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Copilot sells code other people wrote

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Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#161

When my last company got acquired, part of the due diligence process was a scan of our codebase for snippets from stack overflow. Every snippet found that wasn't posted with a clear license by the author was challenged and we rewrote it. Now, I'm not entirely sure how necessary this was from a legal perspective. But introducing an AI into the mix will bring up a lot of uncertainty when it comes to how much change is…

That sounds like legal paranoia or a make-work program.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#162
post #86

> Hector Martin: If you use Copilot, you are basically playing Russian Roulette that the random mashup of existing, copyrighted, hegerogenously licensed code that you get out of it qualifies as an original work, mostly by chance. Or that nobody will ever sue you otherwise. Well, that's already the case with Stack Overflow copypasta enterprise code. If anything, use of Copilot would be an improvement...

Do people really copy/paste from StackOverflow?

I feel this is more a meme, rather than reality. I do check StackOverflow, but never have I took an answer verbatim. I try to see if it's the same problem and what was the approach in deconstructing it, which I find more useful in the long run.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sh t 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), Soundc…

None of those things had zero price and zero cost. The fact that the consumer didn't pay directly for them is irrelevant. You can try testing your theory by trying to sell a "painting" created by DALLE/whatever for more than a third-rate amateur painter can sell one of his. Good luck with that, especially when access to the model becomes easy.

>People respond to the quality of the work, not who made it

This is so painfully incorrect and naive (and contra anything we know about the value of everything which creation has been automated before) that I think it's meaningless to continue this conversation.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#164
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.

That hypothesis is easily disproven by spending an afternoon on a side project with Copilot.

No matter how interesting your problem is, translating it into code is going to involve a lot of grunt work. This isn’t just boilerplate, but also the large portion of your code which is going to be gluing things together.

The time you spend working through those menial parts of your code is time when the context of the interesting part of the problem fades. Once you get the mechanical stuff out of the way, you have to load the interesting stuff back into your brain.

This is where AI coding tools really shine. They dramatically reduce the intervals between when you can think about the actual problem you’re solving by letting you get the boring mechanics out of the way more quickly.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#165
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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?

So it's my job to check my supplier, to make sure lines from co-pilot are legit.

At the same time when fast fashion companies sell T-shirts made with slave labour, its not the company's responsebility to check what their suppliers are doing.

And if tesla autopilot kills you and your family its not their fault either.

Neoliberal morality - companies are never accountable for anything, it's heresy to suggest they should do their job properly.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#166

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…

My code is shared under a license (MIT) that mandates attribution.

That’s all I ask — if you use my code, give me credit.

Stealing my code to train your bot — which will replicate portions verbatim! — is no different whatsoever than the casual plagiarist that copies and pastes a novel snippet manually.

Its absolutely my legal and ethical prerogative to complain about people stealing my code by failing to respect the license under which it was freely provided.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#167

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.

> Sometimes I truly wonder how people can genuinely be upset about things like this

90% of Twitter is just inventing new ways to whine about things

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#168

If GitHub could guarantee that the code Copilot had ingested was only made with OSS licenses, then I don't see what the problem is. But as far as I understand, GitHub trained Copilot on any public repository on GitHub, meaning even if it doesn't have a license specified (so the user publishing it still has the copyright to it), then I don't see how it can be OK.

Maybe when you accepted GitHub ToS you gave them permission for your code to be used for ML training.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#169

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…

Yes but,

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.

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Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#170
post #73
post #41

I don't understand what's going on there. I don't use github. Can someone explain what the author means? Edit: in detail

Nice, being downvoted for asking questions. Nice asshole culture on HN.

You can ask questions but they can't be low effort and need to add something to the discussion.
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