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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

#531

Post by paulryanrogers »

rapind wrote: post #384
zoomablemind wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ...Should you be able to train with material you don't own? If relating this to how humans learn, books and other sources are used to inform understanding and human knowledge. One can purchase or borrow a book without actually owning the copyright to it. Indeed, a given passage may be later quoted verbatim, provided it is accompanied with a reference to its source. Otherwise, a verbatim use without attribution in a…

"If relating this to how humans learn" seems like a big IF though right? Are we going to treat computer neural nets as human from a legal standpoint? At some point Neural Nets like GameGAM might be good enough to duplicate (and optimize) a commercial game. Can you then release your version of the game? Do you just need to make a few tweaks? Are we going to get a double standard because commercial interests are oppose…

This is the key question. In school I was taught to be careful to always cite even paraphrased works. If Copilot regurgitates copyrighted fragments without citation or informing acceptors of licenses involved then it's facilitating infringement.

Re: All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot

#532

Post by tylersmith »

superfrank wrote: post #511
leventov wrote: post #475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps people on HN start sensing that successors of Github Copilot will take their programming job. Rightly so. Personally, I think that in the age of AI programming any notions of code licensing should be abolished. There is no copyright for genes in nature or memes in culture; similarly, these shouldn't be copyright for code.

> Perhaps people on HN start sensing that successors of Github Copilot will take their programming job. Rightly so. I still think we're a long way from that. Copilot will help write code quicker, but it's not doing anything you couldn't do with a Google search and copy/paste. Once developers move beyond the jr. level, writing code tends to become the least of their worries. Writing the code is easy, understanding how…

Based on the responses I've seen, people have it in their heads that Copilot is a system where you describe what kind of software you want and it finds it on Github and slaps your own license on it.

It's just a smarter tab-completion.

Re: All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot

#533

Post by LouisSayers »

leventov wrote: post #475
habitue wrote: post #353

I am really confused by HN's response to copilot. It seems like before the twitter thread on it went viral, the only people who cared about programmers copying (verbatim!) short snippets of code like this would be lawyers and executives. Suddenly everyone is coming out of the woodworks as copyright maximalists? I know HN loves a good "well actually" and Microsoft is always suspect, but let's leave the idea of code la…

Perhaps people on HN start sensing that successors of Github Copilot will take their programming job. Rightly so. Personally, I think that in the age of AI programming any notions of code licensing should be abolished. There is no copyright for genes in nature or memes in culture; similarly, these shouldn't be copyright for code.

> Perhaps people on HN start sensing that successors of Github Copilot will take their programming job. Rightly so.

I feel like this comment misunderstands what a software developer is doing. Copilot isn't going to understand the underlying problem to be solved. It's not going to know about the specific domain and what makes sense and what doesn't.

We're not going to see developers replaced in our lifetime. For that you need actual intelligence - which is very different from the monkey see monkey do AI of today.

Re: All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot

#534

Post by wilde »

AaronFriel wrote: post #193
keonix wrote: post #185

If the training set contains verbatim (A)GPL code does this mean that Copilot also should be distributed by Microsoft under GPL? Because without it Copilot (as it is distributed by Microsoft) couldn't be built, wouldn't it make it a derivative work of GPL'd code (and obviously every other license)? I see a lot of people comparing human learning to machine learning in the comments, but there is a huge difference - we…

No, see Authors Guild v. Google. Even without a license or permission, fair use permits the mass scanning of books, the storage of the content of those books, and rendering verbatim snippets of those books. The Google Books site is not a derivative work of the millions of authors they copied from, and if they did copy any coincidentally GPL, AGPL, or creative commons copyleft work, the fair use exception applies befo…

I buy the argument about copilot itself and this comment. But when someone goes to release software that uses the output of Copilot, I fail to see how they wouldn’t be a GPL derivative work if enough source was used. Copilot is essentially really fancy copy/paste in that context.

