Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

githubcopilotinvestigation.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

431–440 of 1001 posts

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#431

Post by bugfix-66 »

egypturnash wrote: post #423

It's hilarious how when I express displeasure about AI image generators looking likely to take a huge bite out of my profession of "artist" and playing extremely fast and loose with fair use, I get told that it's completely inevitable now and I should either retrain as a prompt engineer or go join the buggy whip manufacturers, but now that this is clearly violating programmer copyrights, you folks are starting to get…

You're absolutely right.

Copilot and Dall-E (and so on) are all bad in the same way.

Many of us agree with you.

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#432

Post by muzani »

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…

It says why in the linked post. People aren't doing open source for free; they do it for the community. But Copilot is there to extract value from it, giving nothing back, not even credit.

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#433

Post by int_19h »

scarface74 wrote: post #102
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. I wonder how many people on HN would be on the side of the creators if we were talking about content created by Walt Disney and whether pirating was ethical?

I don't think many people here would object if Copilot was trained on all the publicly available source code from before 1930.

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#434

Post by mbf1 »

macinjosh wrote: post #353
Ecco wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It doesn't matter what you believe. It matters what the judge and jury say when this goes to trial, and it will go to trial because Microsoft has a lot of money.

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#435

Post by spywaregorilla »

klyrs wrote: post #289
spywaregorilla wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Suppose you wanted to do what some code does, then you see this LGPL code. What can you do? Adjust variable names and play with line spacing and comments until it feels different?

First off, that's a library of pedagogical implementations, so I wouldn't even want to copy it -- I'd prefer a library focused on performance. Second, it's linear algebra, there are alternative implementations and libraries out there. Third, it's covered by the LGPL, so I'd be perfectly happy to link to the library. Fourth, I'd look up a pseudocode description and go from there. In no case would I sit down with anoth…

So if it's fine to copy the pseudocode implementation of a non public use codebase, then you couldn't possibly object to recreating a codebase into a different language then, right?

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#436

Post by JoshuaRogers »

naikrovek wrote: post #403
nathanaldensr wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 phi…

it's not copyright violation. no one reads... https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/github-terms/github-t... when you put code on github.com you grant GitHub the right to show that code to others, independent of the license you choose for your code. full stop. doesn't matter if it's on a webpage, a git client, or a github-developed plugin to an IDE.

While that certainly covers some code on GitHub, much of the code on there is just mirrored from other locations by non-owners: you can find copies of the Linux kernel and SQLite on GitHub, for instance. The users who upload those to GitHub have the right to do so (legally) but do not have any rights that they could grant to GitHub.

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#437

Post by corndoge »

egypturnash wrote: post #423

It's hilarious how when I express displeasure about AI image generators looking likely to take a huge bite out of my profession of "artist" and playing extremely fast and loose with fair use, I get told that it's completely inevitable now and I should either retrain as a prompt engineer or go join the buggy whip manufacturers, but now that this is clearly violating programmer copyrights, you folks are starting to get…

Unless the image generators routinely generate specific works produced by you (or other artists) then it’s not a directly comparable situation to Copilot.

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#438

Post by Imnimo »

>Copi­lot intro­duces what we might call a more self­ish inter­face to open-source soft­ware: just give me what I want! With Copi­lot, open-source users never have to know who made their soft­ware. They never have to inter­act with a com­mu­nity. They never have to con­tribute.

>Mean­while, we open-source authors have to watch as our work is stashed in a big code library in the sky called Copi­lot. The user feed­back & con­tri­bu­tions we were get­ting? Soon, all gone.

I don't see how you square the above complaint with this:

> First, the objec­tion here is not to AI-assisted cod­ing tools gen­er­ally, but to Microsoft’s spe­cific choices with Copi­lot. We can eas­ily imag­ine a ver­sion of Copi­lot that’s friend­lier to open-source devel­op­ers—for instance, where par­tic­i­pa­tion is vol­un­tary, or where coders are paid to con­tribute to the train­ing cor­pus.

Is an AI that was trained on opt-in or paid-for training data any less damaging? How would these choices have alleviated the problems described above?

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#439

Post by spywaregorilla »

andrewxdiamond wrote: post #282
spywaregorilla wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Suppose you wanted to do what some code does, then you see this LGPL code. What can you do? Adjust variable names and play with line spacing and comments until it feels different?

Write it yourself

I wrote it myself and it came out looking very similar. What do I do?

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#440

Post by muzani »

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…

I think it's a gray area in the license. Much of the code was intended to be used freely and commercially by others, but not for AI training. It follows the license to the letter, but not the intent.

I expect we'll see new licenses appear making it clear whether or not the content can be used for training.

Post reply on HN