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GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

githubcopilotinvestigation.com

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Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#91

Post by rzwitserloot »

nomel wrote: post #47
RunSet wrote: post #13

> Microsoft char­ac­ter­izes the out­put of Copi­lot as a series of code "sug­ges­tions". Microsoft "does not claim any rights" in these sug­ges­tions. But nei­ther does Microsoft make any guar­an­tees about the cor­rect­ness, secu­rity, or exten­u­at­ing intel­lec­tual-prop­erty entan­gle­ments of the code so pro­duced. Once you accept a Copi­lot sug­ges­tion, all that becomes your prob­lem: > "You are respon­si­ble…

Could you help me understand the link between the two?

Microsoft released a product which gives you cancer the moment you use it.

According to the opinions about what inclusion of open source code into your projects does, as per the ex-CEO of the company. That seems a bit of a far fetched conclusion, but then, Ballmer did say it.

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#92

Post by ok123456 »

otterley wrote: post #29
ipaddr wrote: post #2

Doesn't really explain how co-pilot is stealing your community. I've used co-pilot and it works great until you are past boilerplate than it falls apart.

Agree, the argument seems pretty threadbare. Millions of programmers use open-source software every day and incorporate it into their own projects without ever engaging the authors of the code upon which they rely. Perhaps the author means that there’s a possibility that the programmer to whom the code was suggested won’t necessarily know its provenance and how to engage the community from whence it came. If so, that…

It's just basically a search engine, but the context is the rest of your code.

Writing software just auto-completing from CoPilot would be like trying to write a whole novel with the auto-predictive text on your phone. You could do it, but the results would be non-nonsensical and full of semantic errors. I don't think there's any real 'provenance' at play in either case.

This guy is a literal who, who is really over estimating the value of his open source contributions over a general development tool that can reduce the cognitive load of working in some hairy code bases.

I don't think it's CoPilot that's 'erasing' his, Racket, community.

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#93

Post by dspillett »

Arainach wrote: post #28
blatherard wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The current github terms of service don't seem to mention this use when they describe the license granted github. https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/github-terms/github-t... 4. License Grant to Us We need the legal right to do things like host Your Content, publish it, and share it. You grant us and our legal successors the right to store, archive, parse, and display Your Content, and make incidental copies, as n…

That mentions everything: Parsing the content, showing it to/sharing it with other users, using it to improve and provide the service. GitHub and all of its features are "the service".

True, but it doesn't mention doing so without the attribution that might be required by the code's licence. If full attribution of where the suggestion was derived from was included¹ there would be not issue IMO², it is this matter that creates the grey area which these discussions result from.

--

[1] the practicality³ of this is a different, though related, discussion

[2] because the user is fully informed and can take responsibility for the decision to use the suggestion or not

[3] or impossibility – given the code could be added by someone who doesn't include that attribution/licence information for the system to be able to pass on even if it were designed to

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#94

Post by [deleted] »

dwgebler wrote: post #65
shpx wrote: post #42

It seems like there's no good license that places absolutely no restrictions or requirements on people using your code (such as attribution and respecting patent rights) worldwide. I want my code to be used the way people treated text in the old days. There's texts that have been re-written, added to and edited by thousands of people over the centuries and yet they don't come with thousands of pages of attribution no…

You don't need to license it, you can just publish it with a declaration that as the author, you are releasing your work in to the public domain. However, in terms of licensing I believe MIT is the most permissive.

[deleted]

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#95

Post by bakugo »

jamiek88 wrote: post #60
version_five wrote: post #51

New tech creates winners and losers, and losers inevitably complain. See looms, VHS, Napster, etc. The more of this complaining I see, the more it falls flat. The only interesting thing is which side different communities end up being on. To be fair, record companies were not in the least bit sympathetic. Open source contributors are easier to identify with, though imo it doesn't actually make their concerns more val…

What does this comment even mean? I cannot parse what you are suggesting.

As far as I can tell it's just a more convoluted way of saying "new good, old bad, only old people disagree"

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#96

Post by slondr »

ClassAndBurn wrote: post #84

My view is the copilot is not stealing open source code. It is learning from it just as a human reader would. People's disguste is based on the assimilation of what they thought was a human trait being machine derived from their work. The copilot service backed by an army of actual humans wouldn’t be a story at all. Nor would anyone be angry, if an individual offered coding skills as a service, and had gone through t…

> People's disguste is based on the assimilation of what they thought was a human trait being machine derived from their work.

No, people's disgust is with Microsoft violating their legal privileges.

> The copilot service backed by an army of actual humans wouldn’t be a story at all.

Correct, it would be an open-and-shut lawsuit.

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#97

Post by blacksmith_tb »

bakugo wrote: post #48
ipaddr wrote: post #2

Doesn't really explain how co-pilot is stealing your community. I've used co-pilot and it works great until you are past boilerplate than it falls apart.

"It's not a problem that it steals code because it doesn't work that well right now" is not a valid argument, don't pretend that AI doesn't advance on a daily basis. Reminds me of people who defend AI art with "you can tell it apart from real art" yeah no, at the rate we're moving you won't be able to tell at all in a year or two.

I agree with your starting point, but art actually makes the questions clearer I think - having AI art "you can't tell apart" is possibly a bad thing for human producers of art (or not, obviously lots of artists don't make their art just to get paid, but if you do...), but seems like a great thing for the human consumers of art? Copiliot/tabnine etc. could certainly give you terrible suggestions, but my experience is they often help with boring scaffolding-stuff which isn't likely to be full of bad ideas, just time savings. Could they mess you up? Oh for sure. But mostly they just seem like an autocorrect that doesn't guess wrong every other time.

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#98

Post by ceroxylon »

chatterhead wrote: post #23
boomskats wrote: post #17

Everything else aside, the design on this site is among the best I've ever seen. Amazing typography, great to read on a phone.

Can you elaborate on what makes it so? Changing font sizes, boldness, lines etc...

For me it was the 'magazine' style with proper breaks and editing, formatted for a vertical screen but still reads great on my laptop. The effort in the content, links and emphasis make it feel like journalism I would normally get paywalled on.

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#99

Post by WrtCdEvrydy »

I wonder what will happen when a company pays some overseas developers $50 for some code, they copy it from Copilot and it copies a bug from a US developer and that company gets hacked for $10 million.

Will the lawsuit fall on the overseas developer, US developer or Github?

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#100

Post by edsouza »

lilyball wrote: post #55
Uhhrrr wrote: post #45

The example given is "sparse matrix trans­pose in the style of Tim Davis", but someone who wanted something with such specificity would be able to just take it from Github anyway, perhaps with a little more searching.

And would therefore have to follow the license of the code they took it from. That's exactly the point. Copilot is reproducing the same code but without the license.

Please look up the license in the source code that Tim Davis points too, it just mentions it's LGPL, but doesn't include the full license text. And none of the C code mentions a license or Tim Davis.

And if you dig further, the whole repo is mixed with BSD and LGPL "licensed" packages together. It's probably best that CoPilot does not suggest from code that does not have an explicit license stated.

I think originally Tim Davis was complaining about the non public sources for suggestions which Github CoPilot ignored.

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