Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

721–730 of 734 posts

Re: All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot

#721

Post by saurik »

_Understated_ wrote: post #267
schneidmaster wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again, not a lawyer, just a guy who likes reading this stuff. The devil is usually in the details of copyright cases. The Turnitin case hinged substantially on whether Turnitin's use of copyrighted essays was "fair use". There are four factors[0] which determine fair use; the two more relevant factors here are "the purpose and character of your use" and "the effect of the use upon the potential market". The court fou…

I thought I understood fair use but turns out I was wrong... That being said, creating a transformative work from something else is considered fair use. So, for example, if I read a whole bunch of books and then, heavily influenced by them, create my own, similar book, that would be fair use I suppose... that makes sense. But, where does the derivative works come in? Where do you draw the line? If I am heavily influe…

If you read a bunch of books and then create a similar book, that isn't transformative; transformative is like, you read a bunch of books and then create a machine translation service. The point of transformative is like "isn't going to conflict with the market or compete in any way with the original thing".

Re: All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot

#722

Post by BlueTemplar »

salawat wrote: post #708
BlueTemplar wrote: post #658

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't care about attribution and other moral rights ? (I guess these are going to depend a LOT on the jurisdiction that you're in ?)

I care, but in the long run, I care more about our descendants not having tools locked out of their hands. Facilitated information asymmetry is the root of far too many evils. Where is your ego when you're dead and gone? Where could we be if the majority of human advancement we're not tightly clutched as trade secrets? As someone who has done paid software engineering (yes, you can feel free to call me a hack or sell…

I don't understand what you're talking about, I'm talking about the non-commercial parts of the monopoly rights that are copyrights and patents, the non-commercial parts arguably aren't going to restrict the users much, and their commercial parts are temporary by design.

(Copyright has went IMHO overboard with its duration, we should scale to back to the original 14 years renewable once, just like patents, but copyright doesn't apply to processes anyway, and so arguably it shouldn't apply to software that can't claim to have any artistic merit.)

Re: All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot

#723

Post by BlueTemplar »

Houshalter wrote: post #696
BlueTemplar wrote: post #688

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, right... This isn't going to fly in court any more than if the Pirate Bay page was written in a way that says that it's solely responsible for what you do with the magnet links that they share.

The pirate bay is very clear to not claim any responsibility for what people post on their site. That's how they get away with it.

I know, it's an hypothetical.

Re: All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot

#724

Post by Siira »

fleddr wrote: post #551

To 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…

And I have yet to see a single life-changing AI application. I haven't tested Copilot yet, but I'll bet it is so precariously useful that a lot of people will feel more productive without it. (BTW, the last time I opened VSCode, it could not even autocomplete Numpy, so I am not holding my breath for AI autocomplete.)

Re: All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot

#725

Post by c-cube »

leventov wrote: post #490
nickvincent wrote: post #354

Regardless of how the (potentially very impactful) debate about licensing and copyright plays out, I think many here would agree this constitutes an "exploitation" of labor, at least in a mild sense. Optimistically, Copilot could be a wake up call for thinking more deeply about how the winnings of data-dependent technologies (ultimately, dependent on the labor of people who do things like write open source code) are…

There will be just a short transition period. In 10 years, AI will be writing most of code, and in 20 years - nearly all code. People will do only architecture/business analysis. No more "exploitation" of labor.

"in 10 years, AI will drive most cars". See how that one panned out? Programmers are safe for still quite a while.

Re: All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot

#726

Post by leventov »

LouisSayers wrote: post #533
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 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 have excellently described the job of business analysts and system architects, but this is not the job of 90% of programmers today, including senior-level. Part of this is already done by other people and doesn't require specific programming skills, hence, at the very least, programmers will lose their privileged position. Another part of it is actually too hard for most people who are currently employed as programmers to do on a decent level (such as meaningfully hacking on Linux kernel).

Re: All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot

#727

Post by davesque »

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…

This isn't true at all. There are stories concerning code stealing that regularly lead the front page on HN and rouse a pretty intense reaction from the community. Saying that HNers have never before cared about this issue seems pretty inaccurate or disingenuous.

Re: All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot

#728

Post by tsimionescu »

FeepingCreature wrote: post #169
tsimionescu wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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? There are many good answers from the legal side. I would also attack this side: the way human beings learn is entirely different from the way ML models are trained. We don't do gradient descent to find the slope of data points and find the most likel…

I'm not sure this is actually true. We can explain code, but the fact that we can explain code is not necessarily related to the way we actually end up writing it. Have you ever written a function "on autopilot"? Your brain has selected what you wanted it to do, and now you're just typing without thought? I don't think we're as dissimilar to this model as we'd like.

The fact remains that, even on autopilot, in not writing code based on similarity with other code I've seen, in writing code to solve a task. In general, the code I'm writing is entirely novel - you could search all of the code ever written and you wouldn't find anything identical, or even similar much of the time. This puts not a brag - I work on fairly standard CRUD stuff most of the time - but just an observation about how human writing works, confirmed by code scanning tools such as Black Duck.

Re: All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot

#729

Post by themeiguoren »

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…

> we don’t distribute copies of humans

A bit of a tangent and it’s fictional, but I really have to recommend the tale of MMAcevedo. https://qntm.org/mmacevedo

Re: All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot

#730

Post by wilde »

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…

Copilot violates the assumptions many people made when they open sourced their code. Moving from manual to automated use feels like a privacy violation because it dramatically changes the amount of effort it takes to leverage the work in an unintended context.
Post reply on HN