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GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

githubcopilotinvestigation.com

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Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#361

Post by saghm »

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…

> "People's legal rights are being violated!" (you definitely don't know that, no one knows that, the article is 100% right about that)

I'm not sure what the argument being made here is. If you make something opaque enough that no one can tell if it's violating legal rights, no one is allowed to say anything about it? This seems uncomfortably close to "it's only a crime if you get caught"

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#362

Post by klyrs »

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…

Other people doing it doesn't make it okay.

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#364

Post by gernb »

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…

My 2 cents,

1. I think if you don't want your code re-used in CoPilot you should have that right

2. I think if CoPilot gets smart enough that it can read your open source code and then reproduce the algorithms without copying your code that should be fair use. It's the same thing a human would do. AFAIK CoPilot can not do that but I can certainly imagine it's not too many years away from that.

3. I think I would opt into sharing all my open source code mostly unrestricted with services like CoPilot. I think the group of people that choose to share their code with AI will do better over all than those that lock their code behind licenses.

Note that I'm referring to snippets of code. I don't know what a good definition of snippet is. In other words, if AI helps me write chunks of 10-100 lines at a time I don't see a problem. Effectively, S.O. answer level of snippets. Whereas, if I tell AI "create LibreOffice" and it clones the millions of lines of code, I think that is a problem. I don't know where the cut off is.

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#365

Post by nonasktell »

mkr-hn wrote: post #310
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…

No one wants to stop what Copilot is being sold as. They want to stop the company selling it from doing what it is famous for doing.

Copilot is not selling code, they're selling GPU time. If you're ready to buy a hundred GPU/TPUs to train a new Copilot that is just as good, but for free, then go do it please, everyone will thank you

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#366

Post by pizza »

strix_varius wrote: post #356
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.

It doesn't indicate either of those things. It's a great tool when you're working on complex code that just reaches the limit of your working memory/attention, and has often suggested good and clean improvements for me. You may dislike it but there are people it helps.

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#367

Post by nonasktell »

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…

Expect you're not licensing functions, you're licensing a repository. If I use a sentence or even a paragraph from a copyrighted book, it's not copyright infringement.

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#368

Post by [deleted] »

nonasktell wrote: post #365
mkr-hn wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one wants to stop what Copilot is being sold as. They want to stop the company selling it from doing what it is famous for doing.

Copilot is not selling code, they're selling GPU time. If you're ready to buy a hundred GPU/TPUs to train a new Copilot that is just as good, but for free, then go do it please, everyone will thank you

[deleted]

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#370

Post by naikrovek »

> Why couldn’t Microsoft pro­duce any legal author­ity for its posi­tion?

Absence of proof is not proof of absence.

They don't owe anyone anything beyond what they agree to provide to users of Copilot via its license agreement or to GitHub users whose code it has used in accordance with that license agreement. Those agreements define what they owe. That's it.

The only way those license agreements don't hold up in court is if they are somehow deemed invalid. I do not see Microsoft making that kind of mistake.

This website is designed to get people angry, and that's all it is going to accomplish.

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