I don't understand what's going on there. I don't use github. Can someone explain what the author means? Edit: in detail
Google “GitHub copilot”
Copilot sells code other people wrote
51–60 of 838 posts
Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote
#52Does this mean I can steal stuff if I say I trained an AI to do it for me?
Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote
#53If you assigned a task to a junior dev, and he/she used some code from open source projects and Stack Overflow to develop a custom program for the task, would you say that this person is selling you other people's code? Is it common or expected for this type of use to be acknowledged?
People I've worked with have different philosophies on this, but personally, if you check in code that is distinctive enough that I can identify the source you copied and pasted it from, and you provided no indication (whether in a comment or a PR description) that you copied it, I will really get quite grumpy at you about it. Way too often I burn half an hour needlessly during review in one of two ways: * trying to…
I understand where you are coming from. However, I think you are making the assumption that this person simply copy/pasted some code with no understanding of it, or that this code is then very different from your codebase and needs to be refactored. If using Stack Overflow did not add to your overall development time but subtracted from it, because it was used as an appropriate piece of a much bigger puzzle - a far more realistic scenario for both Copilot and our general use of SO -, then I see no issue with it whatsoever. Certainly no moral or copyright issues as this person on Twitter implies.
Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote
#54Does this mean I can steal stuff if I say I trained an AI to do it for me?
Is cat an AI?
Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote
#55It’s the same problem with those ML models, the other day someone generated a children’s book using GPT3, turned out that there is a real children's book with the same name and a very similar content: The Very Lonely Firefly by Eric Carle.
Other thing I'm worried about: how to retract facts from ML model? I guess it's impossible, you need to retrain from scratch with part X removed from training set. Or... people could invent layered ML models similar to docker - each layer would be marked what data it was trained with. Then at least you'd have some cache of trained model to re-use in next training session. Nasty stuff.
Or instead of inventing complicated layered ML models Github could just use each repo's license information to decide what's okay to use. Detecting licenses is already a feature on that site.
Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote
#56I mean, if it's autocompleting a fairly simple line, and can do that because it's analysed a lot of lines, I don't really see that as "stealing anything". If you are using it to write whole complex functions thatare the same as other people's, I guess that is copying. But if you do the second thing you are not a great dev, and would have probably ended up copy pasting it anyway. I think the first use case is far more…
The first can be automated without ML though. And once you use ML you cannot guarantee it won't copy-paste existing code. This whole thing would be fine if GitHub hadn't just used all public code on their platform, ignoring all involved licenses.
The problem is, if they had used only code with a license that allows copying without attribution, there wouldn't have been a lot of code left...
Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote
#57If you assigned a task to a junior dev, and he/she used some code from open source projects and Stack Overflow to develop a custom program for the task, would you say that this person is selling you other people's code? Is it common or expected for this type of use to be acknowledged?
It's absolutely fine to allow humans to do that while prohibiting (commercialized) AI to do the same thing.
I don't see why that should be the case in this particular scenario, or what benefit is gained from that. Could you elaborate?
Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote
#58I mean, if it's autocompleting a fairly simple line, and can do that because it's analysed a lot of lines, I don't really see that as "stealing anything". If you are using it to write whole complex functions thatare the same as other people's, I guess that is copying. But if you do the second thing you are not a great dev, and would have probably ended up copy pasting it anyway. I think the first use case is far more…
> But if you do the second thing you are not a great dev, and would have probably ended up copy pasting it anyway.
If you do that on your own, it's your (legal) responsibility. If Copilot does it for you, it's GitHub's/Microsoft's responsibility.
Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote
#59If you assigned a task to a junior dev, and he/she used some code from open source projects and Stack Overflow to develop a custom program for the task, would you say that this person is selling you other people's code? Is it common or expected for this type of use to be acknowledged?
No matter how complex a program is, and no matter whether it uses techniques sometimes described as "AI" in its implementation, it's not a person. Copilot is just a very complex pipeline from other people's code to your editor, which ignores the license of those other people's code.
Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
> the vast majority of developers constantly look at OSS code daily and lift ideas/patterns/snippets from there regularly Perhaps in your circles, but that's certainly not something I've encountered over a 25 year carreer.
So when you google a problem and it leads you to a code snippet that solves it that just happens to be OSS, you immediately scrub your brain and pretend you never saw it and instead instead come up with your own completely independent solution after the fact?
Google usage is outright forbidden for work in institutions that care about intellectual property rights, so the brain scrub issue is just arguing at the wrong level.
If you're googling solutions around you're already not taking intellectual property seriously enough to care about what happens after you lift ideas around.