231–240 of 838 posts
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…
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"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.
Saying that Word2Vec or Copilot have "understanding" of their input requires a redefinition of the word "understanding".
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> 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.
As a consumer, it's quite obvious to me too how it benefits only the writer/creator at the detriment of everyone else.
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.
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…
It’s a product by a business. Why is that not open to criticism?
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Yes, but those humans are humans, not machines. With machines the scale changes dramatically. Which, incidentally is something copyright law has addressed explicitly: if you mechanically transform at best you end up with a derived work.
I don't understand the difference between Co-Pilot on the one hand and Moderna (on the shoulders of medical research) or SpaceX (on the shoulders of physics knowledge and cumulative rocket engineering knowledge) on the other. They all heavily use technology, automation and machines. I don't see where the distinction is coming from, and if there is a technical legal distinction, is it an ethically important one?
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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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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.
Can you post the link to that?
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 co…
There are tools that will analyze a codebase and identify where chunks of varying size seem to come from. Mostly to determine if the code is encumbered by problematic licenses, but also to detect where the programmers may have borrowed code from.
If memory serves, some of these companies also have closed source codebases in their database, enabling them to detect if unpublished code has been re-used.
The times I've used this in due diligence it has rarely been a deal-breaker when we do find large chunks of code that may be problematic. For instance due to licensing terms that are not acceptable. You just make a note of it and have them rewrite the code before the transaction can take place. (Or you figure out if you can accomodate the license terms).
Isn't every programmer in history (except the gall who invents her own language and writes all her own code) simply an archeologist for other people's work? We all Duck/Google for code anyway. Why not admit and make it easier?
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html for a quick intro
Also, are you okay with other people selling *your* work and *you* getting nothing out of it? Many people are not.