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GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

githubcopilotinvestigation.com

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Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#201

Post by baryphonic »

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? Where you have to opt into models or can opt out (and many wind up doing so)?

A future where technology is developed in accordance with longstanding law? Also, maybe a future where my copyrighted works are compensated for when they're being used to automate my job away? If the music industry can deal with royalties, maybe software can, too?

> 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 where you must ensure you properly attribute your model outputs, only train on opt-in data, etc, etc. Surely no one really thinks that a court case against Microsoft/OpenAI (even if they lose) would stop CoPilot?

I'd expect injunctions against Microsoft/OpenAI from further training CoPilot with inappropriately-licensed code. I'd expect damages for all of the instances of copyrighted material that CoPilot regurgitates.

> Most of these complaints seem to be extremely emotional and cherry-picked. "People's legal rights are being violated!" (you definitely don't know that, no one knows that, the article is 100% right about that), "look I prompted CoPilot for this piece of code that I already knew about and it spit it right out" (that's not how it's going to be used in practice).

How are these emotional? They're opinions, like all legal claims, supported by facts. It doesn't really matter if they're "cherry-picked" or not, only whether CoPilot actually violated copyright. If it gives seemingly novel results 999 times out of 1000, but in the other case verbatim generates copyrighted material without proper permission, then that is a copyright violation. At scale, that's a copyright violation with some modest damages even.

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#202

Post by bigiain »

melony wrote: post #53
bigiain wrote: post #41

This is a bit off-topic, but I wonder if there are people/teams right now creating git repos, doing the source code equivalent of "SEO" on it, and embedding backdoors in stupidly overoptimized for the training process code? I wonder when we'll hear about the first big hack that gets traced back to production code pushed live after CoPilot "suggested" eval(base64decode({webshell}))

If that code managed to hit production, then the problem is with the management and engineering leadership, not Copilot.

And none of us here have ever worked under incompetent management or engineering leadership...

(Hell, I've _been_ that incompetent management and engineering leadership at various times over the last few decades...)

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#203

Post by numpad0 »

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…

I think I agree with this comment[1] from the other thread; never previously thought that a process being transformative means input and output datatypes do not coincide, but maybe that is it.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33240681

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#204

Post by chiefalchemist »

> Arguably, Microsoft is cre­at­ing a new walled gar­den that will inhibit pro­gram­mers from dis­cov­er­ing tra­di­tional open-source com­mu­ni­ties. Or at the very least, remove any incen­tive to do so.

The walled garden bit I get. But I'm lost making the leap to "remove any incentive to do so." Is Butterick suggesting that someone is going to put aside their code and do a deep dive on GitHub looking for a snippet that might not exist?

I'm not trolling. I'm sincerely trying to grasp the argument being made.

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#205

Post by j2kun »

invig wrote: post #150

What's with the default to "if it's not explicitly legal, it must be illegal"? Imagine if every new piece of software your wrote had to be tested for legality because you don't know that it's explicitly legal. Oh there aren't laws for this new thing, so I guess you should challenge yourself all the way to the supreme court? I get the author not liking Copilot, but I don't see that GitHub/Microsoft have any kind of ob…

The licenses in question in this issue make it explicitly illegal for Copilot to reproduce their code.

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#206

Post by arrosenberg »

Plasmoid wrote: post #188
planetsprite wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any law where the penalty is a fine only exists for the poor. Any regulation where the penalty is in the millions only exists for small businesses.

I guess that's true. If you consider laws to be strictly transactional then you can totally do the crime if you're willing to do the time. I'm just not convinced by the idea that any penalty less than death isn't a penalty.

Lots of distance between small monetary fines and a death penalty. I would settle for executives and board members going to jail when they do crimes.

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#207

Post by jen20 »

honkler wrote: post #177
jen20 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue with copilot is that it is not respecting clause 1.

so what? You can put on a cowboy hat and larp as one, but that does not mean everyone else around you have to take it seriously. Same way with these made up licenses. If it's on the internet, it belongs to all. Or else keep it with yourself.

So, if you are not compliant with the posted license, you are in violation of copyright.

This is no different whether you are honkler or Microsoft (other than in how vigorously or not someone may enforce it).

If you really believe that anything posted to the internet ‘belongs to all’ then I don’t know what to tell you other than you live in a fantasy land where Oracle Corporation does not exist. We might all prefer it if things were that way, but they simply aren’t, and that’s just tough.

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#208

Post by gspencley »

invig wrote: post #150

What's with the default to "if it's not explicitly legal, it must be illegal"? Imagine if every new piece of software your wrote had to be tested for legality because you don't know that it's explicitly legal. Oh there aren't laws for this new thing, so I guess you should challenge yourself all the way to the supreme court? I get the author not liking Copilot, but I don't see that GitHub/Microsoft have any kind of ob…

> What's with the default to "if it's not explicitly legal, it must be illegal"?

That's not how I interpret what's happening.

People who produce things have rights over their products. Be it artists, craftsmen, inventors, entrepreneurs or coders. There is a legitimate question here as to whether CoPilot has infringed upon those rights. I don't see it being about "making something illegal." I see it about answering a valid question as to whether CoPilot is liable for measurable damages caused to creators under existing laws.

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#209

Post by jacooper »

visarga wrote: post #179
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…

> 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. Copilot makes source code much more open, if you think about it. It implements code reuse in a different way than classes and libraries. It offers its skills equally to everyone, skills learned from everyone. As for the cost of the API - it's expensive to run large langua…

Free/libre software ≠ free as beer.

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#210

Post by belltaco »

verisimilitudes wrote: post #133

Never forget this is how people who dare to reverse engineer Windows are treated: https://www.theregister.com/2019/07/03/reactos_windows_resea... https://marc.info/?l=ros-dev&m=118775346131654&w=2 I don't use Github, but fuckers upload my code there anyway. Copyright is evil, but only large corporations having copyright, even more than they already do, is even worse.

They're treated with an email to the mailing list? Was there C&D or lawsuit? You make it sound like the ReactOS devs were thrown into prison.
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