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Copilot sells code other people wrote

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Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#211

Post by teakettle42 »

skc wrote: post #42
Luc wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the vast majority of developers constantly look at OSS code daily and lift ideas/patterns/snippets from there regularly Perhaps in your circles, but that's certainly not something I've encountered over a 25 year carreer.

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?

> … and instead instead come up with your own completely independent solution after the fact?

Yes, I’m not a plagiarist.

If you’re literally copying and pasting code snippets without attribution, you’re plagiarizing.

You’re also probably violating the OSS project’s license.

It’s no different than copying and pasting someone else’s sentence or paragraph into a written paper.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#212

Post by eloisius »

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.

So if I fit a network to output entire chapters of a book when given the chapter number as input, I can print and sell copies of it that way?

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#213

Post by core-utility »

meheleventyone wrote: post #158
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…

Do we have any evidence that copilot doesn't check/filter by license?

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#214

Post by lin83 »

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…

> 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.

Something being cool doesn't exempt it from discussion of its ethics and certainly doesn't exempt it from legal consequences. Often what people call "disruption" is often just exploiting resources/people/their work in unsustainable ways until oversight is introduced.

If CoPilot is copy/pasting large amount of code with unknown licenses, that is a large and real risk for users aside from violating open source projects licenses.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#215

Post by redox99 »

zufallsheld wrote: post #126
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.

As to your first point, there are many repositories on github that the author of code did not upload there or where not all contributors to the code are on github or agreed to let their work be used in such a case.

That's really no different than somebody uploading proprietary code they don't own (stolen, leaked, whatever reason etc) on Github. Github has to assume that you are allowed to do so. What are they going to do otherwise, somehow manually verify that each repository is legit?

Now you might say, what about GPL code you don't own. You are allowed to redistribute it (upload to github). But because you are not the owner you can't license it to Github under new terms (that allow them to use it for ML training). But the question still is, is there anything in the GPL that forbids it's code being used for ML training? Even if the generated model is proprietary, has no attributions, etc?

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#216

Post by teakettle42 »

ThereIsNoWorry wrote: post #207
teakettle42 wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sometimes I truly wonder how people can genuinely be upset about things like this. Tell me you regularly plagiarize without telling me you regularly plagiarize.

Code plagiarization is not a thing by all practical purposes (it's even almost impossible to go to court with that for very obvious reasons). And that's good. Because with that insane lockdown of "Intellectual Property" nothing would ever get done. So, think what you want.

> Code plagiarization is not a thing by all practical purposes

Of course it is. Plagiarism is “the practice of taking someone else's work or ideas and passing them off as one's own.”

It’s unethical and it will get you fired at any reputable company.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#217

Post by nl »

jhugo wrote: post #143
nl wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tok…

"it no more copies code than a human does" < that's a very big call right there, considering how much verbatim copying has already been documented in Copilot. The primitive understanding Copilot has of what it is generating doesn't even approach that of the most average programmers. It's classic AI: impressive on the surface.

This isn't true.

All the "copied code" I've seen is where the person prompts it with a large amount of very unique preamble and then it fills in the exact example they are quoting from.

Try it without doing that.

And it's weird people think it can't understand conceptual relationships. Word2Vec demonstrated that nearly 10 years ago and that's a much weaker model in terms of both size and techniques than this is.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#218

Post by zarzavat »

meheleventyone wrote: post #158
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…

The entire point of a fair use right is that you don’t need the copyright owner’s permission to be able to exercise it. Fair use allows you to do things that the copyright owner doesn’t like.

Is fair use on a massive scale still fair use? Courts generally think so, otherwise Google would have been out of business a long time ago.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#219

Post by meheleventyone »

core-utility wrote: post #213
meheleventyone wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Do we have any evidence that copilot doesn't check/filter by license?

One of the (ex?) programmers from Valve managed to get it to spit out parts of the Source engine verbatim. He posted a Twitter thread yesterday I believe.
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