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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

#351

Post by cnma »

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…

> Nobody is really being hurt when a new tool makes it easier to copy little bits of code from the internet.

Of course people are hurt, namely the original creators who spent years of work and whose work is potentially laundered, depending on how good this IP grabbing AI will get.

If it gets really good, some smug and well connected loser (e.g. the type who posts pictures of himself with a microphone on GitHub) will click a button, steal other people's hard work and start a "new" project that supersedes the old one.

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

#352

Post by hluska »

dahart wrote: post #334
chrisseaton wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What do you think I changed I think you added > Which “it” are you referring to?... Because I have a tab open and can see the old one!

I added that before I saw your comment. So?

So @chrisseaton was correct, you did edit your posts and their question was in good faith.

Edit - I’m adding another point as an edit to show another way to communicate. Would any of your points been lost had you done something similar?

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

#353

Post by jefftk »

krono wrote: post #296
jefftk wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> have a lot of open source code that I love to share for things like education or private stuff, but if you want to use it for something real, you need to hire me. If you can suck all the code without even I noticing it, that's not fair Co-pilot aside, that's already how it works today. If you make something open source, I can use your code to power my business, and I'm under no obligation to hire you. It's great wh…

> If you make something open source, I can use your code to power my business "Open source" isn't a license. You're not allowed to just use any open source software that doesn't contain a license by default.

The standard definition of "open source" is https://opensource.org/osd, which has:

"Open source doesn't just mean access to the source code. The distribution terms of open-source software must comply with the following criteria: ... The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research."

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

#354

Post by jefftk »

johnday wrote: post #300
jefftk wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> have a lot of open source code that I love to share for things like education or private stuff, but if you want to use it for something real, you need to hire me. If you can suck all the code without even I noticing it, that's not fair Co-pilot aside, that's already how it works today. If you make something open source, I can use your code to power my business, and I'm under no obligation to hire you. It's great wh…

It sounds like the person you're responding to already releases their code under a non-commercial license. The problem with Copilot is that it may allow commercial enterprises to avoid such a license by copying the code verbatim from their repositories, possibly without any party involved knowing that it's happened.

Where are you seeing that they are using a non-commercial license?

(And non-commercial licenses are not open source: https://opensource.org/osd)

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

#355

Post by kortilla »

breck wrote: post #295
wcerfgba wrote: post #31

I'm glad that Copilot is bringing the grey areas of copyright into discussion. If I write a book and it is copyright, what's the smallest unit which is covered by that copyright? Each word is obviously not. Some sentences will be fairly generic and I will not be the first person to write them. But some sentences will be characteristic of the work or my own style. Clearly how we apply copyright to subdivisions of an o…

This. You realize it doesn’t make any sense. All ideas are shared creations, by definition. If you’ve created something that has meaning for other people, the meaning comes from the ideas you are incorporating into your own tree. There is no defending copyright. It is indefensible from first principles. It makes no logical sense. Though it sure has proven to be a profitable con.

> There is no defending copyright. It is indefensible from first principles. It makes no logical sense.

What does that even mean? The intent from the beginning of copyright was to allow people to live off of intellectual works by claiming legal rights over the work.

There are no “first principles” from which basically any societal agreements like these are derived.

Even something as simple as “murder is illegal” isn’t actually derived from any first principles because the government is allowed to murder people, citizens are during self defense, etc.

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

#356

Post by jozvolskyef »

saurik wrote: post #248
jozvolskyef wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine for a second a model of the human brain that consists of three parts. 1) a vector of trillion inputs, 2) a black box, and 3) a vector of trillion outputs. At this level of abstraction, the human brain "pattern matches and replicates" just the same, except it is better at it.

