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GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

githubcopilotinvestigation.com

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Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#751

Post by nonrandomstring »

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 Is my understanding outdated here?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…

> It is likely that

Here's the real problem:

We're on a forum in which most of the participants are in at least the top 0.1% of technical ability, and yet here we are waving our hands and speculating on "what AIs think" and how "they probably/likely compute" things.

Last week I met with a director of a new "AI" research group, chuffed to the nines with a massive research grant he just landed. I'm happy for him, with only one little concern - that he knows nothing whatsoever about machine learning or mathematics and outspokenly doesn't believe that "knowledge is that important in the new reality".

Copyright infringement is an inconvenience for people who worry about that sort of stuff. Sure. But don't you all see a much more serious issue? It's bad enough that code is already so precariously bloated and over-complex nobody bothers to debug critical applications any more. Now we want to add "assistance" from tools that nobody understands.

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#752

Post by skeaker »

cycomanic wrote: post #599
oefrha wrote: post #530

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use Copilot all the time and I’ve never once used it to generate a whole prepackaged function that’s more than maybe three lines. So no, I don’t benefit from its reproducing other people’s code at all. Tell me you don’t use Copilot without telling me about it.

Ok so you don't care about the second part of the argument, you don't care about the danger of violating copyright.. The first question though is if training on large bodies of OSS is fair use. Are you saying you don't care about the copyright of your own work either? Or you don't care because you don't publish your work OSS?

I personally don't care about the copyright of my own work when it comes to code. I publish the majority of my work anonymously with a clause that just says something along the lines of "feel free to use some or all of this without any attribution." Denying others from using my code feels like it goes against the essence of OSS itself. It's like if I found the solution to some complicated math problem but didn't let anyone else see it because it's "mine."

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#753

Post by concordDance »

janef0421 wrote: post #196
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.

The people protesting aren't a "vocal few"; We're the people who made copilot possible. We are frustrated that our work is being used to profit a massive corporation without any compensation and in a way that we at best did not intend to allow and at worst is in direct violation of the terms we set.

Nah, you're definitely the few. Its not a random sample, but an informal survey of my coworkers found no one who would care and generally positive sentiment.

The people who comment on something are disproportionately those who care a great deal.

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#754

Post by abigail95 »

kelnos wrote: post #673
zarzavat wrote: post #665

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The law does not concern itself with trifles.[0] Programmers tend to think of copyright as a Boolean valued function. Either something is infringement or it isn’t. Judges think of copyright infringement as a real-valued function of many arguments corresponding to the circumstances of the parties (e.g. what actual damage was done?). A human quoting a human without attribution, without any profit made or identifiable d…

I'm not convinced of what you wrote. Is it actually true that cases like that are dismissed? Or is it that the infringing party is ordered to stop, but not damages are awarded to the rightsholder? You've offered no examples of dismissal to back up your statement. I absolutely agree with you that copyright is not a boolean, but I don't buy the idea that a judge will just shrug and allow infringement to continue just b…

Louisiana Contractors Licensing Serv., Inc. v. Am. Contractors Exam Servs., Inc., 13 F. Supp. 3d 547, 554

(sorry i wrecked the citation and lost where i found it)

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#756

Post by bobdvb »

macintux wrote: post #140
Kiro wrote: post #38

Abolish all copyright. We're all happily pirating movies and music but code is for some reason sacred.

> We're all happily pirating movies and music but code is for some reason sacred. Speak for yourself. I pay multiple streaming services, music and video, because I prefer creators be able to eat.

As someone who works at a streaming service: thank you.

We are people, we have ambitions and families. We're not just a faceless corporation.

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#757

Post by mkmk3 »

remram wrote: post #541
rmahan wrote: post #532

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GitHub’s free code storage, static site hosting, etc. is compensation If you aren’t paying for the product, you are the product.

You can't give someone a dime (that they could have easily picked up from any of your competitors too) and then break into their house claiming they had been compensated. In this case they even steal code authored by people who never used GitHub at all, but had someone else mirror it or publish it on GitHub.

Not fair, while giving you the dime I'm pretty sure they quietly whispered something about them getting to live in your walls as compensation

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#758

Post by marginalia_nu »

boomskats wrote: post #17

Everything else aside, the design on this site is among the best I've ever seen. Amazing typography, great to read on a phone.

Interesting. For me it was so slow to scroll I had to use archive.ph to read it :-/

This is on a powerful PC with a state-of-the-art graphics card.

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#759

Post by marginalia_nu »

cercatrova wrote: post #8

Does GitHub not have the right to view and train from your content when you agree to their Terms of Service and upload your code? People are conflating their open source license with the one they give GitHub when making a GitHub account, but they are two entirely separate and parallel licenses. The former is for other people to use your code, the latter is for GitHub to host your code. If you don't like it, you are f…

> Does GitHub not have the right to view and train from your content when you agree to their Terms of Service and upload your code? [...] If you don't like it, you are free to host your code on your own servers.

I do exactly this, and it does all of bupkis to prevent someone from downloading my code from my gitea, and uploading it to GitHub. In fact, several people have.

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#760

Post by mkmk3 »

concordDance wrote: post #737
Test0129 wrote: post #682

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It would be sad if someone succeeded in shutting down CoPilot for this kind of copyright stuff. It enables the large scale theft of code. It completely ignores licenses. There are plenty of open source licenses that allow code use with proper attribution yet Copilot doesn't (and probably can't) figure a way to comply with all of them. Copilot, as the article suggests, is a marketing stunt. To me it's more than that…

So many comments like this, but none list a tangible harm that's anywhere near the millions of man hours systems like this will save. Heck, basically none (including this one!) list a harm at all!

Honestly, kinda fair. How is it different to pirating anything, and the moral qualms that come in there? Some people see it as a massive issue, others don't believe the harm is significant. Probably makes an OSS dev enjoy their working being open source less, I imagine, which may have larger ramifications in terms of the ecosystem it promotes, but outside of that I'm guessing (I'm also trying to understand) it's just a matter of who's seeing the benefit from this tech. I think that's a reasonable thing to be concerned about, when wealth seems to have a tendency to centralize, and the average worker doesn't have the level of power we would ideally like.
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