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GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

githubcopilotinvestigation.com

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Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#871

Post by marcodiego »

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…

> A human being doesn't violate copyright in learning from a copyrighted work, including when that human being is later more able to produce other works based on that learning

You have to be very careful with this line of thinking. I remember SCO versus RedHat began on much smaller premises. I also remember it took years for ReactOS to audit their code after mere suspicions arose about code that seemed to be inspired by something like asm to C translation.

The GPL is clear: derived works must be under the GPL too. The license must be respected, it doesn't matter if it was copied "from inspiration because it was learned" by an algorithm or a person.

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#872

Post by BowBun »

i_like_apis wrote: post #821
BowBun wrote: post #794

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 attr…

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.

Like posts have said, whether training is fair use is not a matter of opinion, it is a matter of law. You can't use an appeal to your authority to make grand statements like this.

Frankly, I don't care that ML/AI _needs_ this to work. That's not my problem. You don't get to circumvent existing agreements (and law) because you believe that ML learning is the same as a human reading a piece of code and then typing it up on the side. Tesla manages just fine by generating their own training data. Other businesses have found partners to acquire data from. The only reason this isn't being immediately addressed is because there is near-zero accountability for license violations in software companies, and ML further obfuscates that.

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#873

Post by burkaman »

nfw2 wrote: post #815
burkaman wrote: post #515

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think most people are concerned that Copilot is going to be reproducing verbatim copyrighted code, it's more that it sucks that a giant corporation is going to make a billion dollars from a tool that is entirely built off of millions of peoples' work who were never asked permission and will never be compensated.

If Copilot makes a billion dollars, it is only because it is generating at least a billion dollars worth of value to the community of developers who want to use it. The people painting Microsoft as a big, greedy trust conveniently ignore that Copilot would actually be empowering the ecosystem of tech companies to develop services that compete with Microsoft faster and more easily.

Isn't that the corporate dream though, to make all your competitors dependent on you?

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#874

Post by melagonster »

iroh2727 wrote: post #664
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…

+1. And let's not forget too that "AI", that is, ML models, are not "autonomous" in the way that humans are autonomous. Sure, we use the word "learn" to describe what they do, which is one word that we also use to describe what people do. But ML models are always wielded by people or corporations for particular purposes. If a corporation was to directly publish some copy that appears plagiarized, we'd call that plagi…

There is a common argument that "human just a better neural network", I don't know, did they mean we need to give GPT-3 or Dalle basic human rights?

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#875

Post by SantalBlush »

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!

You could say this about all software piracy. So Microsoft can work to end software copyright instead of trying to corner the market on pirated software and asking forgiveness after the fact.

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#877

Post by ghaff »

Timshel wrote: post #828
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…

I agree it's like people are not aware that clean room design is a thing ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design ).

Yes, it's a thing but how often is it actually done? I can imagine circumstances where a company might do so--say a cloud provider wants to clone some open source software and offer it as a service. But I'm pretty sure the practice isn't routine.

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#878

Post by neoromantique »

jakelazaroff wrote: post #506
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 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. Sure — in the same way that hacking into a competitor's GitHub account and copying their private source code is "genuinely useful" to you. As the person benefitting from unlawfully using their source code, of course you wouldn't care that it rep…

Hi! I'll give some insight onto why I benefit tremendously from CoPilot

I have a very severe ADHD and as a result terrible memory, I've been working as a dev for almost a decade now and it always was almost entirely in the browser with a search bar, not IDE, and me working with infrastructure doesn't help as I encounter more than one programming language at a time, daily.

CoPilot helps me not making dozens of jr. dev level search queries daily as I can formulate query right in the IDE and it will fill in the basic algo's, data types, language abstractions that I know exist (as I use them all the time), but I don't remember how to actually invoke them, despite doing so just an hour ago. This is the most useful part of copilot, not the complex and very specific code.

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#879

Post by salawat »

adamhp wrote: post #843
bayindirh wrote: post #771

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 plagiari…

I'm curious about the endgame of copyright with respect to software. At some point, enough people will have written enough code that you can't write code anymore because some fragment of it violates a copyright. Where does the line get drawn? There's only so many ways to do certain algorithms, like DFS or BFS.

At some point it'll have to come home to roost that code is a subset of discrete mathematics first, a literary/artistic work second. There is really no way around it.

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#880

Post by anonymousab »

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…

Code on GitHub is "all rights reserved" by default, which means that it is illegal to copy by default. Only by adding a license does it get opened up and made legal to copy - though typically, only if you also include that license when you do so.

So if you trained yourself to only regurgitate github code with wanton abandon and careless disregard for licensing, then yeah, you're liable to violate that default copyright, and certainly going to be violating license rules if you're regurgitating large blocks from memory but not their accompanying licenses.

This is the system that github and Microsoft participate in and willingly and purposely perpetuate. They benefit immensely from copyright law and protection of their code. You can get that they will damned-well avoid letting copilot anywhere near Windows' source, and they would very much enforce their copyright if copilot was spitting that code out for the masses to use.

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