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GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

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Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#411

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…

Do we need an update of free software licenses to specifically address this?

Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Part of me wants to tell him to try selling it as a machine learning model and just obfuscate the fact that the model was carefully hand written rather than back propagated. How many models are back-propagated first and then hand-tuned?

That's a great question. I had assumed that the workflow of an ML engineer consisted of managing the data and a relatively high level set of parameters around a search space of layers and connectivity, as the whole shtick of ML is that the hyperparameter space of the tensors themselves is too complex to grok or tweak when generated from training. But I only have a passing knowledge of the subject, pretty much just en…

I'm no data scientist but many statistical methods rely on prior knowledge and even computed inputs.

Two examples I can think of are doing linear regression on the square of your input. For deep learning, people have improved visual representation by taking samples of the colors at various frequencies. [1]

[1]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2003.08934.pdf

Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#413

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…

Shit... yea, we should make hay while the sun is shining and maybe become preppers to brace for the inevitable revolution by the < 99.99%.

Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a great question. I had assumed that the workflow of an ML engineer consisted of managing the data and a relatively high level set of parameters around a search space of layers and connectivity, as the whole shtick of ML is that the hyperparameter space of the tensors themselves is too complex to grok or tweak when generated from training. But I only have a passing knowledge of the subject, pretty much just en…

I'm no data scientist but many statistical methods rely on prior knowledge and even computed inputs. Two examples I can think of are doing linear regression on the square of your input. For deep learning, people have improved visual representation by taking samples of the colors at various frequencies. [1] [1]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2003.08934.pdf

Yeah, that's a better way of saying what I meant by managing the data. Mentally projecting data through, massaging said data, and building reproducible pipelines rather than manually tweaking the learned weights after the fact.

Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#415
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

Nothing is closed-source to the courts.

It may be possible to use closed source code during training and delete it, leaving just a black box model that is hard to prove was derived from that closed source code.

Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When AI inevitably outperforms humans on almost all tasks Correct me if I’m wrong, but is that even possible? I kind of thought that AI is just set of fancy statistical models that requires some (preferably huge) data set in order to infer the best fit. These models can only outperform humans in scenarios where the parameters are well defined. Many (most?) tasks humans regularly perform don’t have clean and well de…

> 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…

"Why can't we design a computer that does everything we do... only faster?"

I think the key word in that sentence might be "we". That is, you could hypothesize that while it's possible in principle for such a computer to exist, it might be beyond what humans and human civilization are capable of in this era. I don't know if this is true or not, but it's kind of intuitively plausible that it's difficult for a designer to design something as complex as the designer themselves, and the space of AI we can design is smaller than the space of theoretically conceivable AI.

Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whilst I absolutely agree that writing code fast enough isn't the bottleneck, it's always nice to have tools that reduce repeat code writing. I use the React plugin for Webstorm to avoid having to write the boilerplate for FCs. Maybe in the future Copilot will replace that usage.

To me that - and really any form of common boilerplate - is just evidence that we're lacking abstractions. If your editor is generating code for you, that means that the 'real' programming language you're using 'in your head' has some metaprogramming facilities emulated by your IDE. I think we should strive to improve our programming languages to make less of this boilerplate necessary, not to make generating boiler…

In a very real sense, we are all just using assembly with code generation.

I really like your point on symptoms of insufficient abstraction. I do worry that we always see abstraction as belonging in language. Which in turn we treat as a precious singleton, and fight about.

At least in my own hacking, I'm surprised how infrequently I see programmers write programs that write programs. I'm surprised how infrequently I see programmers programming their shell, editor, or IDE.

Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whilst I absolutely agree that writing code fast enough isn't the bottleneck, it's always nice to have tools that reduce repeat code writing. I use the React plugin for Webstorm to avoid having to write the boilerplate for FCs. Maybe in the future Copilot will replace that usage.

To me that - and really any form of common boilerplate - is just evidence that we're lacking abstractions. If your editor is generating code for you, that means that the 'real' programming language you're using 'in your head' has some metaprogramming facilities emulated by your IDE. I think we should strive to improve our programming languages to make less of this boilerplate necessary, not to make generating boiler…

I’ve read this argument before and I don’t buy it. Boilerplate is an emergent property of composable abstractions.

Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#419

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…

First in was lands, then other means of productions, and for the past 150 years, capitalists have turned many types of intellectual creations into exclusively owned capital (art, inventions). Now some want to turn personal data into capital (the “right to monetize” personal data advertised by some is nothing else) and this aims to turn publicly available code into capital. This is simply the history of capitalism goi…

Marx called this subsumption

Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#420
post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand how your example relates to "launder intellectual property violations". What you're saying is that your grandfather hand wrote some feature extractors that look similar to the neurons that ML models have learned from backpropagation. There's no stealing of IP there at all.

He has a set of patents on certain types of highlighting frequency domain patterns in MRIs. In a lot of ways recurrent neural networks can be frequency domain feature extractors as the backwards data flows create sort of delay line memories tapped at interesting periods. The MRI manufacturers after refusing to license his patents, heavily invested in ML models that focus on using recurrent networks for frequency doma…

You can't patent a concept. You can only patent a process, a machine, an article of manufacture, or a composition of matter. And the invention must be described sufficiently such that a practitioner skilled in the relevant art can reproduce the subject matter.
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