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All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot

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Re: All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot

#51

Post by underyx »

thinkingemote wrote: post #24
underyx wrote: post #5

OP’s rhetoric, and most discussion I see, asserts that training a model on copyrighted data is a copyright violation. Personally I don’t find this to be so obviously the case. Think back to when we were listening to AI generated pop music, for instance. I don’t recall any concern in HN comments about the copyright holders’ music being used for learning.

Did you miss the bit where copilot reproduced exactly a function including the comments? That's not some mashup or reinterpretation or inspiration it meets the definition of plagiarism in universities and is just copying.

I didn’t miss that, this still doesn’t make the answer obvious to me. I’m pretty sure I’ve unknowningly replicated licensed code as well during my time as an engineer, and I’ve written way less code over my 8 years than Copilot has.

Re: All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot

#52

Post by belorn »

Tenoke wrote: post #29
deviledeggs wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not outrage bait. The thing reproduces GPL licensed code verbatim.

I'm talking about how it's presented. It starts with >oh my gods. they literally have no shame about this. Then continues with >it's official, obeying copyright is only for the plebs and proles, rich people and big companies can do whatever they want and > GitHub, and by extension @Microsoft , knows that copyright is essentially worthless for individuals and small community projects. THAT is why they're all buddy-bud…

It seems that github did make a legal consideration when choosing to include public projects but exclude private ones, with many big companies having private projects for proprietary code bases. Users of public repositories are less likely to be able to fight github on the issue.

Re: All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot

#53

Post by emerged »

Yoric wrote: post #13

Out of curiosity, how do we define license violation in that case? I, as a human being, have trained by reading code, much of which is covered by licenses that are somehow not compatible with code I'm writing. Am I violating licenses? Asking seriously. It's really unclear to me where law and/or ethics put the boundaries. Also, I'd guess it's probably country dependent.

None of our laws were created under the assumption that computers would do so much of our jobs and effect so much of our lives. From robotic automation to social media to now computer programming. I think it’s really a mistake to ask what the letter of the law currently means in the evolving context. Laws should serve us and need to be adapted.

Re: All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot

#54

Post by belorn »

Yoric wrote: post #13

Out of curiosity, how do we define license violation in that case? I, as a human being, have trained by reading code, much of which is covered by licenses that are somehow not compatible with code I'm writing. Am I violating licenses? Asking seriously. It's really unclear to me where law and/or ethics put the boundaries. Also, I'd guess it's probably country dependent.

The boundaries are not set in stone, and so the answer is the old theme of "it depend". To provide a slightly different situation which was discussed a few years ago, can you train an AI on pictures of human faces without getting permission? Human painters have created images of faces for a very long time, so is it any different in terms of law and/ethics if an AI do it?

Yes, a bit? It depend. Using such things for advertisement would likely cause anger if people start to recognize images of the training set the AI was trained on.

Re: All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot

#55

Post by greatgib »

As I said in another thread, in my opinion there is no issue to have with whatever they did as training with whatever public data.

And in the end, the output in itself is not really an issue. It is just a machine outputting random lines it encountered on internet.

The problem is from the user side: Ok, you got random lines from random places. If you do nothing about it, then no issue. But if you try to use, publish, sell the code, then you are in deep shit. But somehow it's your fault.

For GitHub, the problem is more to be sued by "customers" that assumed that the generated code was safe to use when it is not the case.

And, as a general comment, I think that this case is very illustrative about the misconceptions about AI and machine learning for the general public:

Here you can see that you don't really have an intelligent system that can learn and then create something new and innovative from scratch. But it is just a machine that copy code it already saw based on correlation with similarities in your current code.

Re: All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot

#56

Post by skinkestek »

Yoric wrote: post #13

Out of curiosity, how do we define license violation in that case? I, as a human being, have trained by reading code, much of which is covered by licenses that are somehow not compatible with code I'm writing. Am I violating licenses? Asking seriously. It's really unclear to me where law and/or ethics put the boundaries. Also, I'd guess it's probably country dependent.

> I, as a human being, have trained by reading code, much of which is covered by licenses that are somehow not compatible with code I'm writing. Am I violating licenses?

As someone who has taught students in ICT a quick rule of thumb was that I picked a piece of text that I suspected, wrapped it in doublequotes and put it into a search engine.

9/10 times - possibly more - of the times I had that feeling it was true. 17 year olds don't write like seasoned reporters most of the time.

Obviously there needs to be some independent tought in there as well, but for teenagers I put the line at not copying verbatim, and to cite sources.

As we've seen demonstrated again and again copilot breaks both my minimum standard rules for teenagers: it copies verbatim and it doesn't cite sources.

I say that is pretty bad.

If the system had actually learned the structure and applied what it had learned to recreate the same it would be a whole different story.

But in this case it is obvious that the AI isn't writing the code - at least not all the time, it is instead choosing what to copy - verbatim.

Re: All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot

#57

Post by goodpoint »

ostenning wrote: post #9
encryptluks2 wrote: post #6

Really hoping to see a max exodus from GitHub after this. Microsoft back to their old tactics like we all knew they would.

Any suggestions for an alternative? One thing I like about github is that it 'seems' to be a defacto standard for portfolios & public works. It also has excellent integration into AWS and alike

SourceHut or Codeberg

Re: All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot

#58

Post by oauea »

monkeydust wrote: post #27

Bit confused. If I have code on GitHub with most restrictive licence possible (no commercial reuse, no derived works) then how did Githubs legal get comfortable with this approach? What am I missing ?

You uploaded your code to their service and agreed to their TOS.

Re: All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot

#60

Post by Causality1 »

Suppose you had some kind of AI Deepfake program operating off a large database of copyrighted photos and you asked it to "make a picture of a handsome man on a horse" and the man's head was an exact duplicate of George Clooney's head from a specific magazine cover, would that be infringement? Would selling the services of an AI that took copyrighted photos of celebrities and edited them into porn movies be infringement? I don't know the answers to those questions but I find it very weird that people think large blocks of typed text are less worthy of copyright protection than other forms of media.
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