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I do not agree with Github's use of copyrighted code as training for Copilot

thelig.ht

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Re: I do not agree with Github's use of copyrighted code as training for Copilot

#111

Post by crazygringo »

jcelerier wrote: post #107
crazygringo wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not what GP is saying. In general, you're absolutely allowed to learn programming techniques from anywhere . You can contribute software almost anywhere even if you've read Windows source code. Re-using everything you've learned, in your own creative creation, is part of fair use. Your example is the very specific scenario where you're attempting to replicate an entire program, API, etc., to identical specific…

> Your example is the very specific scenario where you're attempting to replicate an entire program, API, etc., to identical specifications. That's obviously not fair use. You're not dealing with little bits and pieces, you're dealing with an entire finished product. No - google's 9 lines of sorting algorithm (iirc) copied from Oracle's implementation were not considered fair use in the Google / Oracle debacle. Likew…

Sorry, but you're not recalling correctly. :)

The Supreme Court decided Google v. Oracle was fair use. It was 3 months ago:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_LLC_v._Oracle_America,_...

That's the highest form of precedent, the question has now been effectively settled (unless Congress ever changes the law).

Edit: added a dummy hash to end of URL so HN parses it correctly (thanks @thewakalix below)

Re: I do not agree with Github's use of copyrighted code as training for Copilot

#113

Post by janoc »

lacker wrote: post #34

I thought this was a pretty good thread (by an ex-Wikipedia lawyer) on Twitter about the IP meaning of Copilot. https://twitter.com/luis_in_brief/status/1410242882523459585... And this is a longer article about how IP and AI interact: https://ilr.law.uiowa.edu/print/volume-101-issue-2/copyright... I am not a lawyer, but I am capable of summarizing the thoughts of lawyers, so my take is that in general, fair use allow…

Sorry but it is not a robot publishing the "lifted" code but a human. So the copyright will very much apply. That's an argument like saying CTRL+C/CTRL+V is OK because it is a "computer doing it".

Plus it is not "minor infringement" but code is being lifted verbatim - e.g. as has been demonstrated by the Quake square root code.

Feel free to test this theory in court ...

Re: I do not agree with Github's use of copyrighted code as training for Copilot

#115

Post by the8472 »

saurik wrote: post #87
crazygringo wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not what GP is saying. In general, you're absolutely allowed to learn programming techniques from anywhere . You can contribute software almost anywhere even if you've read Windows source code. Re-using everything you've learned, in your own creative creation, is part of fair use. Your example is the very specific scenario where you're attempting to replicate an entire program, API, etc., to identical specific…

This model doesn't learn and abstract: it just pattern matches and replicates; that's why it was shown exactly replicating regions of code--long enough to not be "de minimis" and recognizable enough to include the comments--that happen to be popular... which would be fine, as long as the license on said code were also being replicated. It just isn't reasonable to try to pretend Copilot--or GPT-3 in general--is some k…

This is called prompt engineering. If you find a popular, frequently repeated code snippet and then fashion a prompt that is tailored to that snippet then yes the NN will recite it verbatim like a poem.

But that doesn't mean it's the only thing it does or even that it does it frequently. It's like calling a human a parrot because he completed a line from a famous poem when the previous speaker left it unfinished.

The same argument was brought up with GPT too and has been long debunked. The authors (and others) checked samples against the training corpus and it only rarely copies unless you prod it to.

Re: I do not agree with Github's use of copyrighted code as training for Copilot

#116

Post by arp242 »

enraged_camel wrote: post #7

It's kind of interesting how quickly sentiment turned negative. The original feature showcase/announcement post was full of excitement by HN (which is kind of strange, if you think about how skeptical the HN crowd is towards AI/ML and automation of programming) but it hasn't been a week and people are already talking about the questionable ethics and potentially disastrous consequences of using the feature.

I can't speak for anyone else, but when I first saw it, it seemed kind of okay, but I also didn't really look too deeply in to it. As I've looked at it a bit more closely and thought about it for a few days, my original feelings have soured quite a bit.

