Copilot sells code other people wrote • Hacker News Board

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#171

Post by Chris2048 » Thu, Jun 23, 2022, 10:55 AM UTC

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…

> willingly share their code on github where it is publicly available just to complain when others make use of that knowledge

because it's not unconditional, there are often licence terms of usage, and copilot is potentially laundering those.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#172

Post by js8 » Thu, Jun 23, 2022, 10:55 AM UTC

Veen wrote: post #150

ajuc wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

As a writer, the benefits are quite obvious to me.

Benefits of what? Of copyright enforcement, or of sharing?

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#173

Post by ClumsyPilot » Thu, Jun 23, 2022, 10:56 AM UTC

scotty79 wrote: post #131

32bitkid wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

does shady guy have his name on the side of a building, and run ads: "buy my shady stuff" and then pay taxes and his earning? That kind of shady guy?

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#174

Post by ImprobableTruth » Thu, Jun 23, 2022, 10:56 AM UTC

dobin wrote: post #142

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…

I neither see it "stealing". The neuronal network was trained with code as input. It's creating code as output. The output has nothing to do with the input once it is trained. Do people dont know how neuronal network work? It's like saying GPT-3 created text is copyright infringement, because some author used the same sentence in a book before.

Overfitting: One weird trick that copyright lawyers don't want you to know!

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#175

Post by coldtea » Thu, Jun 23, 2022, 10:56 AM UTC

trention wrote: post #163

coldtea wrote: post #154

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.* 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 pai…

>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.

As if that proves anything? Sale price is irrelevant. There are paintings sold for millions that 99.9% of the people could not give less fucks for, and "amateur painter" stuff that touch most people who see them.

It's also not like a $2 million in production costs Michael Jackson song with $50M sales is "better" artistically (as opposed to commercially) than a song composed and played by some random guy on an acoustic for ~0.

>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.

It was meaningless to begin with, as you don't discuss, you present your "ultimate truth" ("contra anything we know", lol).

In fact there are tons of works where the creator is anonymous (from folk music and art to early house, techno and rave music, a scene with cherished anonymity), and people respond to it just fine...

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#176

Post by nextaccountic » Thu, Jun 23, 2022, 10:56 AM UTC

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…

> 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.

Because they shared the code under a license, and they have the right to complain if people use that code but don't follow the license.

For example, what happens if Github Copilot spits a copy of some copyrighted code verbatim? Is laundering open source code through a machine learning model a loophole for not having to follow the license?

Often following the license is as simple as giving credit to the original author.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#177

Post by iptq » Thu, Jun 23, 2022, 10:57 AM UTC

I know this isn't really related to the whole copying ethics debate, but I definitely feel like there's some sort of foul play happening here. For all of the unlicensed projects out there, the license that is automatically granted to Github includes:

> the right to store, archive, parse, and display Your Content, and make incidental copies, as necessary to provide the Service, including improving the Service over time

It's insane how vague this is. Is Copilot a "Service"? Sure, by its definition:

> The “Service” refers to the applications, software, products, and services provided by GitHub, including any Beta Previews.

And since much of the code was published before Copilot's inception, this means Github can just arbitrarily add more "services" and milk the code for whatever it wants. Automatically service-ify any public repository? Sure, pay us for quotas. It's like a legal loophole to let Github just bypass any license restrictions you put on it.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#178

Post by mistercow » Thu, Jun 23, 2022, 10:57 AM UTC

mojuba wrote: post #115

triknomeister wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe github copilot is the right tool.

I don't think so. A human-verified, tested and maintained code is obviously superior to a snippet blindly copied and mixed by a statistical system.

That’s not how you use Copilot, any more than it’s how you’d use any other autocomplete tool. I don’t know why so many people seem to think that using Copilot is just closing your eyes, hitting tab fifty times, and then committing.

You work on your code, Copilot makes a suggestion. You read that suggestion and verify that it’s close to what you were already going to do. If it is, you hit tab, then you tweak it. There’s nothing blind about this process.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#179

Post by rglullis » Thu, Jun 23, 2022, 10:58 AM UTC

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…

> why someone would willingly share their code on github where it is publicly available just to complain when others make use of that knowledge.

For other individuals to collaborate, to make the software available to other people, etc. Certainly not for github's profit and much less for the benefit of github's customers who will have access to open code that violates license agreements.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#180

Post by nextaccountic » Thu, Jun 23, 2022, 10:58 AM UTC

iLoveOncall wrote: post #84

Github Copilot is selling code other people wrote as much as the author of this thread is profiting from words other people invented. Absolute nonsense.

The difference is that words aren't copyrighted and doesn't come with an open source license.