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GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

githubcopilotinvestigation.com

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Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#791

Post by bluenose69 »

Two things.

First, it would be nice to have a copilot variant that searched only my own work, so I wouldn't need to grep through other code I've written to get a reminder of how I solved a problem in the past.

And, speaking of the past ...

Second, I am old enough to have seen slide rules being replaced by calculators. This was a great addition to the toolbox, but it also had its downside: I've seen many students who have very clouded notions of significant digits, and many more who get quite confused with where to put a decimal point, when I ask them to compute something simple by hand.

Similarly, coding has been transformed with the advent of stack-like systems. There are two communities of coders now: those who learn a language and then can solve problems based on a solid foundation, and those who shorten the learning phase and code by web-search. The latter, it seems, are in danger of creating code that is brittle, limited, or downright wrong.

To the extent that copilot amplifies this habit of searching instead of thinking, I think it may lead to unreliable code.

So, sure, there are copyright issues. I think they have been well-discussed here and elsewhere. And courts may weigh in with new ideas. But my concern is with the reduction in code quality that may ensue. I'd love to see a discussion of the groups that are using copilot. If they are working on something I don't care about, then this is just a copyright issue. But if they are working on the "smarts" behind drug discovery, the control of dangerous machines, etc., then we have another issue, besides copyright.

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#793

Post by pmontra »

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 came to write the same comment as cool-RR. I'm not sure I ever copied a code block from an open source project. I copied plenty of code blocks from gits, stackoverflow and blogs. Those are the media that could be starved off by a massive use of Copilot.

There could be a problem for open source projects (and closed source ones as well) if Copilot could autocomplete with code from private repositories. I can't remember if it looks at them too.

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#794

Post by BowBun »

I'm in favor of this. You can't ingest code that says "you cannot use this without attribution", put it through a bunch of if statements that strip the license, and then say it's "AI-generated". I don't care about most of our generic CRUD apps or the 15th rewrite of a sorting algorithm, but I do care about those smart enough to advance the field and come up with novel solutions. If we take away the incentive for attribution and recognition, people won't be as willing to share and we'll all be worse for it.

Like someone else said, there was a version of this where they asked people to opt-in and got community involvement. In true MS fashion, they just did it without asking and people are rightfully pissed.

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#795

Post by CaptArmchair »

zarzavat wrote: post #665
naet wrote: post #640

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

> A human quoting a human without attribution

... as opposed to AI. At the heart of the matter lurks a debate whether AI is an independent phenomenon which behaves in its own right, or a just a tool that's created and wielded by humans against a backdrop of clear incentives and motivations.

The argument isn't about whether or not the law deals in a absolutes - it's a basic principle that law is tested in courts through interpretation - the argument is that co-pilot can be perceived as merely a means to an end and that GitHub / Microsoft have created a massive mountain of liabilities for themselves.

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#796

Post by gbrunacci »

bluenose69 wrote: post #791

Two things. First, it would be nice to have a copilot variant that searched only my own work, so I wouldn't need to grep through other code I've written to get a reminder of how I solved a problem in the past. And, speaking of the past ... Second, I am old enough to have seen slide rules being replaced by calculators. This was a great addition to the toolbox, but it also had its downside: I've seen many students who…

For the first one, you might want to look into Tabnine https://www.tabnine.com/

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#797

Post by [deleted] »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #758
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.

[deleted]

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#798

Post by swhalen »

sdenton4 wrote: post #686
delusional wrote: post #680

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This just sounds like blaming the researchers to me. How would i ever know if my "boring code completion" was actually copyright infringement? Your argument just disallows discussing the problem while doing absolutely nothing about it. If you train your dog to NOT attack random passersby and it still does, that dog is euthanized no matter your intentions.

Tim Davis doesn't actually have any instance of copyright infringement to complain about; he was able to induce Copilot to /mostly/ recreate his code through careful prompting, but no one has actually deployed the code. By the same token, we don't outlaw ctrl-c and ctrl-v buttons on computers. There is plenty of space here to discuss developing tools to check for unintentional infringement. I would guess, though, tha…

I am not a lawyer, but I don't think anyone needs to deploy the code in order to infringe copyright: they just need to distribute the code to a third party (hence copyright -- the right to copy). And on the face of it, Microsoft would appear to have distributed Tim Davis's code, in compressed form, as part of the trained language model in Copilot.

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#799

Post by belorn »

jameshart wrote: post #572
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…

What stops humans from reproducing thinly disguised copies of their influences is, essentially, their ethical judgement. Which amounts to saying, humans are trained with a model that they can use to recognize when something they are thinking of producing is 'too similar' to something they have seen before. And, of course, some humans choose not to apply that filter and go ahead and plagiarize anyway; some humans try…

We have such AI already that scores work for how likely it is to be infringing on a prior copyright. It is written by Google and operates on Youtube.

The big question is if we think that Google made a poor work of that AI and if more money and more data rich company can make a better AI that teach originality.

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#800

Post by elcomet »

thomasahle wrote: post #629
trap_goes_hot wrote: post #586

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If you don't know Microsoft's history, a lot of what more informed people are worried about seems overblown. Or maybe they do know about it, and don't agree with you. Do you allow for such an option? https://github.com/features/copilot "What can I do to reduce GitHub Copilot’s suggestion of code that matches public code? We built a filter to help detect and suppress the rare instances where a GitHub Copilot suggesti…

> You have the choice to turn that filter on or off during setup. Notice that Copilot often gives code that verbatim matches opens source software, even when that filter is on. For example: https://twitter.com/DocSparse/status/1581461734665367554?s=2... Their approach of "matches or near matches (ignoring whitespace)" is clearly inadequate, and it's honestly insulting that they think this is enough. Even if Copilot j…

Note that they opened both in the same vs code instance. And copilot uses other files in your vs code project as context to make predictions, so it could have reproduced this code without knowing it before.
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