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GitHub Copilot is generally available

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Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#191

Post by qayxc »

colechristensen wrote: post #123
bluelightning2k wrote: post #100

My unpopular take: most comments here are super entitled. To paraphrase: "sure it's minblowing and the biggest productivity gain in years, but I want it FREE". Yes. You got used to it being free. And now it's not. But $10/mo is a steal. It's more than fair and far, far less than they could get. And no. They don't owe you anything. In fact, they probably host your code (often free), and less directly provide your IDE…

copilot also got its training sets for free and not really with any kind of consent from the owners of that code, and it's really quite ambiguous as to if what it's doing violates many different open source licenses of its training data Microsoft is selling AI services based on training data they don't own and didn't acquire rights to, nobody writing the licenses of the code it's using had the opportunity to address…

> Microsoft is selling AI services based on training data they don't own and didn't acquire rights to, nobody writing the licenses of the code it's using [...]

I agree, but it still uses resources and those don't come for free (hardware, electricity, cooling, maintenance staff, housing, etc.)

It's really difficult to assign monetary value to all these aspects and weighing them against each other in a fair manner.

The consent issue is a difficult legal aspect as well. Github's ToS Section D.4 clearly states they retain the rights to process your content and

  parse it into a search index or otherwise analyze it on our servers
It can be argued that using the content to train an AI model falls under "analysing it on our servers". Also

  It also does not grant GitHub the right to otherwise distribute or use Your Content outside of our provision of the Service
If CoPilot is part of their service, it's in their right to distribute the content, e.g. by means of CoPilot as a processed part of the model.

GPL and other licences don't place restriction on the usage as training data. It's currently a very murky legal grey area. Licences need to adapt to this new form of usage pattern.

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#192

Post by tgv »

hoosieree wrote: post #139

So... is there a watermark like on Dall-E so I can easily tell Copilot did my students' work for them?

The same as always: give an exam on paper, and forbid the use of devices. Because I can tell you (with high probability) that many of your students already have their homework done by somebody else.

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#193

Post by nikeee »

The main page [0] shows you awesome demos, but also its weaknesses in the very first example. It doesn't encode the url encoded body properly:

> body: `text=${text}`,

So it breaks if the text contains a '&' and even allows parameter injection to the call of the 3rd party service. Isn't that critical on a sentiment analysis API, but could result in actual security holes.

I hope the users won't blindly use the generated code without review. These mistakes can be so subtle, nobody even noticed them when they put them on the front page of the product.

[0]: https://github.com/features/copilot/

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#195

Post by Hamcha »

I've been using Copilot non-stop on every hobby project I have ever since they've let me in (2021/07/13) and I am honestly flabbergasted they think it's worth 10$/mo. My experience using it till this day is the following:

- It's an amazing all-rounder autocomplete for most boilerplate code. Generally anything that someone who's spent 5 minutes reading the code can do, Copilot can do just as well.

- It's terrible if you let it write too much. The biggest problem I've had is not that it doesn't write correctly, it's that it think it knows how and then produce good looking code at a glance but with wrong logic.

- Relying on its outside-code knowledge is also generally a recipe for disaster: e.g. I'm building a Riichi Mahjong engine and while it knows all the terms and how to put a sentence together describing the rules, it absolutely doesn't actually understand how "Chii" melds work

- Due to the licensing concerns I did not use CoPilot at all in work projects and I haven't felt like I was missing that much. A friend of mine also said he wouldn't be allowed to use it.

You can treat it as a pair programming session where you're the observer and write an outline while the AI does all the bulk work (but be wary), but at what point does it become such a better experience to justify 10$/mo? I don't understand if I've been using it wrong or what.

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#196

Post by natefinch »

cube00 wrote: post #149
lancesells wrote: post #44

I'll be honest I love the technology involved in this product but I hate that it's another aspect of monetizing the efforts and humanity of millions of people. It's incredible that we're able to do these things but awful at the same time since this data was / is not theirs. Same as something like Dall-E.

> monetizing the efforts ...and not compensating (or even attributing as required by the licenses) the authors for it.

It's not copying open source code. If you learn an algorithm to balance a binary tree from reading GPL code, and then go use that algorithm in your own closed-source project, with your own variables and types and context, are you breaking GPL? You're not copying the code. Just because you learned about it from reading GPL code doesn't mean that whenever you write tree balancing code from now until the end of time, all that code has to be GPL'd.

Copilot learns the "shape" of code. Common patterns and algorithms, etc. You can't copyright an algorithm.

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#197

Post by 6gvONxR4sf7o »

password4321 wrote: post #101
dannytatom wrote: post #54

I've enjoyed using it for free, but not sure it's worth the $10/mo yet. When it works great, it's a nice-to-have for speeding up development but has yet to give me anything I wouldn't be able to just write myself. And when I wish it would give me the answer to something I don't know how to do, it spits out something very wrong. Also feels kind of icky to train on open source projects and then charge for the output.

> train on open source projects To be specific, the FAQ states: "It has been trained on natural language text and source code from publicly available sources, including code in public repositories on GitHub." Some have raised concerns that Copilot violates at least the spirit of many open source licenses, laundering otherwise unusable code by sprinkling magic AI dust... most likely leaving the Copilot user responsibl…

It seems unfortunately clear that generative ML as typically practiced falls under fair use of even the most restrictive licenses or lack thereof (e.g. a training set including disney movies without disney’s permission). Some people say that’s great and it’s legal hooray, but I would love it if the law caught up and added requirements to the models trained this way. If you benefit from other people’s stuff without their permission then you ought to have to give back in some way.

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#198

Post by 2fast4you »

bluelightning2k wrote: post #100

My unpopular take: most comments here are super entitled. To paraphrase: "sure it's minblowing and the biggest productivity gain in years, but I want it FREE". Yes. You got used to it being free. And now it's not. But $10/mo is a steal. It's more than fair and far, far less than they could get. And no. They don't owe you anything. In fact, they probably host your code (often free), and less directly provide your IDE…

> ...it's minblowing and the biggest productivity gain in years...

I wouldn't go that far. It's a pretty big help in repetitive/boiler plate code and it's pretty good at intelligently transforming data, but I've found it gets in the way more often than it helps for every other case.

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#199

Post by wyager »

johnfn wrote: post #190
candiddevmike wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That money isn't going to the folks who wrote the code to begin with though. I think that's where "it should be free" has merit, GitHub is making money on the backs of others.

What? Should I have to reimburse the author of every tutorial and Stack Overflow post I read on my journey to becoming a software engineer?

They intentionally opted in to sharing their work with you in a certain way. If someone copy pasted stack overflow answers and made them into a book, which they sold for money, that would be wrong.

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#200

Post by Macha »

neysofu wrote: post #174
candiddevmike wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That money isn't going to the folks who wrote the code to begin with though. I think that's where "it should be free" has merit, GitHub is making money on the backs of others.

Why should the money go the to code authors in the first place? All training data is available under permissive licenses. Assuming you're not overfitting on specific code sequences (which would require attribution - and yes, I'm aware Copilot is not immune to this problem and it needs fixing), I'd say this is fair play.

Unless something has changed, the training data also includes copyleft code, not just permissively licensed code
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