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GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

githubcopilotinvestigation.com

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Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#721

Post by randomsearch »

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.

I tried copilot and found it an excellent way to inject subtle bugs into my code. It always had a seemingly plausible guess, that was never correct, and coding turned into a guessing game trying to spot the bugs it had injected and hoping I’d found them all.

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#722

Post by forgotpwd16 »

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 trying to bait it into reproducing heavily copy&pasted cherrypicked examples

You don't have to bait it.

>I won't use 20 lines of its output with zero modification.

Depending on changes that may still be derivative work. The entire concept reminds me that can I copy your homework meme.

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#723

Post by qwerty456127 »

It makes sense to copyright a book, but it doesn't makes sense to copyright a phrase (unless you are using it as a trademark motto or something like that), normally phrases are free for anybody to re-use. It makes sense to copyright a program, but it doesn't make sense to copyright a piece of code.

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#724

Post by abigail95 »

j2kun wrote: post #205
invig wrote: post #150

What's with the default to "if it's not explicitly legal, it must be illegal"? Imagine if every new piece of software your wrote had to be tested for legality because you don't know that it's explicitly legal. Oh there aren't laws for this new thing, so I guess you should challenge yourself all the way to the supreme court? I get the author not liking Copilot, but I don't see that GitHub/Microsoft have any kind of ob…

The licenses in question in this issue make it explicitly illegal for Copilot to reproduce their code.

I don't care what your license is, I'm going to use it and I'm going to claim fair use.

What's explicitly illegal about this?

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#725

Post by carom »

rickydroll wrote: post #652

RSI took away my ability to write any significant amount of code 30 yrs ago. co-pilot plus speech recognition restored that ability. what impressed me most was that from a textual description,co-pilot gave me code that could have been written by my mind and pre-injury hands. from the comments here, if I push copilot into giving me code that I would have written for a given problem and that code violates licenses, the…

The issue isn't that something like copilot shouldn't exist. The issue is the disregard for open source. You want a proprietary code completion tool? License your training set properly. If you want to build on open source then open source it and what it produces.

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#726

Post by PAMANOCH »

The problems have almost nothing to do with deep learning stuff. They are on the companies who develop such products.

If a company use someone's code for a commercial product (a normal app), they do need to follow the license accordingly. If a company use someone's code for a commercial product (model training), they don't need to follow anything.

If a company use someone's art piece for a commercial product (a normal game), they do need to get consent, and pay for the right to use to the hosting platform or artists themselves if it is not royalty free. If a company use someone's art piece for a commercial product (model training), they don't need to get consent or pay for anything.

All the problems actually happen before the technical details, making the entire pipeline questionable.

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#727

Post by dkyc »

dgellow wrote: post #710
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…

> It seems clear enough to me that training AIs on copyrighted works is typically or commonly a fair use under existing law Which laws are considered in this case? I understand that fair use is a US concept. For example how does that apply to my projects, published and licensed by a European living in a European country? I would expect the majority of GitHub contributors to not be based in the US, so what laws should…

From GitHub’s Terms of Service [0]:

> Except to the extent applicable law provides otherwise, this Agreement between you and GitHub and any access to or use of the Website or the Service are governed by the federal laws of the United States of America and the laws of the State of California, without regard to conflict of law provisions. You and GitHub agree to submit to the exclusive jurisdiction and venue of the courts located in the City and County of San Francisco, California.

[0] https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/github-terms/github-t...

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#728

Post by Sydneyco »

cool-RR wrote: post #716

While the moral and legal discussions here are interesting and worth exploring, I find this text hyperbolic. Its premise is that the main way that people currently interact with open-source projects is by digging into their source code, copy-pasting away a snippet of code that solves a particular problem, and then of course giving the authors the required attribution. This is far from the truth. The main usage of mos…

I agree with that.

Also, if we agree that GitHub copilot enables you to be more productive as a developer. Can we argue that it could help open-source communities by helping them finish projects faster?

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#729

Post by peoplefromibiza »

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…

> A human being doesn't violate copyright in learning from a copyrighted work, including when that human being is later more able to produce other works based on that learning

Not really.

A human being learns by doing, it takes a lot of time, their knowledge is not transferable, and, above all, they buy the material they learn from (most of the time) It's not fair use, it's "I paid for the entire opera" , sometimes multiple times: different editions, movies, tv shows, etc.

Secondly, it's not true that derivative material is automatically copyright free.

It is in all honesty the contrary, most derivative work that reached popularity is plagued with plagiarism, lack of attribution, undisclosed ghost authors etc. all things that get settled with a contract or in court if the publisher thinks it's worth it.

Otherwise the publication simply disappears.

In other cases the work is licensed, so that the publisher can use someone else's IP and literally resell other people's ideas and/or change them the way they like (or the license permits), without having to create new material and take the risk that nobody will notice it.

Case in point (among too many)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_disputes_over_the_Harr...

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#730

Post by rhdunn »

chrismcb wrote: post #605
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…

It seems pretty clear to me, training an AI on copyrighted materials is not fair use. I'm not sure why you seem to think it is fair use

It depends on what the AI is learning.

If the AI is learning to repeat text (e.g. Copilot) or images (e.g. Dall-E), then that makes it possible to reproduce the copyrighted works, so I would agree that that case is not fair use. -- It would be akin to compressing and distributing those works.

If the AI is learning patterns -- such as "muggle" being a noun that relates to Harry Potter, or that the lemma for "muggles" is "muggle" -- then that is less clear. You can avoid the situation by creating your own sentences with those terms in them, and annotating those sentences instead of the copyrighted ones. That way, the AI is still learning the same information.

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