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GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

githubcopilotinvestigation.com

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Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#631

Post by cycomanic »

naikrovek wrote: post #399
jarsj wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But is it illegal for AI to provide the said assistance ? That, I believe, is the bigger question.

when you put your code on GitHub.com, you grant GitHub the right to show that code to others. https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/github-terms/github-t... this is separate from the license you specify in the repository and you can't revoke it without removing your code from github.com.

From the text:

>We need the legal right to do things like host Your Content, publish it, and share it. You grant us and our legal successors the right to store, archive, parse, and display Your Content, and make incidental copies, as necessary to provide the Service, including improving the Service over time. This license includes the right to do things like copy it to our database and make backups; show it to you and other users; parse it into a search index or otherwise analyze it on our servers; share it with other users; and perform it, in case Your Content is something like music or video.

>This license does not grant GitHub the right to sell Your Content. It also does not grant GitHub the right to otherwise distribute or use

I would say they would have a pretty hard time to justify using the content for AI training (and selling) based on that license. Copilot didn't exist at the time when many agreed to that license, so an argument saying Copilot is part of the service would be difficult to pull off. Moreover they don't even provide copilot to people hosting on GitHub.

Note that MS themselves are not claiming that they are allowed to use the code due to their terms of service. They claim they can do it due to fair use.

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#632

Post by pengaru »

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…

> It is genuinely useful. I don't care that it reproduces copyrighted content.

Plagiarizing is already understood to be a genuinely useful practice.

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#633

Post by perryizgr8 »

I am glad all the legal bs didn't stop MS from making the product. Copilot is surprisingly effective, it truly makes life easier for me, as a developer. The fact is that if you give your code away publicly, you cannot finely control what the world does with it. If this is not acceptable to you, keep your IP private.

If these guys manage to shut down or cripple Copilot using legal mechanisms, you can bet there will be a Chinese/Russian alternative that will be even more indifferent to your LICENSE.md, and you won't be able to get it shut down using the courts.

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#634

Post by xigoi »

johnfn wrote: post #535
burkaman wrote: post #515

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's hardly a new thing! For instance, Google search makes billions of dollars by indexing content that other people make.

Google Search links to the original content. Copilot doesn't.

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#635

Post by perryizgr8 »

neurostimulant wrote: post #626
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 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. Maybe you can exercise some discipline when using copilot, but what about your coworkers? Many companies might not want their employees to insert copyrighted codes into their projects accidentally.

> Many companies might not want their employees to insert copyrighted codes into their projects accidentally.

They can opt not to pay for this entirely voluntary service.

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#636

Post by a254613e »

mgraczyk wrote: post #477

All this discussion of legality is interesting to me, because I'm pretty sure that if Github ran a search in the background, found the corresponding license for the code snippet, then showed it to the user in some cookie-banner like annoyance, it would be completely legal. This is what Github already does on their website with a search bar. Yet somehow I think most people upset about Copilot would not like that outco…

By the way, Amazon's CodeWhisperer does that.

> in very rare cases, an independently generated code recommendation may resemble a unique code snippet in the training data. By notifying you when this happens, and providing you the repository and licensing information, CodeWhisperer makes it easier for you to decide whether to use the code in your project and make the relevant source code attributions as you see fit.

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#637

Post by brian_cloutier »

bugfix-66 wrote: post #616
brian_cloutier wrote: post #593

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're saying any work created by a model trained on copyrighted data is a derivative work of that copyrighted data. But this can't be right, it is inconsistent with how copyright has worked so far. Artists and musicians and engineers all learn from each other and have seen and learned from, "trained on" many other examples of works from their field. Even when works are clearly inspired by other works we tend…

Yes. The copyright law must change. This is different.

why must it change, why is this different? genuinely curious

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#638

Post by Siira »

didibus wrote: post #588
andyp-kw wrote: post #504

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> a very optimized stitching of code it previously saw.

I have seen this line repeated many times, but I never saw it actually explained. A lookup table is dumb and easy to understand/interpret. Deep models are not that. They are also not a linear interpolation of … something. What exactly is the claim being made here? Yes, deep models don’t generalize too well on ood data. How does this make them a “very optimized” lookup table?

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#639

Post by nearbuy »

jonathankoren wrote: post #398
rockemsockem wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, he clearly knew about that code in advance and used his prior knowledge to coax Copilot into spitting it out, yeah? Three characters can get you pretty far, that's 1 combination out of 125,580 (considering all english letters, upper and lower, along with most of the numbers and symbols on my keyboard), plus the description of a fairly complex algorithm. Also, this code is really just executing a mathematical…

> Even if it is a copyright violation, that is one out of, IDK, millions, maybe billions already of Copilot completions? Are you saying that because there are millions of copyright violations, Copilot is too big to fail? Or are you’d saying that Copilot is too big to be held accountable for flagrant violations of the law? I guarantee Copilot’s developers knew it was spitting out verbatim code. It’s too obvious, and p…

I interpreted it as them saying only a tiny, tiny fraction of Copilot completions violate copyright.

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#640

Post by naet »

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…

I see this basic logic in almost AI ethics threads, and it starts with a big assumption: "humans learn from copyrighted source material without copyright violation". This then gets tenuously extended to "ai also learns, so it must not be in violation of copyright law".

The first assumption is highly flawed though. Humans routinely do violate copyright law. Plagiarism is a huge problem in many sectors; un-cited direct copies of people's work in violation of fair use is a regular every day occurrence in the human world. It doesn't matter if you memorized the source material or if you transcribed it or if you copy and pasted it, if it isn't your source material and is someone else's, you've committed a violation of the law. Learning to produce original work and reproducing someone else's work is not the same thing. If an AI is ingesting and perfectly reproducing someone else's copyrighted works, it is in violation of copyright law in the same way a human would be if they reproduce someone else's copyrighted works.

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