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Copilot sells code other people wrote

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Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#91

Post by spupe »

genezeta wrote: post #66
spupe wrote: post #21

If 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?

About 10 years ago or so, I was working at a certain place. They put me into a small team apparently focused on some R+D project under the direction of an "architect". Basically, the project was to package Cordova + Backbone + Marionette, plus a couple of tools, under their own commercial name. Then they'd go around potential clients presenting it as the perfect solution to build hybrid applications for web/mobile/sm…

This is clear-cut fraud, but it is also not even close to what Copilot or most junior devs are doing.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#92

Post by skc »

avereveard wrote: post #60
skc wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Very surprised to hear about this actually.

Maybe I live in a bubble, but the likes of Google/StackOverflow have been part and parcel of a developers toolbox for many years now.

And in any case I wonder how that is enforced. Eg, Someone goes home in the evening and visits github, learns a new trick and comes into the office the next day and implements it.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#93

Post by fimdomeio »

what AI is showing is the fuzzy line between creating and copying. The truth is they are both always present in everything we do, we've just been trying to hide it.

So it should be as simple as if you're using other people's content for your own profit you should properly compensate them.

Or we could just abolish copyright law and assume that everything humans create emanates from culture so its always collectively built and everything should be open source.

Or we just do the same we've been doing. Create even more complex laws trying to define this fuzzy line in a way that companies can keep profiting from it a lot more than individuals.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#94

Post by seanmcdirmid »

32bitkid wrote: post #79
__warlord__ wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why should be GitHub's/Microsoft's responsibility? No one is forcing you to use copilot. If I use grammarly, are they responsible for what am I aiming to write?

If I pay for grammarly, and it plagiarizes an existing work but represents it as an entirely new, independent work and I am unaware of the existing work that is being stolen, who is doing the stealing?

This makes more sense for text message auto complete: you just take the suggested next word after a one word start deed, it might reproduce a Wikipedia entry. But what did tub expect? The same would be true with grammarly if you somehow got it to produce a bunch of new text. You expected garbage, but somehow infringed on copyright instead. But I guess think the user deserves some responsibility in realizing their expected garbage output isn’t for some reason.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#95

Post by mihaic »

parhamn wrote: post #50

Pretty soon the world is going to come to realize art/creation is just blending, incrementing and repurposing prior art. No book, painting, codebase, sonnet, design is theft-less. The art is the space reduction, otherwise we’d just bruteforce away.

This type of argument always distracts from the fact that figuring out where we draw the line between theft and reimagining.

The Magnificent Seven for instance was a reworking of Seven Samurai, but stands on its own as an original creation. Going into a cinema and filming a picture to later put on a torrent site is not artistic reworking.

The hard discussion is about what is acceptable, we all know prior art exists.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#96

Post by FeepingCreature »

All I can think of is Steve Yegge [1]: "They have no right to do this. Open source does not mean the source is somehow 'open'."

My code is on Github so that people can read it, reuse it and learn from it. "The freedom to study how the program works", as the FSF says. If some of the people reading it are machines, why would that matter?

[1] http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2010/07/wikileaks-to-leak-50...

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#97

Post by albertzeyer »

So, how often does it actually happen? Does it happen more often than for a human? Does anyone actually have numbers on this?

Of course, if you provide already a copyrighted prefix, and it has seen that code, the chances are high that it would complete the copyrighted code (because that is what you actually would also expect).

So, for real use cases in the wild, where you write some own real novel code, how often would it suggest some copyrighted code? And how often would a human?

I have used Copilot the last months and I have never ever seen such a case (I can be pretty sure because all the identifier names are really unique, and the code was very custom).

However, I assume that I myself might have produced copyrighted code unknowingly because if you write common patterns (e.g. some tree or graph search, or some sort function, implement LSTM or Transformer, whatever), the chances are not so low.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#98

Post by coldtea »

Agamus wrote: post #75
parhamn wrote: post #50

Pretty soon the world is going to come to realize art/creation is just blending, incrementing and repurposing prior art. No book, painting, codebase, sonnet, design is theft-less. The art is the space reduction, otherwise we’d just bruteforce away.

This idea has been around for a while - why... "pretty soon"? And I'm sure I couldn't disagree with you more. Or are 'influence' and 'theft' the same now?

>Or are 'influence' and 'theft' the same now?

They have been the same for most of history. People could openly copy titles, plots, parts, phrases, etc from prior work. Same for mechanical designs. The only thing preventing them was obscurity (e.g. the inventor trying to make it hidden) not any law or ethical idea that it's bad (there wasn't any). That's how things from math to gears to tunes got better (or changed over time, in the case of art, as better/worse is subjective there).

E.g. globally and historically folk music has been basically taking whatever you want from tunes and songs where everybody does the same with no "permission" asked or needed to be given.

Like 4 verses but want to add a fifth or change some part? Go ahead. Want to play it exactly like you've heard it? Go ahead again.

The idea of "theft" in that regard came in the last 2 or so centuries, and was enforced with artificial legal barriers and new "ethical" concepts that are neither "natural", not present for the vast majority of history (including golden ages of art production).

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#99

Post by trention »

spupe wrote: post #78
jhugo wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you elaborate on why you think a computer program and a person should be treated the same way in this respect? We can take as self-evident that a human is capable of reading about something, conceptualising it, and then writing something completely new with the knowledge they have gained. I think it's also pretty uncontroversial that the primitive "AI" we currently have is nowhere near the level of even an aver…

I think it's best if we sidestep these big conceptual questions about what cognition or creativity really are. It's hard to find agreement, and perhaps it is not necessary to do so. My position is that if a person hired in a company can currently use Google, Stack Overflow and GitHub to help develop their custom scripts, and no moral or copyright issues are infringed (ie, you don't try to say you came up with it on y…

You are saying that the AI should be treated the same way as a person would regarding its 'output'. I disagree. This is a conceptual disagreement and you cannot just sweep under the rug "what cognition or creativity really are".

At the end, when in several (2-5) years we start seeing structural unemployment emerging because of AI deployments, this will be resolved by the legal system, most likely by some sort of partial prohibition of training/monetizing such systems.

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