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GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

githubcopilotinvestigation.com

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Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#351

Post by ai_hypocrite »

nonasktell wrote: post #301

Why would anyone want to stop Copilot is beyond me. Reinventing the wheel, millions of time a day, is an atrocity. Millions of (wo)man hours, wasted, every single day, on writing solutions to problems that have already been solved. There is a partial solution to this, and it's making people angry, it's crazy. If you put your code publicly on the internet, you should expect that people will reuse your code at some poi…

If the copyright holders are so difficult, why not restrict the scanning to code of enlightened people like yourself?

My guess is that there wouldn't be much to scan ...

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#352

Post by nathanaldensr »

nonasktell wrote: post #301

Why would anyone want to stop Copilot is beyond me. Reinventing the wheel, millions of time a day, is an atrocity. Millions of (wo)man hours, wasted, every single day, on writing solutions to problems that have already been solved. There is a partial solution to this, and it's making people angry, it's crazy. If you put your code publicly on the internet, you should expect that people will reuse your code at some poi…

You're asking for people to be okay with potential copyright violations and a removal of attribution because of the common need. Like all things, there must be balance. Open source would not exist if the only use of its output was to train ML models that hide where the code comes from. Part of the allure of open source--maybe the biggest allure, honestly--is the community aspect. I get to find friends, contribute philanthropically, and feel proud of my contributions. Copilot removes any incentive I have to produce code for free.

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#353

Post by macinjosh »

Ecco wrote: post #306
nonasktell wrote: post #301

Why would anyone want to stop Copilot is beyond me. Reinventing the wheel, millions of time a day, is an atrocity. Millions of (wo)man hours, wasted, every single day, on writing solutions to problems that have already been solved. There is a partial solution to this, and it's making people angry, it's crazy. If you put your code publicly on the internet, you should expect that people will reuse your code at some poi…

You’re missing the point. It’s not an ego problem: if you put your code on the internet with a license you should expect people to respect the license’s rules…

Not everyone believes in intellectual property and good luck enforcing that license worldwide.

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#354

Post by Aperocky »

Aeolun wrote: post #339
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.

> using GitHub APIs to download the data yourself isn't possible Is it? Data storage would be prohibitive, but I can see ways to download the entirety of Github in a few weeks/months (assuming my size estimate is accurate).

It's probably the reverse - the data can probably fit in a few commercially available hard drives, the API calls to discover and download all repository without running afoul of the rate limiters and whatever other anti-crawling strategies can take years if you're running it single threaded (a single IP can effectively be considered single threaded).

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#355

Post by Overdr0ne »

nonasktell wrote: post #301

Why would anyone want to stop Copilot is beyond me. Reinventing the wheel, millions of time a day, is an atrocity. Millions of (wo)man hours, wasted, every single day, on writing solutions to problems that have already been solved. There is a partial solution to this, and it's making people angry, it's crazy. If you put your code publicly on the internet, you should expect that people will reuse your code at some poi…

If an ai model is allowed to emit copy-left code verbatim in proprietary software, you can effectively create a gpl 3 stripper. I don't think that ultimately serves your goal of intellectual sharing

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#356

Post by strix_varius »

19h wrote: post #52

I'd be rather saddened if Copilot was shut down or neutered because of a few vocal few protesting against it. It's been a massive productivity improvement to our senior devs, and I got so used to it that it's an annoyance when Copilot doesn't respond.

> It's been a massive productivity improvement to our senior devs

I would hate to work at a place where advanced-but-untrustworthy autocomplete would, at all, impact the productivity of a senior engineer.

Not only does this indicate that your senior engineers' productivity is measured poorly (lines of code), but also that your senior engineers are paid to type, rather than to think.

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#357

Post by nathanaldensr »

Aeolun wrote: post #348
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. Yeah, the vocal few. Do you think I give a rats ass that Copilot is duplicating my OS code? I have to imagine most people are completely ambivalent. Of course I have no proof, I just can’t imagine anything else. The lines probably fall somewhere along the MIT vs GPL camps…

The funny thing is that even the MIT license requires attribution, which of course Copilot doesn't provide.

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#358

Post by anon2020dot00 »

P5fRxh5kUvp2th wrote: post #317
anon2020dot00 wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A few snippets of code is not a product. If there was an open-source money-making product and someone builds a competing product using considerable help from CoPilot then that is a stronger case for damages then if someone just used some snippets of code in their own product. But at that point, it would be just like someone cloning the Github code without following the license and in that case, it should become obvio…

a few snippets of a book also isn't a product, and yet it can absolutely be infringing.

If someone bought a copy of an educational book like "Learning Go" and used some code snippets from it in their own product, that's fair use. But if someone released the book as their own product titled "Learning Go Better" then that is a clear violation.

For open-source projects, CoPilot is in the realm of fair-use for snippets but it can be mis-used just like Github can be mis-used if someone blatantly copies a repository.

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#359

Post by nathanaldensr »

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.

Your comment amounts to "sometimes crime occurs; therefore, laws are pointless."`

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#360

Post by TigeriusKirk »

zo1 wrote: post #286
klyrs wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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.

Here is this guy's function copy-pasted on a SO question: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/17913191/using-typedef-i... Found it after 5 mins and a couple tweaks to the search terms. Another: https://vdoc.pub/documents/direct-methods-for-sparse-linear-... Someone copied this guy's book and put it on scribd: https://www.scribd.com/document/514019650/Direct-Methods-for... Someone put it on a "personal" edu page: http…

From what I've seen on the art side of things, the more a certain work has been copied in the real world (and thus in the training set multiple times), the more likely it is you're able to get a very close copy out of the model with the right prompts.

For example, I'm pretty sure this is why some models turn up a near exact version of The Girl With The Pearl Earring.

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