I never considered the copyright and related ethical implications of ML at all, or thought about the impact it may or may not have on programmers. Your first thoughts on something can be wrong (and actually, often are) and it takes a bit to really think things though – or at least, it does for me.

Re: I do not agree with Github's use of copyrighted code as training for Copilot

#117

Post by [deleted] »

blibble wrote: post #89
lacker wrote: post #34

I thought this was a pretty good thread (by an ex-Wikipedia lawyer) on Twitter about the IP meaning of Copilot. https://twitter.com/luis_in_brief/status/1410242882523459585... And this is a longer article about how IP and AI interact: https://ilr.law.uiowa.edu/print/volume-101-issue-2/copyright... I am not a lawyer, but I am capable of summarizing the thoughts of lawyers, so my take is that in general, fair use allow…

there's a nice example here of it reproducing carmack's famous inverse square root function from Quake 3 (sans GPL, of course) https://twitter.com/mitsuhiko/status/1410886329924194309 this is clearly copyright infringement, and if it isn't: it should be

[deleted]

Re: I do not agree with Github's use of copyrighted code as training for Copilot

#118

Post by dathinab »

lacker wrote: post #34

I thought this was a pretty good thread (by an ex-Wikipedia lawyer) on Twitter about the IP meaning of Copilot. https://twitter.com/luis_in_brief/status/1410242882523459585... And this is a longer article about how IP and AI interact: https://ilr.law.uiowa.edu/print/volume-101-issue-2/copyright... I am not a lawyer, but I am capable of summarizing the thoughts of lawyers, so my take is that in general, fair use allow…

Fair use for training and "independent creation" are one think a AI "remembering and mostly verbatim copying code over" an another.

Many of the current Machine Learning application try to teach AI to understand the concepts behind their training data and use that to do whatever they are trained to do.

But most (all?) fail to properly reach the goal in any more complicated cases, at least the kinds of models which are used for things like Copilot (GPT-3?).

Instead what this models learn can be described as a combination of some abstract understanding and verbatim snippets of input data of varying size.

As such while they sometimes generate "new" things based on "understanding" they also sometimes just copy things they have seen before!! (Like in the Quake code example where it even copied over some of the not-so "proper" comments expressing programmers frustration).

It's like a human not understanding programming or english or Latin letters but has a photographic memory and tries to somehow create something which seems to make sense by recombining existing verbatim snippets, sometimes while tweaking them.

I.e. if the snippets are small enough and tweaked enough it's covered by fair use and similar, BUT the person doing it doesn't know about this, so if a large remembered snippet matches verbatim it will put it in effectively copying code of a size which likely doesn't fall under fair use.

Also this is a well known problem, at least it was when I covered topics including ML ~5 years ago. I.e. good examples included extracting whole sequences of paragraphs of a book out of such a network or (more brilliantly) extracting thinks like peoples contact data based on their names or credit card information (in case of systems trained on mails).

So that Copilot is basically guaranteed to sometimes copy non super smalls snippets of code and potential comments in a way not-really appropriate wrt. copyright should have been a well know fact for the ML specialist in charge of this project.

Re: I do not agree with Github's use of copyrighted code as training for Copilot

#119

Post by qwertox »

hashhar wrote: post #15

Why is this noteworthy? Who is this person? Am I missing something? I agree that there needs to be talk about licensing and copyright but with so "less/no content" there can be no meaningful discussion other than aimless banter.

How about just leaning back and reading the discussions which evolve out of this post? Some may have something to say about it which will either help you solidify your point of view or add a new perspective to it which you might have missed.

The topic is a current one [1], which makes it even more valuable.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27676266

Re: I do not agree with Github's use of copyrighted code as training for Copilot

#120

Post by thunderbong »

lacker wrote: post #34

I thought this was a pretty good thread (by an ex-Wikipedia lawyer) on Twitter about the IP meaning of Copilot. https://twitter.com/luis_in_brief/status/1410242882523459585... And this is a longer article about how IP and AI interact: https://ilr.law.uiowa.edu/print/volume-101-issue-2/copyright... I am not a lawyer, but I am capable of summarizing the thoughts of lawyers, so my take is that in general, fair use allow…

IMHO, Threadreader does a better job of reading these kind of tweets
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