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Copilot regurgitating Quake code, including sweary comments

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Re: Copilot regurgitating Quake code, including sweary comments

#421

So this makes it official... this post[0] and the comments on the announcement[1] concerned about licensing issues were absolutely correct... and this product has the possibility of getting you sued if you use it. Unfortunately for GitHub, there's no turning back the clocks. Even if they fix this, everyone that uses it has been put on notice that it copies code verbatim and enables copyright infringement. Worse, ther…

Not only this but a huge amount of publicly available code is truly terrible and should never really be used other than a point of reference, guidance.

Re: Copilot regurgitating Quake code, including sweary comments

#422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they get rid of licensed stuff it should be ok no? I really want to use this and seems inevitable that we'll need it just as google translate needs all of the books + sites + comments it can get a hold of.

Well... the whole training set is licensed, so you can't really get rid of it. I think that the technology they are using for this is just not ready.

Just retrain the model using properly licensed code? ("just" is doing a ton of heavy lifting, but let's be real, that's not impossibly hard)

Re: Copilot regurgitating Quake code, including sweary comments

#423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

while the word 'master' can indeed be used in the sense of "master and slave", its use in git is more akin to the use of 'master' in "master record", and doesn't refer to 'ownership' in any way

[deleted]

Re: Copilot regurgitating Quake code, including sweary comments

#424
post #82

From the GPLv2 licensed code: https://github.com/id-Software/Quake-III-Arena/blob/master/c... copilot repeats it word for word almost, including comments, and adds an MIT like license up the top

This exact code is all over github, >1k hits https://github.com/search?q=%22i++%3D+%2A+%28+long+%2A+%29+%...

that will make a great defense at a copyright court.

"your honor, i would like to plead not guilty, on the basis that i just robbed that bank because i saw that everyone was robbing banks on the next city"

...on the other hand, that was the exact defense tried for the capitol rioters. So i don't know anything anymore.

Re: Copilot regurgitating Quake code, including sweary comments

#425
post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually the indentation of the first comment and the lack of preprocessor show it's not copied from this code directly but from Wikipedia ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_inverse_square_root#Overv... ) So It could be that the Quake source code is not part of the training set but the Wikipedia version is.

While I strongly doubt they would use Wikipedia as a training set, has anyone done a search of GitHub code to see if other projects have copied-and-pasted that function from Wikipedia into their more-permissive codebases?

It’s pre-trained, partially, on Wikipedia. GPT-2 did this sort of thing all the time: native to the architecture to surface examples from the fine-tuning training set by default.

Re: Copilot regurgitating Quake code, including sweary comments

#427
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good luck checking every code line for license violations

SaaS idea: code linter, but for licenses.

That's one of blackduck's offerings: https://www.synopsys.com/software-integrity/open-source-soft...

At a previous job we had a audit from them, it seemed to not be too accurate but probably good enough for companies to cover their asses legally.

Re: Copilot regurgitating Quake code, including sweary comments

#428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Adding to this: I run product security for a large enterprise, and I've already gotten the ball rolling on prohibiting copilot for all the reasons above. It's too big a risk. I'd be shocked if GitHub could remedy the negative impressions minted in the last day or so. Even with other compensating controls around open source management, this flies right under the radar with a c130's worth of adverse consequences.

Do you also block stack overflow and give guidance to never copy code from that website or elsewhere on the Internet? I'm legitimately curious - my org internally officially denounces the copying of stack overflow snippets. Thankfully for my role it's moot as I mostly work with an internal non-public language, for better or worse, and I have no idea how well that's followed elsewhere in the wider company.

Who really copies stack overflow snippets verbatim? It's usually just easier to refer to it for help figuring out the right structure and then adapt it for your own needs. Usually it needs customization for your own application anyway (variables, class instances, etc).

Re: Copilot regurgitating Quake code, including sweary comments

#429
post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait until people on the toxic orange site find out what has happened to AI Dungeon.

I'm out of the loop.

https://gitgud.io/AuroraPurgatio/aurorapurgatio

https://www.reddit.com/user/non-taken-name

Re: Copilot regurgitating Quake code, including sweary comments

#430

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”.

Quoted post unavailable.

Everyone has a line of how much they are willing to change their language, though. There will always come a point where someone will think some change is "silly", even though the old term may have upset some people. And almost every term has some sort of baggage associated with it.

There was a post going around somewhere of a college's earnest attempt and change some language (like avoiding "give it a shot" because of the association of "shot" with guns). Would renaming all the various things we call "triggers" be ok, so we don't upset victims of gun violence?

So the master->main change was the line for some people, not others.

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