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Copilot sells code other people wrote

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Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#151

Post by HumanReadable »

Sorry for the unproductive tone of this comment, but there's something about the attitude of this tweet that really grinds my gears.

Any time someone invents something new and incredible, there's always a crowd of negative nancies eager to discredit and explain why the invention is nothing new and a detrement to society.

I don't understand why someone would willingly share their code on github where it is publicly available just to complain when others make use of that knowledge.

'co-pilot just sells code other people wrote' is such a ridiculous understatement of what co-pilot does. Instead of marvelling at the human ingenuity that went into creating it, they sneer at the audacity of openAI to do something without first asking their permission.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#152

Post by FeepingCreature »

happymellon wrote: post #107
FeepingCreature wrote: post #96

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...

Because a lot of this code would be put into closed source software, which is against the licence and would prevent people from exercising the right to study how a program works.

But I don't care if closed source programmers read my GPL code! The freedom to learn is not copyleft. So long as they put independent effort into their work, they're good in my book. Shared knowledge is a vital commons, and I'm honored if I can contribute to it.

Maybe this goes back to that debunked paper that claimed that transformers were only remixing input samples?

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#153

Post by Ciantic »

I'm bit mixed on this, code Copilot usually autocompletes me is not particularly novel, it's just mundane stuff I would write anyway. Most of these snippets are not copyrightable in my opinion, because it was obvious in the first place. Like CSS nth-child odd / even logic, or one case it filled me ~10 lines JS logic of filtering rows by category stored in dataset, which I would have written anyway.

Then there are cases where it amazes me completely, it wrote 10 lines of C++ code for rendering a monochrome glyphs with bits using Freetype library. It though had odd subtle bug, the glyphs came reversed and it worked with only certain font size which it seemed to pick up from different file all together.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#154

Post by coldtea »

trention wrote: post #138
coldtea wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

>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 sht about it.*

Art doesn't touch people because it has cost.

In fact, for ages certain types of art had no cost - poetry, public festivals, and so on. And many still don't (e.g. free punk/underground/indie/etc public performances), Soundcloud music, and so on.

Most movies and series seen on TV are also ~0 (and for kids, everything is ~0, as their parents foot the bill), but they're still touched by them.

>The only real question is how will human artists (provided they exist in your preferred dystopia) will prove that they have created something themselves.

Note the loaded words "your preffered dystopia" (who says whether I prefer it or not? I merely describe what's the case. You have some ethical/political point to make).

As for the answer to the question, they wont have to. People respond to the quality of the work, not who made it (and whether they used AI or chance - another popular method - or not).

In fact tons of genius artists have described themselves not as the creators but as "mere conduits", and say the music/words/etc come from "elsewhere" (implying god, some muse, some spirit, etc). Especially when they fell the most "inspired" (the word itself means "visited by the spirit").

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#155

Post by carom »

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…

My problem is with the weights not being released. They are a derivative work of open source code in the most literal sense. The weights would not exist without those lines. Gradient descent is using literal derivatives.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#156

Post by swader999 »

bloat wrote: post #82
avereveard wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is interesting. Is the internet completely cut off? Do they have internal libraries of documentation for third party stuff they are using (paper? digital?) Do you have any example institutions, or what domain they are working in? Thanks.

I think it would be for super secure military coding. But business domains? Hardly ever.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#157

Post by alkonaut »

mojuba wrote: post #38

Can I suggest a hypothesis that if you find Copilot useful it means the problem you are solving is a boring one? I might be wrong of course.

99% of the "problems" I'm solving when I'm working even on very interesting and challenging problems, are boring subproblems. If I can get those out of the way then that would be great.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#158

Post by meheleventyone »

HumanReadable wrote: post #151

Sorry for the unproductive tone of this comment, but there's something about the attitude of this tweet that really grinds my gears. Any time someone invents something new and incredible, there's always a crowd of negative nancies eager to discredit and explain why the invention is nothing new and a detrement to society. I don't understand why someone would willingly share their code on github where it is publicly av…

They own their code and it either has a license for use or is implicitly rights retained if not. If Copilot regurgitates their code, from a project that is public but with a non-permissive license they are having their IP rights violated so are totally correct in being unhappy about that.

Just because you’ve made something cool doesn’t give you the right to harm others in the process.

If MS or OpenAI don’t think this is the case then they should have also included their private repositories.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#160

Post by highwaylights »

HumanReadable wrote: post #151

Sorry for the unproductive tone of this comment, but there's something about the attitude of this tweet that really grinds my gears. Any time someone invents something new and incredible, there's always a crowd of negative nancies eager to discredit and explain why the invention is nothing new and a detrement to society. I don't understand why someone would willingly share their code on github where it is publicly av…

This seems disingenous.

People don’t have a problem that AI is being used in some form to provide the service.

The complaint is pretty clearly that code is being lifted from repositories without attribution or compensation, and being redistributed into other applications.

How impressive the work behind copilot is or is not really isn’t relevant.

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