The paper clip maximizers have already taken over :(
All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot
601–610 of 734 posts
Re: All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot
#602Earlier quoted context omitted.
Google Books is a commercial site which incorporated the snippets of millions of copyrighted works. And of course, sitting in thousands of Google servers/databases are full copies of each of those books, photos of each page, the OCRed text of each page, and indexes to search them. Even that egregious copying without a license or permission was considered fair use. If anything, the ways in which Copilot is different a…
The Google books example really misses the point, one of the reasons why the judges considered it fair use was because it was pointing back to the original sources (and thus potentially increasing publishers earnings). Copilot does none of that. If all the ML companies are so sure this is fair use I encourage them to train an AI on Disney movies to generate short cartoon snippets based on some description. There sure…
The main issue here is less doing it, but getting sufficiently nice results. I've done work in generative AI before and right now the state of the art is passable on single images with some but not enough control and is still weak on videos without heavy structure requirements. I expect in 5-10 years we will have good enough models (or hardware) to do short video generation and the question will get tested then. I also think a meaningful good video requires audio and have fun making well aligned text (for dialogue) audio of that text, and video frames. Aligning all that generation together is still challenging today.
Re: All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot
#603I 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.
Patents on genes actually are a thing. So that example is pretty false. Whether they should be a thing is a separate question, but right now discovery of a gene and it's usefulness can be patented and is done for medical patents.
Re: All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot
#604To me, the particular use case and whether it is fair use or not, is of minor interest. A far more pressing matter is at hand: AI centralization and monopolization. Take Google as an example, running Google Photos for free for several years. And now that this has sucked in a trillion photos, the AI job is done, and they likely have the best image recognition AI in existence. Which is of course still peanuts compared…
I have about 300,000 photos that haven't been scanned by AI (unless someone at Backblaze did it without permission). I'm sure there are lots of other photographers out there who miss Picassa, which Google killed off to push everyone's data to their service. (It did really well in matching faces, even across age, but the last version has a bug when there are multiple faces in a picture, sometimes it swaps the labels)…
Absolutely possible.
What I'm building into PhotoStructure is typically called "transfer learning."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transfer_learning
PhotoStructure is entirely self-hosted, including model training and application: the public domain base models (trained on huge datasets) are fetched and cached locally.
By design, none of your data (or even metadata) leaves your server.
(I expect to ship this in an upcoming beta next month.)
Re: All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot
#605Earlier quoted context omitted.
> all evidence so far shows that it directly recites code very rarely indeed. _Once_ is enough for it to be infringing. The law is not very forgiving when you try and handwave it away.
You sound quite sure that the outlying instances of direct copying wouldn't be covered by the Fair Use copyright exemption. Any particular reason for that? I tend to think it would be covered (provided it there were relatively small snippets and not entire functions).
Precedent. Google v. Oracle found 9 lines, of an "obvious" implementation to be infringing.
Re: All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot
#606Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 compatibl…
A naive developer thinks that they are the source code they write (you're not), and their source code leaking to the world makes them worthless. (Which isn't true, but being that invalidated explains a lot of the fear. Which, welcome to the club, programmers. Automation's here for your job too.) Still, some of the moral outrage here has to do with it coming from Github, and thus Microsoft. Software startup Kite has l…
A naive developer thinks that they are the source code they write (you're not), and their source code leaking to the world makes them worthless.
Maybe Github isn't violating the licenses of the programmers who host on them. Maybe Copilot doesn't just spit out code that belongs to other people. Those are matters of interpretation and debate.
But if Github was doing this with Copilot, virtually an open source programmer would have a reason to be upset. Open source programmers don't give their code out for free they license it. This is a legal position, not a feeling. "Intellectual property" may be a pox on the world but asking open source developers to abandon their licenses to ... closed source developers, is legitimately a violation.
And before the spitting out source code problem appeared, I recall quite a few positive responses to Copilot. Lots of people still seem excited. And yeah, people are looking at the downside given Microsoft's long abusive history but hey, MS did those thing.
Re: All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot
#607To me, the particular use case and whether it is fair use or not, is of minor interest. A far more pressing matter is at hand: AI centralization and monopolization. Take Google as an example, running Google Photos for free for several years. And now that this has sucked in a trillion photos, the AI job is done, and they likely have the best image recognition AI in existence. Which is of course still peanuts compared…
On the other hand, DeepL (made by a small German company) is better than Google Translate.
Re: All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot
#608The somewhat frustrating solution is to simply realize that “copyright” is one of the worst abominations humanity has ever conceived…
It’s literally being used to stifle research as we speak, but for some completely insane reason we are protecting a handful of publishers as a cartel…
It really is so simple: “don’t be a bigoted fascist”, but just have a glance at the fascists decrying my stance as a degenerate liberal, in the answering comments
Re: All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot
#609Guys please read the Terms of Use of Github section D.4. We need the legal right to do things like host Your Content, publish it, and share it. You grant us and our legal successors the right to store, archive, parse, and display Your Content, and make incidental copies, as necessary to provide the Service, including improving the Service over time. This license includes the right to do things like copy it to our dat…
GitHub's T&Cs don't override licensing terms.
Re: All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot
#610Earlier 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 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…
The thing is that understanding the domain and thinking out a fairly efficient or elegant solution is something a lot of industry specialist and scientists can do, and only part of programming. Another part is dealing with all the language syntax and specialist lego bits/glue code, and that's something domain specialists tend to be less good at and not enjoy spending time on; it's its own craft.
Having a semi-intelligent monkey that can fetch obvious things off the shelf, build very basic control structures, and do the boring little housekeeping tasks is bad for the craft of programming but very good for the good-enough-solution situation. I can see it having the same impact as cheap and widely available digital cameras; anyone can be a kinda decent photographer now, but if you want to be a professional you're probably going to have to work a lot harder to stand out, whether that's by development of craft, development of narrow technical expertise and fancy equipment, or development of excellent business skills.