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GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

githubcopilotinvestigation.com

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Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#771

Post by bayindirh »

iepathos wrote: post #554
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…

Humans do violate copyright if they use copyrighted passages directly in their work and pass it off as their own without any attribution, which is what copilot has been show to sometimes do, though not always. Copilot will sometimes offer chunks of code that can be found verbatim in open source code bases and passes it off to users without attribution. I agree it is ok to learn from copyrighted work and reproduce new…

> Microsoft will likely need to add checks to prevent copilot from offering verbatim copies of code going forward to try to avoid copyright violations here.

A user once replied to one of my comment[0] about this with the following:

> It's not really an issue when you're a large software corporation; you already have mechanisms in place to check for license compliance in everything that ships, including F/OSS plagiarism checks [1].

IOW, from my understanding, they don't care. Big players do their own checks anyway, and small fish won't be creating problems because it's too convenient for them. Classic Microsoft (as I know from 90s).

The bigger thread can be seen in [2].

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32534697

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32539467

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32533531

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#772

Post by janef0421 »

concordDance wrote: post #753
janef0421 wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My point was not that those critical of CoPilot are in a majority, it is that our perspective is important because our labour is what makes copilot possible.

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#773

Post by carom »

bo1024 wrote: post #247

There are two issues -- (1) feeding copyrighted material in to an AI model, and (2) getting copyrighted material out . The latter is obviously a violation of copyright, full stop. The former, to me, is obviously not a violation. If it were, that would massively tilt the playing field in favor of large corporations. It would become very hard to independently train your own models. Philosophically, I go by the principl…

There is no obvious violation or obvious not violation. It is a matter of fair use and it will be settled in court. Using copywritten code and not open souring the derivative work (copilot's model) may very well be a violation.

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#775

Post by carom »

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…

>If Copilot itself is infringing then so is GPT-3, DALL-E 2, NovelAI, and Stable Diffusion.

Not necessarily. Copilot is a special case because it is using licensed code and the model is a derived function. There is an interpretation where it needs to be open sourced.

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#776

Post by toastal »

xxs wrote: post #736
skytrue wrote: post #350

It's always interesting to see the buzz that occurs when Copilot is brought up as a topic. This place is called "HackerNews", yet routinely people forget that a "hacker" is somebody using technology to overcome novel problems. Doesn't GitHub Copilot fall into this category? Why is there such an outcry over a technology that has been in the public's hands for less than a year? I'm almost certain that the team responsi…

Personally, all my code open source is in public domain (CC0). SO it's a free game. However taking any other code without any regard to license,or author's permissions, is unethical and undesirable. At the very least add a comment in the generated snipped where the code originates from. That won't suffice in all cases but it's disingenuous to profit from others' work without any credit/permission.

Fedora no longer accepts the CC0 license for code. If it's public domain code, you should be using 0BSD.

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#777

Post by solidasparagus »

thomasahle wrote: post #617
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. I feel like the title of the article is literally written for you: """Maybe you don’t mind if GitHub Copi­lot used your open-source code with­out ask­ing. But how will you feel if Copi­lot erases your open-source com­mu­nity?""" If you want to keep having useful tools based on open source code in the future, it is in your interest that peo…

But that part of the argument is far more nebulous and bullshitty than the copyright argument. The idea that copilot is killing any substantial open-source project just isn't true right now. Copilot doesn't generate libraries worth of functionality, it generates small functions or less. Open-source projects remain as important as they were before copilot.

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#778

Post by fartsucker69 »

could this be solved by MS brute-force shipping all the licenses (w/ references to their original projects) of all the repos they used to train to copilot along with copilot itself?

it wouldn't cover cases where people illegally copy pasted some code into their projects with dubious / not explicit licenses, but this is the same as using any open source project in general.

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#779

Post by benced »

1. New player shows up, changes value chain and creates abundance 2. People who benefitted from old value chain whine 3. New player throws them a bone with a small fund or maybe a setting box, doesn’t change 4. (A few years later) no one cares about the kooks who whined

I’m not even 30 yet and I’ve seen this happen again and again - it’s frankly boring at this point. We’ve seen this with Spotify and music, newspapers and the internet etc.

The practical truth is that Copilot is a useful tool for humanity to have. It is exceedingly unlikely it will be stopped because a small percentage of programmers - themselves a small percentage of people who benefit from code - feel their interests have been hurt. Change or get left behind (but make sure to enrich some lawyers on a pointless suit in the meantime).

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#780

Post by DarkmSparks »

rhdunn wrote: post #730
chrismcb wrote: post #605

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"…

You actually just convinced me of the exact opposite.

Because copilots "use" of the works _was_ the learning.

So it would seem to me that Microsoft needs to apply "fair use" to copy and redistribute _the entire works_ they used for training.

In which case lack of fair use my well be the least of their problems, they are really crossing into Computer Fraud and Abuse Act territory similar to when Aaron Swartz "borrowed" MITs data.

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