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GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

githubcopilotinvestigation.com

781–790 of 1001 posts

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#781

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

Eh, I think the line height is too cramped and the hyphens make reading on the internet harder to read. Hyphens are good if you're trying to save ink or pages in a novel, but screen real estate is more than free on the internet.

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#782
If this becomes illegal, it will pretty much mark the death of free/open ML and its sets.

If you can't train on data before asking for permission, the data set becomes sparse. Thje only people who will be able to afford this will be, you guessed it, established giants who can build their own sets.

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#783
If they really don't think that they need to comply with any license, then why not include all private repos in the training set? Could it be that they're worried about legal repercussions, whereas OSS is easier to (ab)use for this purpose because there's much less legal muscle behind it?

It is also very telling that they have not included any of their own proprietary code in the training set. If it's merely suggestions that are generated, why not also train on the NT kernel? Office?

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#784
Sad to see people trying to make copilot illegal

Using it is exactly like using Google. Google scrapes the internet and trains a model that gives you results for search queries on their website. The results may be copyright protected

Copilot scraped the internet to train a model that gives you results for code snippets in your code editor. The results may be copyright protected

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#785

Copilot is trained on and returns AGPL code verbatim. It’s game over. If these licenses are not enforced it defeats the entire purpose.

It might be the case that it is fair use to train the model on public data, but the code which it produces is covered by AGPL. Github limits liability in its TOS. (I am not a lawyer).

Folks really should take their GPL code to a platform with similar ideals and stop propping up Microsoft GitHub.

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#786
post #727

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 cou…

Anyone can say that, but that doesn’t make it real, especially with regards to European consumer protection.

It's real because our laws (including those of European countries) make it real.

Some seem to assume there's some general "If it's American it's invalid" law in Europe. This is not the case. With the exception of specific laws, such as GDPR regarding privacy, this is a perfectly valid clause.

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#788

As a joke, I made a webpage where you can do attribution to ALL GitHub repositories: http://thanksforthecode.com It scrolls past all the repos movie-credits-style. Doing it that way takes several days! It shows how abstract and absurd giving contribution to such a large body of works is.

You're missing your tag

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#789
I'm against software patents to most degree.

Especially with algorithms.

I was rooting for Google when the JVM topic happened and I'm rooting for GitHub with autopilot.

And yes there is src from me on GitHub too but use it! I used so much other code in the last 15 years.

Copyright on algorithm or basic code should be a no go.

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#790

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…

Of course it is cherry picked. The idea is that it allows you to INTENTIONALLY void any copyright you want. So let's say I obtain an illegal copy of microsoft windows' source code. Under this precedent, what stops me from just (overfitting) training a neural network to produce the source code verbatim, sans any license notice? But it doesn't end there. What stops me from making a neural network that exactly reproduce…

Like this? https://github.com/ZoloZiak/WinNT4
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