Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

thelig.ht

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

501–510 of 545 posts

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

#501

Post by progfix »

kuon wrote: post #127

I've given thousands of hours to open source projects, I really think open source is a pillar of modern society. So you would think I am all for something like copilot, but no. At first I thought this was a great feature, because easier access to code, but after some reflection, I am also very skeptical. I am able to make my code open source, because I can make a living out of it, and I have a lot of open source code…

> I 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.

Then you should share your code with a license that reflects that.

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

#502

Post by dTal »

slavik81 wrote: post #500
dTal wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>When a machine does it, does it matter if the machine literally copied it from sources, or first transformed it into an isomorphic model in its "head" before regurgitating it back? You've hit the nail on the head here. If this is okay, then neural nets are simply machines for laundering IP. We don't worry about people memorizing proprietary source code and "accidentally" using it because it's virtually impossible fo…

> We don't worry about people memorizing proprietary source code and "accidentally" using it I'm not sure why it's different, but that's a common concern with music. For example: https://www.reddit.com/r/WeAreTheMusicMakers/comments/4v8u8d...

That's a really good observation. Perhaps it highlights an essential difference between two modes of thought - a fuzzy, intuitive, statistical mode based on previously seen examples, and a reasoned, analytical calculating mode which depends on a precise model of the system. Plausibly, the landscape of valid musical compositions is more continuous than the landscape of valid source code, and therefore more amenable to fuzzy, example-based generation; it's entirely possible to blend two songs and make a third song. Such an activity is nonsensical with source code, and so humans don't even try. We probably do apply that sort of learning to short snippets (idioms), but source code diverges too rapidly for it to be useful beyond that horizon.

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

#503

Post by dTal »

hollerith wrote: post #358
jozvolskyef wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Hmm... but a finite state machine with an infinite tape is Turing complete too. If you're allowed to write symbols out and read them back in, you've invalidated the "proof" that humans aren't just doing pattern matching.

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

#505

Post by native_samples »

rvnx wrote: post #401
dheera wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> then you'd want to forbid contributors from using CoPilot I mean, if you used CoPilot on one computer, stared at it intensely for 1 hour, closed that computer, and then typed out code in the other computer that you were contributing from, you technically didn't use it for the contribution, you just used CoPilot for your education only. Intellectual property is itself a flawed concept in many ways. It's like asking…

Intellectual property itself is silly. How can a thought be the property of someone ? Secrecy is the solution if you don't want others to learn from you (like Coca-Cola does).

It's not silly, it's an evolved and pragmatic solution to the question of how society can incentivize creative work. More or less every society has developed some notion of IP and there's little appetite in wider society to debate it - the idea of abolishing IP laws is deeply fringe and only really surfaces in forums like this one.

Does it have flaws and can it be improved upon? Sure. I think society underweights what improvements to the patent system in particular could do. But such ideas are so niche they are hardly even written down, let alone debated at large. Society has bigger issues on its mind.

Like any evolved system IP law encounters new challenges over time and will be expected to evolve again, which it will surely do. A simple fix for Copilot is surely to just exclude all non-Apache2/BSD/MIT licensed code. Although there might technically still be advertising clause related issues, in practice hardly anyone cares enough to go to court over that.

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

#506

Post by 0-_-0 »

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.

This is wrong, this is not what Turing completeness is. It applies to computational models, not hardware.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_completeness

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

#507

Post by native_samples »

mdpye wrote: post #327
IncRnd wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes! Thank you. I should have clarified that I meant within the US.

Oh, then today I learned! I didn't realise they were different. Just looked it up in a "plain English dictionary of law" and the distinction seems subtle but important. Rather than "with the intention of depriving the owner", the US one says "with the intention of converting it to their use", which seems broad enough to cover exploiting a copy, rather than the original (or only, in the physical realm...)

The US definition seems more robust, as otherwise, I could somehow steal something you built (e.g. a farm) and then generously allow you to continue using it, perhaps for a fee. You would therefore not be deprived of it but I would still be the new owner or user.

It seems unlikely this distinction would ever matter in a real court though.

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

#508

Post by neop1x »

saurik wrote: post #40

I never hosted--with quite some prejudice, even--any of my projects on GitHub (for a number of reasons that are off topic right now)... it didn't matter, though: people take your code and upload it to GitHub themselves (which is their right); so you can't avoid Copilot by simply self-hosting your repositories.

Your choice but be aware that self-hosting probably reduces collaboration with community. GitHub and GitLab makes it easy to contribute a pull request. Hundreds of private cgit web frontends make it hard to contribute and it is often impossible to search the code on the web, requiring a clone which takes a long time for big repos.

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

#509

Post by CRConrad »

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #474
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Of course not. Reading some copyrighted code can have you entirely excluded from some jobs That's not a law. That's a cautionary decision made by those companies or projects to make it more difficult for competitors to argue that code was copied. Those projects could hire people familiar with competitor code and assign them to competing projects if they wanted. The contributors could, in theory, write new code with…

>That's not a law. That's a cautionary decision made by those companies or projects to make it more difficult for competitors to argue that code was copied. and they made those decisions based on the need to be able to argue in court that code was not copied. >then you'd want to forbid contributors from using CoPilot Right, the whole thing about arguing if copilot spits out a ten line function verbatim is not really…

> >That's not a law. That's a cautionary decision made by those companies or projects to make it more difficult for competitors to argue that code was copied.

> and they made those decisions based on the need to be able to argue in court that code was not copied.

Yeah, but only to make it easier for them to argue it; the letter of the law doesn't require it. You could argue that "Sure, I read Windows source code once -- but that was years ago and I can't remember shit of it, so anything I wrote now is my own invention." That might be harder to get the court to accept as a fact, but it's not a prima facie legal impossibility.

Cautionary decision =/= actual law.

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

#510

Post by CRConrad »

dragonwriter wrote: post #402
rvnx wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Intellectual property itself is silly. How can a thought be the property of someone ? Secrecy is the solution if you don't want others to learn from you (like Coca-Cola does).

> Intellectual property itself is silly. How can a thought be the property of someone ? No category of intellectual property covers thoughts, so the question has no relevance to the preceding statement.

An equally valid, AFAICS, way of looking at it is that "intellectual property" covers nothing but thoughts, only expressed in different forms.
Post reply on HN