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Copilot sells code other people wrote

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Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#481

Post by tiborsaas »

teakettle42 wrote: post #166
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…

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…

Is is really stealing when your code is used to change a parameter value from 0.3623727247 to 0.3623727321?

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#482

Post by drexlspivey »

bayindirh wrote: post #469
dekhn wrote: post #466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Copyleft isn't really a good example. Let's talk about copyright. That fragment of code is not copyrightable on its own. Too small, too trivial.

Let's say I have 25 line function which does something novel and can be published as research (which I did, BTW, no joke), and I opened its reference implementation with AGPLv3+. Is it again too trivial?

is 25 lines the limit then? do you count comments? can I codegolf a few lines to get below the limit?

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#483

Post by ModernMech »

olalonde wrote: post #475

I'm going to make a bold prediction: no one will ever lose a copyright lawsuit due to usage of Github Copilot generated code. The code snippets it produces are too small or trivial to qualify for copyright infringement.

CoPilot is a new technology, and smallish snippets of code are all it is capable of at this point. Microsoft will surely work to expand its capabilities to produce larger and more complex programs, don’t you think?

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#484

Post by tartoran »

Yenrabbit wrote: post #310
bborud wrote: post #198

My personal reasons for not using copilot are a bit simpler. I believe the act of researching which solutions to use for a given problem is not so much about time, or the code you end up with, but about developing a better understanding of what you are doing. You may end up just cutting, pasting and modifying a piece of code you found, but hopefully, you were exposed to a few different ways to accomplish the same thi…

At least the way I use it, it's not taking much away from my problem solving. It's just that instead of having to type `particlesGeometry.setAttribute('position', new THREE.BufferAttribute(positions, 3))` I just write `//Add as an attribute` and then hit TAB, since Copilot is smart enough to see that I've just prepared some geometry and populated an array of positions (both operations also sped up by not having to ty…

So you’re just getting a helping hand doing code plumbing. That sounds good as long as you let the helper take the lead

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#485

Post by tartoran »

kraftman wrote: post #445
bborud wrote: post #198

My personal reasons for not using copilot are a bit simpler. I believe the act of researching which solutions to use for a given problem is not so much about time, or the code you end up with, but about developing a better understanding of what you are doing. You may end up just cutting, pasting and modifying a piece of code you found, but hopefully, you were exposed to a few different ways to accomplish the same thi…

I would be interested to know how many people are actually using copilot to generate entire chunks of code that they don't understand. For me it's just autocomplete on steroids, its not answering any questions I don't know the answer to (other than syntax ive forgotten), it's just making the boilerplate faster to write so I can think about the actual problem I need to solve.

Not using copilot but if I did Id use it in the way you expressed as well, just for plumbing and tedious stuff.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#486

Post by bayindirh »

drexlspivey wrote: post #482
bayindirh wrote: post #469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's say I have 25 line function which does something novel and can be published as research (which I did, BTW, no joke), and I opened its reference implementation with AGPLv3+. Is it again too trivial?

is 25 lines the limit then? do you count comments? can I codegolf a few lines to get below the limit?

> is 25 lines the limit then?

I don't know. That's my function's length.

> do you count comments?

No comments, no blank lines.

> can I codegolf a few lines to get below the limit?

You bet. But, if you copy my reference implementation, you need to get the license as well.

However, the research is on the open. Read it, implement it. That's no problem.

But, CoPilot is not reading my paper. It's reproducing my function verbatim, which is under a license which has share-alike mechanics.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#487

Post by leereeves »

aaaaaaaaata wrote: post #378
aahortwwy wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft's internal policies don't allow their employees to do this without legal approval.

So they don't ask.

I think aahortwwy's point was that Microsoft won't permit their own employees to do what Copilot does.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#488

Post by leereeves »

lin83 wrote: post #214
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…

> Something being cool doesn't exempt it from discussion of its ethics and certainly doesn't exempt it from legal consequences.

Indeed. The heist in Ocean's Eleven was cool, but it was still theft.

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#489

Post by nl »

jhugo wrote: post #232
nl wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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".

What's your definition?

Re: Copilot sells code other people wrote

#490

Post by nl »

tyingq wrote: post #250
nl wrote: post #123

This isn't how a language model works. It's SO frustrating that even on HN people still fall for this naive and incorrect analysis. Pasting bits I've said before on this topic: Language models do not work like this. They can copy content but usually that's for something like the GPL language text. Generally they work on a character by character basis predicting what is the most likely character to appear next. This v…

If this were true, then they would have trained it on all of MS's proprietary source code too.

It is true.

And that doesn't follow at all.

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