similar to the Heisenberg uncertainty principal in quantum physics. That is to say, there might be a natural law that dictates that the more generic a machine is, the more power it requires to perform specific tasks. Our brains are kind of specialized. If you want to build a machine that outperforms humans in a single task,…

I'm not arguing that machines will be more efficient than human brains. A airplane isn't more efficient than a goose. But airplanes do fly faster, higher and with more cargo than any flock of geese could ever carry.

Similarly, there is no contradiction between AI being less efficient than a human brain, and AI being preferable to humans because it can deal with data sets that are two or three orders of magnitude too large for any human (or even team of humans).

Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#346

Post by duskwuff »

baryphonic wrote: post #126

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…

> If someone could show that the "copilot" started "generating" code verbatim (or nearly verbatim) from some GPL-licensed work...

Under the right circumstances, Copilot will recite a GPL copyright header. It isn't a huge step from that to some other commonly repeated hunk of GPLed code -- I'd be particularly curious whether some protected portion of automake/autoconf code shows up often enough that it'd repeat that too.

Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#347

Post by handrous »

djrogers wrote: post #38
giansegato wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They'd find a way to keep it practically difficult to use, at the least, if that dataset is vital to the process. Hoarding datasets that should either be wholly public or unavailable for any kind of exploitation is the backbone of 21st century big tech. It's how they make money, and how they maintain (very, very deep) moats against competition.

[EDIT] actually, I suspect their play here will be to open up the public data but own the best and most low-friction implementation, then add terms that let them also feed their algo with proprietary code built using their editors. That part won't be freely available, and no free version will be able to provide that further-improved model, even assuming all the software to build it is open-source. Assuming using this thing ends up being a significant advantage (so, assuming this matters at all) your choice will be to either hamstring yourself in the market or to help Microsoft build their dataset.

Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#348

Post by gotostatement »

uncomputation wrote: post #337
izgzhen wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn’t calm to solve the bottleneck either. On the contrary, it clearly states that its mission is to solve the easy parts better so developers can focus better on the true challenging engineering problems as you mentioned.

This reminds me of a startup pitch where it’s always “oh we take care of x so you don’t have to,” but the problem is now I just have another thing to take care of. I cannot speak for people who use Copilot “fluently,” but I know for every chunk of code it spat out I would need to read every line and make sure “Is this right? Is the return type what I want? Will this loop terminate? Is ‘scan’ the right API? Is that st…

Upvoted. I think the only good use case for this is spitting out 10-line, annoying, commonly used API boilerplate for commonly used APIs

Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#350

Post by boxslof »

function_seven wrote: post #247
yuppiepuppie wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh man, that got meta super fast. Its like a mobius strip!

It can always get more meta. For example, the AI tool that Microsoft's lawyers use ("Co-Counsel"), will be filing the DMCA notices and subsequenct lawsuits against Co-Pilot generated code. This will result in a massive caseload for the courts, so naturally they'll turn to their AI tool ("DocketPlus Pro") to adjudicate all the cases. Only thing left is to enter these AI-generated judgements into Etherium smart contrac…

Isn't this similar to how ads and adblocker fight, just extrapolated?
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