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Copilot regurgitating Quake code, including sweary comments

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Re: Copilot regurgitating Quake code, including sweary comments

#341

Post by neutronicus »

jacurtis wrote: post #295
tyingq wrote: post #30

They have 4 hand picked examples on their homepage: https://copilot.github.com/ One has the issue with form encoding: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27697884 The python example is using floats for currency, in an expense tracking context. The golang one uses a word ("value") for a field name that's been a reserved word since SQL-1999. It will work in popular open source SQL databases, but I believe it would bom…

> The ruby one isn't outright terrible, but shows a very Americanized way to do street addresses that would probably become a problem later. As someone who has been coding up address storage and validation for the past week in my current job, that one really made me laugh. Mostly because it tries to simplify all the stuff I have been analyzing and mulling over for a week into a single auto-complete. Spoiler: The Gith…

A lot of my job is thinking hard about how to do [X], incidentally needing to remember how to do [trivial thing Y] and looking it up.

Like, I did it before, remember that it was trivial, I just forget the snippet and I have to break focus to look it up - often by scrolling through my own commit history to try and find the time I did [trivial thing Y] four months ago.

I do kind of wish I could automate that. Skipping the actual typing of the snippet is sort of gravy on top of that.

Re: Copilot regurgitating Quake code, including sweary comments

#342

Post by mimixco »

gpm wrote: post #172
mimixco wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been in the business a long time and I just don't believe in generalized AI at all. Writing code requires general (not artificial) intelligence. All of these "code helping" tools break down quickly because they may be searching for and finding relevant code blocks (the "imperative hell" referred to by another commenter), but they don't understand the context or the overall behavior and goals of the program. Writ…

If we're coming up with potential uses, I think they got the direction wrong. Don't tell me what to do, tell me what not to do. "this line doesn't look like something that belongs in a code base", "this looks like a line of code that will be changed before the PR is merged". Etc.

That would be fantastic! Imagine if it could catch common errors before you make them. So many things in loops and tests that we mess up all the time. My favorite is to confuse iterating through an array vs an object in JS. I'd love to have Gazoo step in and say, "Don't you mean, this, David?"

Re: Copilot regurgitating Quake code, including sweary comments

#343

Post by hamandcheese »

heroHACK17 wrote: post #320
foobiekr wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Copilot appears to be “give more efficiency leverage to the worst kind of coder.”

This is my thought as well. I get the "make productive engineers even more productive" angle, but productive engineers' bottleneck isn't coding. Sure, coding up a boilerplate Go web server is tedious, but I have done it so many times that it takes me two seconds now. On the flip side, coding can be the bottleneck for the worst kind of coder. When I first started coding, coding was hard simply because I had very littl…

I’m gonna have to disagree - coding can and does take significant amounts of time even when I know exactly what problem I am solving.

I admit that at many organizations there are so many other factors and bottlenecks, but it’s not uncommon that I find myself 8+ hours deep into a coding task that I had expected would be much shorter.

On the other hand, usually that’s due to refactoring or otherwise not being satisfied with the quality of my initial solution, so copilot probably wouldn’t help…

Re: Copilot regurgitating Quake code, including sweary comments

#344

Post by handrous »

lawl wrote: post #25
bencollier49 wrote: post #15

This does make me wonder if this is susceptible to the same form of trolling as that MS AI got. Commit a load of grossly offensive material to multiple repos, and wait for Copilot to start parroting it. I think they're going to need some human moderation.

Way better. It's susceptible to copyright trolling. Put up repos with snippets for things people might commonly write. Preferably use javascript so you can easily "prove" it. Write a crawler that crawls and parses JS files to search for matching stuff in the AST. Now go full patent troll, eh, i mean copyright troll.

1) Write a project heavily using Copilot (hell, automate it and write thousands of them, why not?)

2) AGPL all that code.

3) Search for large chunks of code very similar to yours, but written after yours, licensed more liberally than AGPL. Ideally in libraries used by major companies.

4) Point the offenders to your repos and offer a "convenient" paid dual-license to make the offenders' code legal for closed-source use, so they don't have to open source their entire product.

5) Profit?

Re: Copilot regurgitating Quake code, including sweary comments

#346

Post by minimaxir »

celeritascelery wrote: post #44

From the Copilot FAQ: > The technical preview includes filters to block offensive words And somehow their filters missed f*k? That doesn’t give a lot of confidence in their ability filter more nuanced text. Or maybe it only filters truly terrible offensive words like “master”.

In my testing of Copilot, the content filters only work on input, not output.

Attempting to generate text from code containing "genocide" just has Copilot refuse to run. But you can still coerce Copilot to return offensive output given certain innocuous prompts.

Re: Copilot regurgitating Quake code, including sweary comments

#347

Post by nitrogen »

neutronicus wrote: post #341
jacurtis wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The ruby one isn't outright terrible, but shows a very Americanized way to do street addresses that would probably become a problem later. As someone who has been coding up address storage and validation for the past week in my current job, that one really made me laugh. Mostly because it tries to simplify all the stuff I have been analyzing and mulling over for a week into a single auto-complete. Spoiler: The Gith…

A lot of my job is thinking hard about how to do [X], incidentally needing to remember how to do [trivial thing Y] and looking it up. Like, I did it before, remember that it was trivial, I just forget the snippet and I have to break focus to look it up - often by scrolling through my own commit history to try and find the time I did [trivial thing Y] four months ago. I do kind of wish I could automate that. Skipping…

It would be nice if there were a way to automate the "remembering what that one function is called and what order the parameters are in" portion of my job.

IME the best thing for this is looking at the method listing in the docs for the classes I'm using. E.g. for Ruby, it's usually looking at the methods in Enumerable, Enumerator, Array, or Hash. Or I'll drop a binding.pry into the function, run it, and then type ls to see what's in scope.

Re: Copilot regurgitating Quake code, including sweary comments

#349

Post by TeMPOraL »

axiosgunnar wrote: post #138

I hate to be the one that says this but I think it‘s true: "So you are an SWE and you take a break from work to go to Hackernews to complain that Github's Copilot, which is an AI-based solution meant to help SWEs, is utter shit and completely unusuable. And then you go back to writing AI-based solutions for some other profession. Which is totally not shit or anything.“ Can anybody put this more elegantly?

Dunno. I go to HN because it's the one place where I can whine about AI being total bullshit, for the exact reasons as we're now complaining about wrt. Copilot.
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