Human brains are at least minimally recurrent, and are trained on data sets that are much wider and more complex than what we are handing GPT-3. I have done all of these standard though experiments and even developed and trained my own neural networks back before there were libraries that have allowed people to "dabble" in machine learning: if you consider the implications of humans being able to execute turing compl…

The human brain isn't Turing-complete as that would require infinite memory. I'm not saying that GPT-3 is even close, but it is in the same category. I tried playing chess against it. According to chess.com, move 10 was its first mistake, move 16 was its first blunder, and past move 20 it tried to make illegal moves. Try playing chess without a chessboard and not making an illegal move. It is difficult. Clearly it does understand chess enough not to make illegal moves as long as its working memory allows it to remember the game state.

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

#357

Post by dahart »

hluska wrote: post #352
dahart wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I added that before I saw your comment. So?

So @chrisseaton was correct, you did edit your posts and their question was in good faith. Edit - I’m adding another point as an edit to show another way to communicate. Would any of your points been lost had you done something similar?

> So @chrisseaton was correct

No that’s not true. I did not edit my posts after reading their reply, and the false accusation was that I changed my comment after it was replied to.

I didn’t challenge whether the question was in good faith, but I’ll just note that the relevant discussion of copyright got dropped in favor of an ad-hominem attack.

My question of which “it” was being referred to is a legitimate question that I believe clarified the intent of my comment, and I added it to make clear I was talking about what @lacker said, not what @jcelerier wrote.

> Edit - I’m adding another point as an edit to show another way to communicate. Would any of your points been lost had you done something similar?

This doesn’t answer my question of why an edit should not be made before I see any replies, nor of why any edit is “poor form” and according to whom. I made my edit immediately. I’m well aware of the practice of calling out edits with a note, I’ve done it many times. I don’t feel the need to call out every typo or clarification with an explicit note, especially when edited very soon after the original comment.

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

#358

Post by hollerith »

jozvolskyef wrote: post #356
saurik wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Human brains are at least minimally recurrent, and are trained on data sets that are much wider and more complex than what we are handing GPT-3. I have done all of these standard though experiments and even developed and trained my own neural networks back before there were libraries that have allowed people to "dabble" in machine learning: if you consider the implications of humans being able to execute turing compl…

The human brain isn't Turing-complete as that would require infinite memory. I'm not saying that GPT-3 is even close, but it is in the same category. I tried playing chess against it. According to chess.com, move 10 was its first mistake, move 16 was its first blunder, and past move 20 it tried to make illegal moves. Try playing chess without a chessboard and not making an illegal move. It is difficult. Clearly it do…

>The human brain isn't Turing-complete as that would require infinite memory

A human brain with an unlimited supply of pencils and paper, then.

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

#359

Post by discreteevent »

rcxdude wrote: post #282
throwaway_egbs wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just when I thought tweetstorms couldn't get any worse, here's one where every tweet is a quote-tweet of the author. I don't even understand how I'm supposed to read this. > Copyright has concluded that reading by robots doesn’t count. Infringement is for humans only; when computers do it, it’s fair use. Surely there's a limit to this. If I use a machine to produce something that just happens to exactly match a copyr…

That quote is basically entirely nonsensical. 'copyright' hasn't decided anything (nor has any legislative body nor the courts). All that's happened is that OpenAI has put forward an argument that using large quantities of media scraped from the internet as training data is fair use. This argument for the most part does not rely on the human vs machine distinction (in fact it leans on the idea that the process is not…

Surely it could be argued that there is a loss of audience to the author. At the moment some people will read the author's code directly in order to find out how to solve a problem. In the future at least some of those people will just ask copilot to solve the problem for them.

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

#360

Post by remram »

nilshauk wrote: post #249

I used to admire GitHub for being a fully bootstrapped company and free to pursue a path in the world they believed in as a company. Since the Microsoft acquisition it’s becoming painfully obvious how unhealthily centralized the dev world has become, and they seem to strive to become ever more entrenched in the name of maximizing shareholder value. I only have a small amount of open source projects on GH but I intend…

In this case that might not help you at all. If your project is popular enough, somebody will mirror it on GitHub, where they are free (or believe they are) to incorporate your code in Copilot. Voting with your feet might be helpful long-term but will not protect you from this particular "feature".
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