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GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

githubcopilotinvestigation.com

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Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#581

Post by cycomanic »

schoen wrote: post #486

Here are a few thoughts I haven't formulated before: It seems clear enough to me that training AIs on copyrighted works is typically or commonly a fair use under existing law, because the AIs can and commonly do learn non-copyrightable elements and aspects of those works. It's very obvious from enormous numbers of examples that current AI systems are capable of learning much more abstract features of human culture (g…

> Here are a few thoughts I haven't formulated before:

> It seems clear enough to me that training AIs on copyrighted works is typically or commonly a fair use under existing law, because the AIs can and commonly do learn non-copyrightable elements and aspects of those works. It's very obvious from enormous numbers of examples that current AI systems are capable of learning much more abstract features of human culture (grammar, concepts, facts, cultural tropes, and many others).

I said it already in a previous discussion, I would be very careful with comparing ML with how humans learn. To me there are still a lot of examples that show that AIs don't understand prompts (see e.g. the discussions around the "horse riding astronaut" prompts för stable diffusion et al.) and it seems like they really are just doing sophisticated pattern matching. If that is what they do aren't they themselves covered by the licenses/ restrictions placed on the "patterns" they "choose" from?

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#582

Post by remram »

cercatrova wrote: post #26
ja3k wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Over time, this process will starve these com­mu­ni­ties. User atten­tion and engage­ment will be shifted into the walled gar­den of Copi­lot and away from the open-source projects them­selves The author seems to be implying that since Copilot can reproduce the code of open source repository X in certain scenarios there'd be no reason for programmers to learn/use/engage with repository X. But this is silly. Maybe s…

It also doesn't make any sense. Copilot suggesting to me the signature of a function from some library is not actually the same as executing that library. That library still needs to be downloaded onto my computer to be executed. And who will write new features to a library if not for the people who are interested in that?

Open-source licenses have terms that apply to the source code, not "execution", so I really don't understand your point?

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#583

Post by sweetheart »

burkaman wrote: post #515
woah wrote: post #491

It would be sad if someone succeeded in shutting down CoPilot for this kind of copyright stuff. It is genuinely useful. I don't care that it reproduces copyrighted content. The only way you can get it to do that is to bait it with the function names of functions that have already been copy and pasted thousands of times onto GitHub without proper licenses. Luckily, someone will probably come out with a "renegade" vers…

I don't think most people are concerned that Copilot is going to be reproducing verbatim copyrighted code, it's more that it sucks that a giant corporation is going to make a billion dollars from a tool that is entirely built off of millions of peoples' work who were never asked permission and will never be compensated.

I don’t think anyone really cares about that kind of stuff, though. Like, there are loads of examples of similar things which no one (rightfully) bags an eye at. Like if I take a photograph of you out in the public and sell the photo for $1 million, would you expect compensation? Or if someone compiles a list of the best restaurants in the world and sells that list, do you think the restaurants should be compensated?

The value that is being derived here is in the curation of the material, not the material itself.

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#584

Post by AlexandrB »

kmeisthax wrote: post #568

If Copilot itself is infringing then so is GPT-3, DALL-E 2, NovelAI, and Stable Diffusion. There's no legal argument that would solely target one application of this technology, and you can't build generative AI using current ML tools without relying on a very large corpus of public data. All AI is built on free-riding[0]. While there is no US case law that explicitly says "training AI is fair use", the Second Circui…

> And the absolute worst interpretation of AI is that it's just a very well-compressed search engine index for its training set data[1].

I don't think this parallel makes sense because a search engine links to copyrighted works, each of which is still governed by its original copyright, while these AI create derivative works or reproduce the original works without even attribution.

Indeed, if an AI was just and index for the training set there would be less of a problem because the origin of a work could be found and its license honored.

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#585

Post by reflexe »

schoen wrote: post #486

Here are a few thoughts I haven't formulated before: It seems clear enough to me that training AIs on copyrighted works is typically or commonly a fair use under existing law, because the AIs can and commonly do learn non-copyrightable elements and aspects of those works. It's very obvious from enormous numbers of examples that current AI systems are capable of learning much more abstract features of human culture (g…

Maybe the solution here is do adopt the approach from humans: if you independently produce someone's copyrighted work and then discover about it - you'll drop it. The same approach could be used here, they can add a check for the similarity between the output and the original training material, if it is above a threshold, they'll drop the suggestion (maybe they are already doing that).

