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Coping with Copilot

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Re: Coping with Copilot

#361

Post by pabs3 »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #231
dragonwriter wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wonder if they should make a special open source license, that disallows use of the source code for the purpose of training something like Copilot. Since Microsoft uses material for copilot outside of licensing on the basis that it is Fair Use, that would probably have no effect in practice on whether or not the material is used in training something like Copilot. For that to matter, you’d first have to win a law…

I don't care about all the handwaving here, it comes down to this. The moment a fragment of code from a GPL'd or AGPL'd project shows up almost verbatim in someone's closed source or non-copylefted, etc. project, and someone proves it, sparks are going to fly. And it's probably already happening, just people haven't discovered it yet. How many years did the Oracle/Google lawsuit go on for? And in the end about a hand…

Didn't it already happen that it spat out a function from Quake? And they then dealt with that by banning the particular function.

ISTR that Amazon's version of copilot has licensing info output too.

Re: Coping with Copilot

#362

Post by bergenty »

fantispug wrote: post #343
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #89

I understand the problem here and I sympathize with professors in these circumstances. Learning the fundamentals will remain important. But as others have pointed out: if students are unwilling to learn, or are taking shortcuts, it will ultimately hurt them in the long run. One thing tho is that things like Copilot put the lie to the hypothesis (propagated mostly by the Google-style job interview) that intensely codi…

This happened in mathematics about a decade ago when Wolfram Alpha came out. Lecturers started complaining that Wolfram Alpha could solve assignment problems with worked steps. In both cases I think this is a real opportunity; we can let students get more quickly to bigger problems and systems thinking by leveraging these tools. It requires professors to start thinking innovatively about how to teach and assess these…

And it does. Kids use wolfram alpha for a lot of the first and second year math courses in college now.

Re: Coping with Copilot

#363

Post by bergenty »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #89

I understand the problem here and I sympathize with professors in these circumstances. Learning the fundamentals will remain important. But as others have pointed out: if students are unwilling to learn, or are taking shortcuts, it will ultimately hurt them in the long run. One thing tho is that things like Copilot put the lie to the hypothesis (propagated mostly by the Google-style job interview) that intensely codi…

There is a copilot for that. I think you’re making programming seem more intricate than it is. It can build a crud app. It can build distributed systems. It can write web3 contracts. There’s not a whole lot besides that except maybe rare structural projects that don’t happen very often.

Re: Coping with Copilot

#364

Post by bergenty »

fancyfredbot wrote: post #6

I get that copilot is AI and pretty cool, but students could look up a Fibonacci program on Google before it existed. What's more these algorithms are written in books. If students wanted to cheat on your "write depth first search" assignment then they already were.

How accessible something is matters a lot. Writing a comment and then pressing enter is a whole lot easier and very accessible.

Re: Coping with Copilot

#365

Post by dcow »

atomicnumber3 wrote: post #302
bcrosby95 wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've thought of going back for an MSc because it sounds kinda fun. Although probably in math rather than CS. I never thought it would be held against me though. Seems weird.

I don't think it would be held against you? Especially if it was "going back" for it. I think the uncharitable view people take of a Bachelors followed immediately by a masters but with no PhD is that they presumably weren't planning to go for a PhD, and given that, had the choice between a) doing 2 more years of school for very tenuous benefit and b) going directly into a job where entry level pays 1.5x+ the median…

Or that they washed out of a PhD.

Re: Coping with Copilot

#366

Post by gfiorav »

I agree with the point that there's no point in fighting the advent of AI-aided development, but it's also true that the invention of calculators didn't mean we stopped learning how to add.

Re: Coping with Copilot

#368

Post by tbrownaw »

cosmojg wrote: post #342
tgv wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if students are unwilling to learn, or are taking shortcuts, it will ultimately hurt them in the long run That's a very limited, and dismissive view. If you allow students to use copilot, you're handing out certificates or diplomas to people who can't code. That will very quickly erode the value of your institute's certification, and with it, that of the other students. Otherwise, why not give everyone an MSc in CS…

Tools of abstraction like Copilot raise the threshold for what can be considered "fundamentals." Yes, knowing how to add, subtract, multiply, and divide is important. However, now that calculators exist, we can teach people to do so much more than simple arithmetic. So, too, with Copilot.

> Tools of abstraction

Isn't it a bit leaky to be called that?

Re: Coping with Copilot

#369

Post by LtWorf »

bigDinosaur wrote: post #319
LtWorf wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's how it works in italy. The bad side is that to be an engineer you have to pay a yearly fee as well :D

Being an actual engineer (software) is different to just being a software engineer, and the former is very commonly highly regulated.

In italy software engineers are actual engineers.

Re: Coping with Copilot

#370

Post by runald »

Ask canned questions, expect canned answers as well. Dumb or lazy incompetent students will look up solutions to problems like fibonacci sequence or sum of numbers without understanding them or solving them first on their own. This has always been the case, even before copilot came along. Copilot only made it even easier and accessible to even dumber students, and made it harder for dumb teachers to lazily give canned programming questions.

I haven't used copilot yet, so I don't know how intelligent it is at producing solutions that it hasn't seen before. Assuming it's not that intelligent, one solution would be to just add small, tricky variations or constraints to well-known programming problems. So instead of just asking "find the sum of numbers", ask "find the sum of foo numbers", where foo is some made-up property, like a number contains even number of odd digits. Then require the implementation to count down instead of counting up.

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