GitHub Copilot investigation • Hacker News Board

Re: GitHub Copilot investigation

#161

Post by mtlynch » Mon, Oct 17, 2022, 11:42 PM UTC

armchairhacker wrote: post #37

One issue I see with Copilot is that they get free access to all open-source data on GitHub, but using GitHub APIs to download the data yourself isn't possible (rate limiting). This is an unfair advantage. Copilot is not only making money off of open-source, they are making money off of open-source in a way others can't. I would love to see a lawsuit which requires GitHub to provide their full Copilot dataset.

Not a supporter of Copilot, but I think it's pretty easy to access the same data through BigQuery:

>The Google BigQuery Public Datasets program now offers a full snapshot of the content of more than 2.8 million open source GitHub repositories in BigQuery. Thanks to our new collaboration with GitHub, you'll have access to analyze the source code of almost 2 billion files with a simple (or complex) SQL query.

https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/public-datasets/github-...

Re: GitHub Copilot investigation

#162

Post by pixl97 » Mon, Oct 17, 2022, 11:43 PM UTC

gfynt wrote: post #143

rockemsockem wrote: post #128

What do people think the future looks like where publicly available resources on the Internet (art, code, etc) aren't fair use for training ML models? Where you have to opt into models or can opt out (and many wind up doing so)? OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, et al will STILL train such models that can do all the same things, but it will be much harder for non-industry-backed individuals to navigate the legal minefield w…

If they continue that path, the future will be that OpenAI, Microsoft, Google etc. will pay larger and larger fines at least in the EU, until they are blocked entirely.

And the EU will continue to fall farther and farther behind in software development.

Re: GitHub Copilot investigation

#163

Post by klyrs » Mon, Oct 17, 2022, 11:43 PM UTC

rockemsockem wrote: post #128

What do people think the future looks like where publicly available resources on the Internet (art, code, etc) aren't fair use for training ML models? Where you have to opt into models or can opt out (and many wind up doing so)? OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, et al will STILL train such models that can do all the same things, but it will be much harder for non-industry-backed individuals to navigate the legal minefield w…

> "look I prompted CoPilot for this piece of code that I already knew about and it spit it right out"

https://twitter.com/docsparse/status/1581461734665367554

An english description plus three characters of a function name is enough to coax CoPilot into distributing LGPL-licensed code out of context, without a proper license. That's neither "emotional" nor "cherry-picked", it's a clear-cut license violation.

Re: GitHub Copilot investigation

#164

Post by Arbortheus » Mon, Oct 17, 2022, 11:44 PM UTC

armchairhacker wrote: post #37

One issue I see with Copilot is that they get free access to all open-source data on GitHub, but using GitHub APIs to download the data yourself isn't possible (rate limiting). This is an unfair advantage. Copilot is not only making money off of open-source, they are making money off of open-source in a way others can't. I would love to see a lawsuit which requires GitHub to provide their full Copilot dataset.

That’s the problem with big tech. When they own all the roads, it makes organic competition almost impossible, as they will always be 2 steps ahead.

Re: GitHub Copilot investigation

#165

Post by CoastalCoder » Mon, Oct 17, 2022, 11:44 PM UTC

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #106

elfatizer wrote: post #49

There are lots of comments arguing for or against Copilot on a value judgment, and having an opinion on it being ethical or legal, etc isn't going to be the same for everyone. But I think regardless of where you stand, there should be some sort of legal ruling to clarify the gray areas that Butterick breaks down.

Agreed, but I also hate how so much of our substantive law basically has to be created by the courts because (a) many of our legislatures, especially at the federal level, have become more and more non-functional, and (b) IMO legislatures are especially bad at implementing technical legislation. I think there is a good, fundamental legal/societal question of how copyright should apply to AI output. I just don't think…

I agree. Any law that's only clear after a court ruling is, de facto, an ex post facto law. Disgusting.

Re: GitHub Copilot investigation

#166

Post by visarga » Mon, Oct 17, 2022, 11:44 PM UTC

rcoder wrote: post #122

keithnz wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why use the API? why not just use git to get the code? All you need the API for is repository discovery

I'm gonna guess that Microsoft GitHub (tm) would shut you down pretty quickly if you tried to clone tens or hundreds of thousands of repos in a short window of time, b/c of course that's sketchy/abusive use of their infrastructure, right? But of course if the data is already sitting in object storage inside your cloud environment and all you have to do is run some MapReduce jobs to get at it... Hence: unfair, anticom…

There are accessible code datasets that contain massive scrapes of Github.

Re: GitHub Copilot investigation

#167

Post by noitpmeder » Mon, Oct 17, 2022, 11:44 PM UTC

deworms wrote: post #139

smt88 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Copilot wouldn't be shut down or neutered because "a few vocal people" protested against it. It would be because it's illegal and violates the licenses, desires, and intentions of the thousands of workers who wrote the code in its corpus. You act like Microsoft is trying to do a public service and people are angry about it. The reality is that they're taking billions of hours of work and using it to build a product t…

Quoted post unavailable.

It definitely does violate licenses -- this is true EVEN WHEN the repo they pulled it from is the original violator.

Re: GitHub Copilot investigation

#168

Post by epolanski » Mon, Oct 17, 2022, 11:45 PM UTC

elfatizer wrote: post #49

There are lots of comments arguing for or against Copilot on a value judgment, and having an opinion on it being ethical or legal, etc isn't going to be the same for everyone. But I think regardless of where you stand, there should be some sort of legal ruling to clarify the gray areas that Butterick breaks down.

Bingo, I feel so uneasy at the thought we could risk a lawsuit because a colleague put unlicensed code in our repos.

Re: GitHub Copilot investigation

#169

Post by nmilo » Mon, Oct 17, 2022, 11:45 PM UTC

rockemsockem wrote: post #128

What do people think the future looks like where publicly available resources on the Internet (art, code, etc) aren't fair use for training ML models? Where you have to opt into models or can opt out (and many wind up doing so)? OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, et al will STILL train such models that can do all the same things, but it will be much harder for non-industry-backed individuals to navigate the legal minefield w…

> What do people think the future looks like where publicly available resources on the Internet (art, code, etc) aren't fair use for training ML models?

A better future to me. I don't want pictures of my face training ML models, nor do I want my art, or my code. I don't want my face to be more recognizable to AI, and I don't want my work to contribute to the consolidation of power to a few big firms. And for what, what can ML models even bring me besides surveillance? Cool art? Text-to-speech?

Re: GitHub Copilot investigation

#170

Post by noitpmeder » Mon, Oct 17, 2022, 11:45 PM UTC

Spivak wrote: post #108

jfghi wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d claim that it’s more than a “few vocal” protestors. If the system is illegal, it needs to become legal or disappear. If I’m writing code for a query optimizer, the SQL Server solution isn’t going to magically show up.

It’s not illegal, it’s at worst a fancy code search tool that Github has the right to show you the results via the license you grant them when you upload and make public code on Github which is way stronger than other search engines like Sourcegraph have to show public code. It doesn’t mean you have the right to use any of the code it generates but Copilot itself isn’t illegal in any meaningful sense.

This is definitely not true. When your license requires you bundle said license with any reproductions of the code, and Copilot spits out said code sans license, they are breaking the law.