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#586

Post by trap_goes_hot »

mkr-hn wrote: post #529

A sizable, possibly plurality cohort of fully adult tech people is young enough to not know about United States v. Microsoft Corp. This would explain a lot of comments I see on this topic. If you don't know Microsoft's history, a lot of what more informed people are worried about seems overblown. Copilot was Microsoft's first test of people's trust after the GitHub acquisition. It's going very, very, very poorly. The…

>If you don't know Microsoft's history, a lot of what more informed people are worried about seems overblown.

Or maybe they do know about it, and don't agree with you. Do you allow for such an option?

https://github.com/features/copilot

"What can I do to reduce GitHub Copilot’s suggestion of code that matches public code?

We built a filter to help detect and suppress the rare instances where a GitHub Copilot suggestion contains code that matches public code on GitHub. You have the choice to turn that filter on or off during setup. With the filter on, GitHub Copilot checks code suggestions with its surrounding code for matches or near matches (ignoring whitespace) against public code on GitHub of about 150 characters. If there is a match, the suggestion will not be shown to you. We plan on continuing to evolve this approach and welcome feedback and comment."

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#587

Post by comex »

jakelazaroff wrote: post #551
dmix wrote: post #520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> in the same way that hacking into a competitor's GitHub account That's like comparing grand-theft auto to someone stealing a pack of gum from a convenience store. It's not a useful analogy. The latter is still a problem, but we don't need to be FUDy about it. And OPs right, this will keep happening until we come up with better ways of solving this problem. Whether that's educating companies on the legal (and moral)…

OP can correct me if I'm wrong, but they don't seem particularly interested in solving anything. They literally said "I don't care that it reproduces copyrighted content." So the problem, as I see it, is the people who see the laundering of open source and proprietary code as a draw , rather than a drawback .

Not sure if they edited their comment, but the end of it contradicts your interpretation:

> I won't be afraid of accidently violating copyright myself, because I won't be trying to bait it into reproducing heavily copy&pasted cherrypicked examples, and I won't use 20 lines of its output with zero modification.

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#588

Post by didibus »

andyp-kw wrote: post #504
nightski wrote: post #498

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally I'm not worried about the end user using copyrighted code. That is their responsibility. If you have verbatim GPL code in your commercial closed source code base that is a liability and it might be dangerous to use copilot. What I have more of a problem with is Microsoft charging for copilot which was trained on copyrighted code without any permission whatsoever which they really have no right to utilize/c…

As a human, if I learn how to program by studying copyrighted code, is it unethical for me to use that knowledge to make a living ?

I'll repeat something I asked elsewhere here.

From what I understand, it is not proven that the AI uses the knowledge of concepts and logic to write the new code. It is likely that it actually performs instead a very optimized stitching of code it previously saw.

Is my understanding outdated here?

From the ethical point of view, I'd say you're making some assumptions here that result in it being ethical when a human does it, and those assumptions might not hold for an AI.

For example, you're assuming a win/win outcome, where your learnings from copyrighted open source code don't harm the original authors ability to find work, or the value of their code.

With an AI I think there are possibilities we're looking at a win/lose situation, where Microsoft wins big, and maybe some other developers that also profit of their use of copilot, but where the original authors of the code that went to train it see their skills be devalued over time as a direct consequence.

In my opinion, a win/lose is unethical. What I'm not convinced is that we're looking at a win/lose, but I think there's a possibility.

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#589

Post by gamekathu »

A bit of a controversial opinion: to those who are defending CoPilot saying it "boosted my productivity" and would miss it if it is discontinued, maybe you are not a productive developer to begin with. I fail to see how searching the same snippets on Google or saving commonly used macros in your favorite editor would not yield the same amount of productivity. I have used CoPilot for several months and I actively stopped using it, because I was afraid I will be dependent on it, and it would actually reduce my ability to do critical code-building. I'm happy without it - sure it takes some micro seconds more to type out my code instead of autogenerating it, but I feel much more self confident in my own coding skills.

CoPilot is a great research work - it is indeed spectacular to see how pre-training can achieve such impressive code completion results. However, in my honest opinion, it should not be a tool for a serious developer.

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#590

Post by muzani »

bogota wrote: post #461
muzani wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Like everything in life. Its all about extracting value from someone else who has no control over the exploitation. You only notice when you are the one being exploited though. As long as some company can improve its bottom line it’s all good though

That's... the exact opposite of a community. Communities are about contributing whatever you can, and taking what you need. There's more joy in giving than taking. Exploitation happens when someone is taking advantage of that tendency to give.

Eventually someone comes in and takes everything that isn't nailed down and then sells it, and that becomes the problem.

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