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Copilot sells code other people wrote

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Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#131

Post by scotty79 »

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?

If you pay a shady character to get you a modern laptop for $100 you can't claim that you were unaware that it was most likely stolen and the fact that you paid for it something doesn't absolve you morally.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#132

Post by ajuc »

mihaic wrote: post #95
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.

> The hard discussion is about what is acceptable

What if we just say "both"? Libraries were a thing for millenia and writers still wrote books. There are costs to IP laws and the benefits aren't obvious.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#133

Post by redox99 »

afiori wrote: post #90
antihero wrote: post #31

I 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 when Oracle won its copyright lawsuit against google it was because of a 8 line bound checking utility function.

Source?

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#134

Post by ModernMech »

natly wrote: post #112
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.

Unless every invention is gonna be AI generated (which is kind of a scary situation), intellectual property still needs to be a thing (otherwise people won't have incentive to invent, it'll just be stolen from them).

> otherwise people won't have incentive to invent, it'll just be stolen from them

Citation needed. Speaking personally, I spend most of my creative energy on a project which is open source and permissively licensed to the point where I’m fine with anyone stealing it. I expect to earn negative money from it at the limit.

Why do I do it? I dunno it’s fun. Can’t that be enough?

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#135

Post by nl »

jhugo wrote: post #68
spupe wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see why that should be the case in this particular scenario, or what benefit is gained from that. Could you elaborate?

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…

Copilot understands concepts as well as may humans. You can see primitive versions of this in the old Word2Vec demos showing how those models understand how London:England ~= Paris:France

Copilot is much more sophisticated than that, and it no more copies code than a human does. It generates on a character by character basis given the contextual probability of the next character conditioned on the previous set of tokens with the "heat" being a factor how how randomly it will choose characters.

This is much more similar to how a human writes than "copying".

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#136

Post by coldtea »

Agamus wrote: post #129
coldtea wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 o…

Not sure why I'm being downvoted here - I agree that this idea has been the same for most of history. Your example of folk music is an odd one, for exactly that reason - it largely repurposes existing art. For example, Wagner wrote extensively about why we shouldn't respect folk music for this reason. I mostly disagree with him, but his comparison at least illuminates that this isn't so black and white. And that's re…

>I sense that if someone came along 2400 years ago with the exact play that Sophocles had just produced and claimed they had just composed it themselves, immediately after a public performance, someone would claim that theft had occurred. Do you disagree?

Yes. They would say it was "plagiarism", which is different than theft.

And there was no law against either case.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#137

Post by keraf »

ThereIsNoWorry wrote: post #113

1. You most likely agreed to that by using GitHub. 2. Copy&Pasting Code by manual search exists. 3. This is just a smart tool so you don't have to figure out yourself what to copy&paste (in the best case) and save a lot of time. Sometimes I truly wonder how people can genuinely be upset about things like this. What is broken are copyright and patent laws in the 21st century.

The point of this Tweet is about licensing. When using an MIT licensed library for example, you would have to give attribution. But you can easily rewrite portion of that library yourself using Copilot, which could potentially use code from the initial lib, without any attribution or whatsoever. It's even more problematic with licenses such as the GPL.

I guess Copilot could address this by checking the licenses of the projects it uses. Even when combining code, it could pull in the required attribution or avoid GPL licensed code (unless enabled) for example.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#138

Post by trention »

coldtea wrote: post #122
trention wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that AI will not lead to "golden ages of art production" because nobody gives a sh*t about art created by AIs. And nobody will.

> because nobody gives a sh t about art created by AIs. And nobody will.* You'd be surprised. Especially if people don't care/are told/whether it's "created by AI or not". Whether in "high art" or lowly pop, "generative music" (and fine art) has long been a thing. And people do attach to it (e.g. to Brian Eno's generative works made by rule based systems he programs).

No, I will not be surprised. Outliers are outliers. "Art" created by AIs will just have price (and cost) of ~0 and, like everything that has a price/cost of 0, nobody will give a sh*t about it. The only real question is how will human artists (provided they exist in your preferred dystopia) will prove that they have created something themselves.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#139

Post by jhugo »

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…

I would agree with you if the AI was genuinely assisting with that task, but it isn't.

It's taking inputs, ignoring their licenses, permuting them in ways that are not understandable to the user, and then outputting them.

That's an entirely different task than the user reading SO or using Google and then writing their own code, because the "AI" is not capable of writing its own code at that level.

Relying on this tool means ignoring the license of code that you're copying, without even knowing that you're doing it.

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