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GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

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Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#461

Post by naikrovek »

izgzhen wrote: post #323
naikrovek wrote: post #286

I don't see the point of this tool, independent of the resulting code being derivative of GPL code or not. being able to produce valid code is not the bottleneck of any developer effort. no projects fail because code can't be typed quickly enough. the bottleneck is understanding how the code works, how to design things correctly, how to make changes in accordance with the existing design, how to troubleshoot existing…

It doesn’t calm to solve the bottleneck either. On the contrary, it clearly states that its mission is to solve the easy parts better so developers can focus better on the true challenging engineering problems as you mentioned.

if it doesn't claim to help any code production bottlenecks, then what good is it? it's just piping in code that may or may not contain a subtle bug or three.

That doesn't help anyone!!

I am usually pretty pro-Microsoft, but this tool is a security nightmare and a bad idea all around. It will cause many (most? all?) who use it far more work than it saves them, long-term.

Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#462

Post by georgeplusplus »

nextaccountic wrote: post #355
georgeplusplus wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This new economic system you want has been in use since the 70s. Everything about the economy is practically socially managed these days. What part of printing trillions of dollars to stimulate economic productivity is somehow a free market system?

I wasn't talking about free market, but the state of present economy. Unfortunately, those trillions of dollars aren't being distributed to the people, but instead is concentrated in the hands of the richest.

Im pretty sure the people got 5000$ on average in stimulus checks at the tune of 9 trillion dollars these last few months.

Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#463

Post by FridgeSeal »

pornel wrote: post #442
hyperpallium2 wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The market ultimately obeys customer demand, so all these problems will be sorted out... until customer AI.

That's the next step for Amazon Prime: 0-click shopping. Just buys stuff from your recommendations every month and sends it to you.

"Local man in mental distress as microwave-lasagna meals get delivered to his house every 20 minutes"

Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#464

Post by jamiek88 »

FridgeSeal wrote: post #463
pornel wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the next step for Amazon Prime: 0-click shopping. Just buys stuff from your recommendations every month and sends it to you.

"Local man in mental distress as microwave-lasagna meals get delivered to his house every 20 minutes"

Amazon refuses request for microwave.

Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#465

Post by BlueTemplar »

all_rights_rsvd wrote: post #115
toyg wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Technically then I'm infringing as soon as I clone your repo, possibly even as soon as a webserver sends your files to my browser. "All rights reserved" makes sense on final items, like books or physical records, that require no copy or change after owner-approved manufacturing has taken place. It doesn't really make sense on digital artefacts.

So don't clone it, read it online. I reserve all rights, but I do give license to my host to make a "copy" to let you view it. I do that specifically to prevent non-biological entities like corporations or AI from using my code. If you're a biological entity, I specify you can email me to get a license for my code for a specific, defined purpose. I have a conversation with that person, then I send them a record numbe…

> possibly even as soon as a webserver sends your files to my browser.

Considering how it works for personal data with the RGPD, I doubt that this is even needed ?

Also copyright is something you have by default, no licence terms necessary.

OTOH if they aren't a human, then copyright barely applies to them anyway (consider search engine crawlers indexing your website for instance), and I don't think that putting up a notice will legally change anything ?

(You'll probably have better luck with robots.txt ...)

Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#466

Post by BlueTemplar »

cortesoft wrote: post #167
jordemort wrote: post #56

What happens when someone puts code up on GitHub with a license that says "This code may not be used for training a code generation model"? - Is GitHub actually going to pay any attention to that, or are they just going to ingest the code and thus violate its license anyway? - If they go ahead and violate the code's license, what are the legal repercussions for the resulting model? Can a model be "un-trained" from a…

Also, how would you know if your code was included in the training or not? Then, let’s say the AI generates some new code for someone, and it is nearly identical to some bit of code that you wrote in your project. If they didn’t use your code in the model, then the generated code is clearly not a copyright violation, since it was effectively a “clean room” recreation. If your code was included in the model, is it the…

They "just" have to comply with all the licenses for all the code that the program was trained on ?

I suppose that for most open source licences this at the very least involves attribution for all the people that produced the code that the program was trained on ?

Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#467

Post by BlueTemplar »

baryphonic wrote: post #126

If someone could show that the "copilot" started "generating" code verbatim (or nearly verbatim) from some GPL-licensed work, especially if that section of code was somehow novel or specific to a narrow domain, I suspect they'd have a case. I don't know much about OpenAICodex, but if it's anything like GPT-3, or uses that under the hood, then it's very likely that certain sequences are simply memorized, which seems l…

It doesn't matter, Copilot isn't human, therefore it isn't considered as an author, and therefore cannot do derivative works.

The issue is with the users of Copilot potentially violating copyright and licences (non-attribution for instance) and with Microsoft facilitating it. (See also : A&M Records, Inc. v. Napster, Inc.)

Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#468

Post by BlueTemplar »

gdsdfe wrote: post #428
gdsdfe wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would you know if copilot was used or not?!

I'm not sure why I'm getting down voted? "We'll forbid the use of copilot in our code base" How???? How the fuck would anyone know how the code was written?

How can you generally know ? You can't, really, plagiarism is a hard problem...

Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#469

Post by BlueTemplar »

dwheeler wrote: post #459
tyingq wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did say "for example".

You certainly did! But there are a lot of people who think "OSS license means there are no requirements" and think it's okay to do things like copy without attribution when the license requires attributions. I know you didn't say anything like that either, but some others might think it. It seems to me an important question is, "is this like a human who learns from examples, or is this really a derivative work in the…

Neither :

https://scholarship.law.cornell.edu/facpub/1481/

Copilot isn't human and therefore what it does isn't a "work".

The usual issues still apply to users of Copilot - unwitting violations of license terms of the code it was trained on (like non-attribution) are still violations.

Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#470

Post by BlueTemplar »

drran wrote: post #225
tyingq wrote: post #76

"We found that about 0.1% of the time, the suggestion may contain some snippets that are verbatim from the training set" If it's spitting out verbatim code 0.1% of the time, surely it's spitting out copied code where only trivial things are different at a much higher rate. Trivial things meaning swapped order where order isn't important, variable/function names, equivalent ops like +=1 vs ++, etc. Surely it's launder…

I have a much simpler AI Copilot, called "cat", which spills verbatim code more frequently, but it's OK for me. Can I train it on M$ code?

My cat only spills drinks and produces garbage when walking over the keyboard... :'(
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