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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

#91

Post by tazjin »

neom wrote: post #87

Curious what the consensus is on how GH should have approached this to avoid such blowback. Best case scenario, they explained in advance on the GH blog they're going to be doing some work on ML and coding, and they'd like people to opt into their profile being read via a flag setting/or put a file in the repo that gives permission like robots.txt? Second best case scenario, same as first but opt out vs opt in, and l…

> Second best case scenario

Not really, consider for example repositories mirrored to Github.

It seems unclear who has the rights to grant this permission anyways (with free software licenses). Probably the copyright holder? Who that is might also be complicated.

Re: All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot

#92

Post by _Understated_ »

Ok, my curiosity has been fired here...

I have conjured up two scenarios here:

Let's say I use copilot to generate a bunch of code for an app, something substantial, and it regurgitates a load of bits and pieces from many sources it got from GitHub, I'd assume there won't be any attribution in it... it will be as if Copilot made the code itself (I know it sort of does but lets not split hairs!). I'm guessing the prevailing theory (from GiitHub anyway) is that I'm legitimately allowed to do this.

Now, let's say I generated all that code by manually copying and pasting chunks of code from a whole bunch of repos, whether they are open source, unlicensed, whatever. Would I not be ripe for legal issues? I could potentially find all the code that copilot generated and just copy and paste it from each of the sources and not mention that in my license. What if I told everyone "yeah, I just copied and pasted this from loads of Github repos and didn't put any attribution in my code". I'd assume that (morality aside) I'd be asking for trouble!

Am I missing something? Am I misunderstanding the situation, or the capabilities of copilot?

Re: All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot

#93

Post by lukeplato »

neom wrote: post #87

Curious what the consensus is on how GH should have approached this to avoid such blowback. Best case scenario, they explained in advance on the GH blog they're going to be doing some work on ML and coding, and they'd like people to opt into their profile being read via a flag setting/or put a file in the repo that gives permission like robots.txt? Second best case scenario, same as first but opt out vs opt in, and l…

They should have only used code from projects that included a license that allow for commercial use or made their model openly available and/or free to use

Re: All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot

#94

Post by rvz »

It's been admitted again. This contraption by GitHub is really causing chaos in the open source world and has been trained upon all public GitHub code; essentially those who have their code hosted there publicly, gave them permission to train copilot on their code. Now they are complaining about it after all these problems [0].

I warned against hosting source code on GitHub and going all in on GitHub Actions, mainly for them being unreliable for the past year. [1] (They go down every month). Now Copilot has gone and trained on every single public repo on GitHub as admitted right in this post, regardless of the copyright.

Maybe for organisations with serious projects, perhaps now's the time to leave GitHub and self-host your own somewhere else?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27726088

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27366397

Re: All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot

#95

Post by CyberRabbi »

mikehearn wrote: post #66

ML novice question: is this atypical when training models? Wasn't GPT-3 trained on a lot of copyrighted data? My gut instinct, which is based on very low-information, is that it would be pretty hard to train models if you could only use open-licensed material.

Yes training data is very valuable. Producing quality training data is an industry in itself. GitHub is trying to get it for free, doesn’t work that way.

Re: All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot

#96

Post by CyberRabbi »

Tenoke wrote: post #74
mikehearn wrote: post #66

ML novice question: is this atypical when training models? Wasn't GPT-3 trained on a lot of copyrighted data? My gut instinct, which is based on very low-information, is that it would be pretty hard to train models if you could only use open-licensed material.

Yes, it would stiffle NLP research immensely and we likely wouldn't see anything better than gpt3 for years if such restrictions are put in place.

You’re free to privately research with this data but commercializing other people’s work using ML is theft.

Edit: commercializing of the derived work is one explicit consideration used by US law in making a fair use determination. That said, even if it weren’t commercialized it may still be infringement and I believe it is.

Re: All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot

#97

Post by mullikine »

Public facing open-source code & media is going to be learned by language models because they're exposed to them. That's the simple truth. Nothing can stop that, not unless all public repos are made private. Everyone has access to the ability to create their own GPT, thanks to open-source. OpenAI is not actually very far ahead of open source anymore.

The US seems well enough informed. As mentioned in the following report "AI tools are diffusing broadly and rapidly" and "AI is the quintessential “dual use” technology—it can be used for civilian and military purposes.".

https://www.nscai.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Full-Report...

I'm fully expecting that if I begin a story and put it on my blog or on github, and if I go away for a couple years, I'll see it completed for me when I return. I can use foresight to my advantage or I can pretend like it's still the 1990s as if placing some text at the top of the code I exposed publicly is going to prevent people from training on it.

One thing for sure though, I don't think a large company such as Microsoft should be profiting from training their language model on open-source code.

The best way to release Copilot in my opinion would be to make the entire thing open source and have separate models, even a private paid-for model so long it's trained on their own code.

An open source model trained on code for specific licenses sounds fine, but then the model should also follow that same license as the code it was trained on.

There's just something deeply unsettling about having a computer complete your thoughts for you without being able to question how or why.

Re: All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot

#98

Post by jensensbutton »

Wouldn't it be the people publishing code written with Copilot that (potentially) violate any licenses? It doesn't seem to be that the tool violates anything, though it may put the _user_ at risk of violating something.

Like, don't use it if you're worried about violating licenses, but I don't see how Microsoft could get in trouble for the tool. It doesn't write and publish code by itself.

Re: All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot

#99

Post by fragileone »

ssivark wrote: post #64

Calling it “public” code feels like doublespeak. It’s most definitely NOT public domain code — it only happens to be hosted on GitHub and browsable ( but not copyable ) by people. “Source available for viewing” is very different from “public property” as the phrase is commonly understood: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_property

The word they're actually referring to here is "source available", and trying to use "public" is just to confuse people into thinking they're referring to public domain only.

Re: All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot

#100

Post by neom »

tazjin wrote: post #91
neom wrote: post #87

Curious what the consensus is on how GH should have approached this to avoid such blowback. Best case scenario, they explained in advance on the GH blog they're going to be doing some work on ML and coding, and they'd like people to opt into their profile being read via a flag setting/or put a file in the repo that gives permission like robots.txt? Second best case scenario, same as first but opt out vs opt in, and l…

> Second best case scenario Not really, consider for example repositories mirrored to Github. It seems unclear who has the rights to grant this permission anyways (with free software licenses). Probably the copyright holder? Who that is might also be complicated.

Good point, I would have thought GH requires you to agree in some TOS that you have permission to put the code on GH (but I don't know)? If so, could that point be put aside? (I'm not a software engineer so sorry if that made no sense. Super curious about the whole codepilot thing from a business and community perspective)
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