most of the code I write is glue sticking together 8 proprietary systems nobody's ever heard of. how is copilot gonna help me with that?
Copilot sells code other people wrote
271–280 of 838 posts
Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote
#272When 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…
Isn't all stack overflow content creative commons? https://stackoverflow.com/help/licensing
it is - which is a problem if you want to repackage something under a different license.
Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote
#273Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 inter…
I'm very curious to see some examples where Copilot autocompleted something truly useful and saved you time - and that also disproves my hypothesis that you are doing something boring or with the wrong tools/languages/frameworks. Things that a non-ML autocomplete could do don't count.
I can give you an example of an entire (well, I still consider it alpha) library I wrote several months ago, using Copilot: https://github.com/osuushi/triangulate
This is an implementation of a 1991 paper on polygon triangulation into Go. So the deepest thinking about how to solve the problem was obviously already done for me, but there were a number of edge cases that I had to invent my own solutions to, and the translation itself involved keeping a lot of context in my head.
I can’t tell you in precise detail what Copilot did, and what I wrote by hand. I wasn’t taking notes or recording my screen. But there’s a reason you don’t see a lot of blocks in there where I forgot to comment anything, because my entire process for this was “type what I want to do in English, and see if Copilot will generate the next snippet, or something close”. I didn’t do this out of bloodyminded dedication to the AI cause, but because it continued to be an extremely effective way to get the code written quickly.
I can give a few specifics:
- My linear algebra is rusty, and Copilot was extremely helpful here. I would often just type the basic thing I was trying to do in pretty vague linear algebra terms, and it would generate the formula.
- I wrote a lot of tests like this https://github.com/osuushi/triangulate/blob/main/internal/sp.... This is a minor thing, but those aren’t copy-pasted. Instead, I would write the first test, and for the most part, I could just type something like `func TestConvertToMonotones_SquareWithHole`, and it would figure out how to adapt the previous test automatically.
- It generates exactly the error strings I want based on context an enormous percentage of the time.
I want to stress that I’m just giving a few examples of things that I specifically remember because I talked about them at the time, not characterizing the majority of the experience of using Copilot. The majority of the experience of using Copilot is that you write comments, and then the things you were about to type appear on the screen before you have to type them.
Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote
#274Earlier quoted context omitted.
Does that prove it ignores licenses or does that imply the source engine exists verbatim (minus licenses) multiple times on Github?
If it's minus a license then it should be assumed that rights are retained (in the same way you can't just take ownership of an image you find on the internet) so if it were filtering it shouldn't take code from repo's without explicit and favorable licenses. If it is taking code only from repo's with permissive licenses (e.g. MIT) then why aren't they following the attribution requirements? I don't think you can hav…
If I steal some code and put it on Github under MIT that doesn't really make it MIT, I'm just lying that it is. If Copilot then uses that it's still in violation of the law I'd assume (ignorance doesn't exonerate you etc.). So they'd have to verify on a case by case basis, which they obviously haven't given the volume of data they had to feed the thing.
It's kinda shocking that they think they can sell this, even providing it for free is extremely sketchy but at least complies with BSD/GNU/CC licensed stuff I guess.
Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote
#275Earlier 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…
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.
I don't think releasing a commercial product that copies people's code without complying with the license is anywhere near fair use.
Also, the open source community has far less leverage to apply pressure to Google than it does to GitHub. We may be able to do something about this.
Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote
#276Sorry 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…
Plagiarism isn't new or incredible.
Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote
#277Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
> 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?
They are all in compliance with intellectual property laws? Seriously, that's a bloody big difference.
Co-pilot is not in compliance with many of the source code it is using!
Whether you like it or not, compliance with the law is necessary.
Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote
#278Pretty soon the world is going to come to realize art/creation is just blending, incrementing and repurposing prior art. No book, painting, codebase, sonnet, design is theft-less. The art is the space reduction, otherwise we’d just bruteforce away.
Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote
#279Sorry 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 problem with this conversation is how we can have a 200 comment thread without anyone providing any kind of proof to these claims. Is there any instance of this bot printing an actual copyrighted algorithm instead of a mundane uncopyrighteable piece of logic?
Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote
#280Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it's best if we sidestep these big conceptual questions about what cognition or creativity really are. It's hard to find agreement, and perhaps it is not necessary to do so. My position is that if a person hired in a company can currently use Google, Stack Overflow and GitHub to help develop their custom scripts, and no moral or copyright issues are infringed (ie, you don't try to say you came up with it on y…
I would agree with you if the AI was genuinely assisting with that task, but it isn't. It's taking inputs, ignoring their licenses, permuting them in ways that are not understandable to the user, and then outputting them. That's an entirely different task than the user reading SO or using Google and then writing their own code, because the "AI" is not capable of writing its own code at that level. Relying on this too…
> That's an entirely different task than the user reading SO or using Google and then writing their own code, because the "AI" is not capable of writing its own code at that level.
I would say it's a very similar task. If I need to remember how to use a certain function, I can Google for documentation and examples, or I can tell Copilot what I want to do. The fact that the solution was presented by Copilot or a SO thread is, in my view, irrelevant. And to compound on that, I doubt anyone checking SO truly knows where that answer came from. The person could simply be reproducing a snippet from somebody else, you have no way of knowing if it was licensed.
I don't think this is bad either. Even our current shitty copyright laws protect that kind of use. I shouldn't have to worry whether my little prime number generator uses an algorithm first created by John Carmack or Microsoft. Programming has evolved rapidly in great part because we can all use other people's work and use it to improve ours. Of course you shouldn't just copy and paste everything and call it a day, but that's hardly what Copilot enables anyway.