Re: All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot

#535

Post by alkonaut »

neonihil wrote: post #457

I think it’s pretty easy to defeat MS in court. We just need to bring the music industry into this! For example: Let’s train a network on Beatles music to generate new Beatles songs. I’m pretty sure music lawyers will find a way to prove that the trained network is violating the label’s copyright, as they always manage to do that. And then we just need to use the precedent and argue that music is the same thing as co…

> For example: Let’s train a network on Beatles music to generate new Beatles songs. I’m pretty sure music lawyers will find a way to prove that the trained network is violating the label’s copyright, as they always manage to do that.

The people making the machine that learned (and recites) beatles songs aren't infringing though (most likely). It's those that use the machine to create and distribute the new works that are.

Same here. No one will be able to say that Copilot itself is a "derived work" or somehow uses the code in a way similar to a computer program (Although such claims have already been made - I highly doubt that's the case). But those that produce a whole file full of GPL code verbatim (Which will be rare, but WILL happen), are at risk of violating the license terms if they distribute it under the wrong license.

Re: All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot

#536

Post by joe_the_user »

habitue wrote: post #353

I am really confused by HN's response to copilot. It seems like before the twitter thread on it went viral, the only people who cared about programmers copying (verbatim!) short snippets of code like this would be lawyers and executives. Suddenly everyone is coming out of the woodworks as copyright maximalists? I know HN loves a good "well actually" and Microsoft is always suspect, but let's leave the idea of code la…

I am really confused by HN's response to copilot.

If you're asking about the moral reaction here, I think it depends on how one views Copilot. Does Copilot create basically original code that just happens to include a few small snippets? Or does Copilot actually generate a large portion of lightly changed code when it's not spitting out verbatim copies of the code? I mean, if you tell Copilot, "make me a QT compatible, crossplatform windowing library" and it spits out a slightly modified version of the QT source code and if someone started distributing that with a very cheap commercial license, that would be a problem for the QT company, which licenses their code commercial or GPL (and as QT a library, the QT GPL forces user to also release their code GPL if they release it, so it's a big restriction). So in the worst case scenario, you can something ethically dubious as well as legally dubious.

Copilot should be inspiring people to figure out how to do better than it, not making hackers get up in arms trying to slap it down.

Why can't we do both? I mean, I am quite interested in AI and it's progress and I also think it's important to note the way that AI "launders" a lot of things (launders bias, launder source code, etc). AI scanning of job applications has all sorts of unfortunate effects, etc. etc. But my critique of the applications doesn't make me uninterested in the theory, they're two different things.

Re: All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot

#537

Post by e12e »

sp332 wrote: post #453
e12e wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now, was the leaked nt kernel source ever published on github?

https://github.com/PubDom/Windows-Server-2003 Second result on DDG.

I wonder if co-pilot will cough up stuff like these useful macros? Seems like a reasonable hack...

https://github.com/PubDom/Windows-Server-2003/blob/master/co...

  #ifdef _MAC
  # include 
  # pragma segment ClipBrd

  // On the Macintosh, the clipboard is always open.  We define a macro for
  // OpenClipboard that returns TRUE.  When this is used for error checking,
  // the compiler should optimize away any code that depends on testing this,
  // since it is a constant.
  # define OpenClipboard(x) TRUE

  // On the Macintosh, the clipboard is not closed.  To make all code behave
  // as if everything is OK, we define a macro for CloseClipboard that returns
  // TRUE.  When this is used for error checking, the compiler should optimize
  // away any code that depends on testing this, since it is a constant.
  # define CloseClipboard() TRUE

  #endif // _MAC
Just the kind of trick co-pilot should help us with?

Re: All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot

#539

Post by e12e »

extra88 wrote: post #394
e12e wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that's another thing - co-pilot doesn't quote it encourages something more akin to plagarism , doesn't it?

Plagiarism, pretending you made a work entirely yourself when you didn't, is rarely a matter for a court to decide and the standards for what constitutes plagiarism can vary a lot. When I turn in projects for a course, a cite sources in the comments a lot, even if what I turn in is substantially modified. An employer generally doesn't care if you copied and pasted code from StackOverflow or wherever, so long as you d…

> Citing your source is not a get out jail free card

No, but it's a requirement of the license stackoverflow.com uses, which is unfortunate, for code (as opposed to text, where a quote can be easily attributed).

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