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GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

githubcopilotinvestigation.com

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Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#851

Post by nix0n »

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…

> What's with the default to "if it's not explicitly legal, it must be illegal"?

That's what "all rights reserved" means.

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#852

Post by nullvoxpopuli »

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.

My experience is that copilot is shit for anything not super basic.

Incorrect suggestions all the time

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#853

Post by gizzlon »

enlyth wrote: post #847
mkr-hn wrote: post #529

A sizable, possibly plurality cohort of fully adult tech people is young enough to not know about United States v. Microsoft Corp. This would explain a lot of comments I see on this topic. If you don't know Microsoft's history, a lot of what more informed people are worried about seems overblown. Copilot was Microsoft's first test of people's trust after the GitHub acquisition. It's going very, very, very poorly. The…

Or some of us do, and just have our own opinions. I literally don't care if someone steals my code, and I think the current state of digital copyright is nonsense that does not benefit society in any way.

That is certainly your right, but very interesting in this discussion.

Copyright laws should change if needed, but this is not the process.

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#854

Post by mkr-hn »

trap_goes_hot wrote: post #586
mkr-hn wrote: post #529

A sizable, possibly plurality cohort of fully adult tech people is young enough to not know about United States v. Microsoft Corp. This would explain a lot of comments I see on this topic. If you don't know Microsoft's history, a lot of what more informed people are worried about seems overblown. Copilot was Microsoft's first test of people's trust after the GitHub acquisition. It's going very, very, very poorly. The…

>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…

I didn't say anything to dismiss or discount that some people just don't care or have a different view. I carefully qualified my comment to only address people who don't know, and they do exist in large numbers.

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#855

Post by youssefabdelm »

a254613e wrote: post #627

>But how will you feel if Copi­lot erases your open-source com­mu­nity? Jesus Christ, dramatic much? Are people that stumble upon a piece of code while googling how to do something, and end up copying and pasting the code from the repo, really building the open source community? Because that's essentially what it is. Whether I use copilot to generate a tedious function, or I copy it from your open source repo I'm on…

Couldn't agree more... It's very depressing that this post is popular, wouldn't want Copilot shut down over some drama queen lawyers that have no connection to the reality of software development and ALL creative fields. Creation requires influence: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJPERZDfyWc&feature=emb_titl...

The entire fucking concept of intellectual property and copyright is flawed from the get go. The issue people are wrestling with beneath the surface is not copyright but the monetary system itself which incentivizes this "chisel off one another" behavior and "MINE!" behavior because otherwise how will you survive if you can't monetize your actions?, but intelligent socioeconomic alternatives exist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBIdk-fgCeQ

People are trying to solve this problem in an ass-backwards way. Either move to universal basic income or a resource-based economy and make all ideas 'free', 'copyable' and 'remixable' since it doesn't matter either way you have access to some resources (in UBI) or all resources for free (in resource based economy) and don't need to monetize anything since you have access to everything...instead people are content with making life shittier.

"We stand on the shoulders of giants" said Newton, but oh no.. this piece of paper called 'the law' knows better!

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#856

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

0xferruccio wrote: post #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

Surely the difference is that if you find something via Google/search you can then read any copyright notice to determine whether the code is OK to use for your use case (no joke if you're a corporate developer). If you're using Copilot to "generate" (but sometimes regurgitate?) code then AFAIK Copilot doesn't show you the copyright notices or any indication of whether what it is giving you is a "fair use" derivative or a copyright violation exact copy regurgitation.

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#857

Post by i_like_apis »

kevincox wrote: post #845
i_like_apis wrote: post #821

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally disagree. Training is fair use. It is akin to learning. Code licenses do not restrict you from reading or learning. ML training needs to be fair use of copyrighted works, or most machine learning and AI projects will be impossible.

I agree that training is fair use. I don't agree that when the model spits out verbatim or near-identical copies of copyright code that somehow the copyright is striped or that the usage of it is somehow fair use. I believe that the vast majority of code that copilot produces is fine. But we have also seen clear examples of copyright violation. The biggest problem is that it is basically impossible for the user to te…

I agree there, and I think most rational people would too.

This whole website though and "investigation" is some sort of sensationalism that seems ultimately aimed at fair use training, which is very unfortunate. It seems like it involves an ego trip and popularity-chasing with targeting a megacorp as a means to that end.

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#859

Post by mkr-hn »

enlyth wrote: post #847
mkr-hn wrote: post #529

A sizable, possibly plurality cohort of fully adult tech people is young enough to not know about United States v. Microsoft Corp. This would explain a lot of comments I see on this topic. If you don't know Microsoft's history, a lot of what more informed people are worried about seems overblown. Copilot was Microsoft's first test of people's trust after the GitHub acquisition. It's going very, very, very poorly. The…

Or some of us do, and just have our own opinions. I literally don't care if someone steals my code, and I think the current state of digital copyright is nonsense that does not benefit society in any way.

You're free to put your code under something like CC0 if you feel this way. Everyone else who puts their code under a license that requires at least attribution and expects Microsoft to follow it can continue taking Microsoft to task for ignoring that responsibility at scale.

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#860

Post by erlendellingsen »

a254613e wrote: post #627

>But how will you feel if Copi­lot erases your open-source com­mu­nity? Jesus Christ, dramatic much? Are people that stumble upon a piece of code while googling how to do something, and end up copying and pasting the code from the repo, really building the open source community? Because that's essentially what it is. Whether I use copilot to generate a tedious function, or I copy it from your open source repo I'm on…

Totally agree. The fact is that this product assists developers (both experienced and non-experienced) with increasing productivity and aiding in generation of new code, products and services. This product is fantastic in my view. Attempts at baiting the service to output potentially copyright violating code (which is synthesised because it is copied thousands and thousands of times in public repositories) only shows how desperate those claims are.
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