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GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

githubcopilotinvestigation.com

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Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#971

Post by nearbuy »

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…

That's not what's happening here. Copyright work remains copyrighted regardless of how you produced it. If you lived in a secluded cave and completely independently wrote Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (unlikely, I know, but it's hypothetical), you'd be violating J.K. Rowling's copyright by selling it.

Copilot doesn't help people intentionally launder copyrighted code. It may cause people to accidentally use copyrighted code without realizing it. They're still liable.

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#972

Post by kanonade »

Oh my god, round and round on this topic. Leave it alone. Copilot is an amazing tool and demo of what AI can do. I will happily pay for good ML products, which a notoriously hard area to monetize.

Copilot may produce results from the training set, but if you're letting it do that, that says more about you than about copilot.

All of these claims use the example "Write me a function to foo the bar that takes baz as an argument". If you prompt it to write entire functions and classes for you, then it will lean on its training set.

But if you actually just write code, then it will complete small single lines in exactly the style you've previously written. With code that is unique to your program because it can synthesize new code.

In this role copilot is no different than a search engine. By prompting it lazily, copilot isn't the one stealing the code, you are.

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#973

Post by sooyoo »

SahAssar wrote: post #711
sooyoo wrote: post #666

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. Or they could integrate a way to find the produced output back in the corpus if it's sufficiently close and provide a reference/attribution. Basically whatever tool a copyright lawyer would use to track down original work. And that's just the engineering solution…

> Or they could integrate a way to find the produced output back in the corpus if it's sufficiently close and provide a reference/attribution. Basically whatever tool a copyright lawyer would use to track down original work. That assumes that the licenses of your code and the original code are compatible which often isn't the case.

No, it doesn't assume that. Ensuring that they are compatible would be the next step. Either manually by the user or automatically by showing a fat warning or retracting the suggested code completion.

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#974

Post by kbelder »

naet wrote: post #640
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…

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…

>Humans routinely do violate copyright law. Plagiarism is a huge problem in many sectors; un-cited direct copies of people's work in violation of fair use is a regular every day occurrence in the human world.

And we need to accept that and get over it, not get better at outlawing it.

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#975

Post by autoexec »

kbelder wrote: post #974
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…

>Humans routinely do violate copyright law. Plagiarism is a huge problem in many sectors; un-cited direct copies of people's work in violation of fair use is a regular every day occurrence in the human world. And we need to accept that and get over it, not get better at outlawing it.

I'd say we need to reject it, refuse to get over it, and demand changes to fix copyright law so that humans and AI don't need to risk violating the law in order to learn things and create new works based on what they've learned from what others created before them.

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#976

Post by autoexec »

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 ).

Not really a fix to the problem since as your own link shows you can still be dragged into court to defend against a copyright lawsuit which can cost someone tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars and there are no guarantees when you're up against a team of lawyers representing an entity with far more money and resources than you have. In the end, you can do everything right and still easily end up being screwed which isn't how anything should work.

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#977

Post by dongkyun »

nearbuy wrote: post #971
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…

That's not what's happening here. Copyright work remains copyrighted regardless of how you produced it. If you lived in a secluded cave and completely independently wrote Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (unlikely, I know, but it's hypothetical), you'd be violating J.K. Rowling's copyright by selling it. Copilot doesn't help people intentionally launder copyrighted code. It may cause people to accidentally use c…

> If you lived in a secluded cave and completely independently wrote Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (unlikely, I know, but it's hypothetical), you'd be violating J.K. Rowling's copyright by selling it.

This is absolutely incorrect. Independent creation is a complete defense to copyright infringement. Funny enough, Learned Hand gives a near identical example to highlight the opposite conclusion ("if by some magic a man who had never known it were to compose anew Keats's Ode on a Grecian Urn, he would be an 'author,' and, if he copyrighted it, others might not copy that poem, though they might of course copy Keats's").

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#978

Post by nearbuy »

dongkyun wrote: post #977
nearbuy wrote: post #971

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not what's happening here. Copyright work remains copyrighted regardless of how you produced it. If you lived in a secluded cave and completely independently wrote Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (unlikely, I know, but it's hypothetical), you'd be violating J.K. Rowling's copyright by selling it. Copilot doesn't help people intentionally launder copyrighted code. It may cause people to accidentally use c…

> If you lived in a secluded cave and completely independently wrote Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (unlikely, I know, but it's hypothetical), you'd be violating J.K. Rowling's copyright by selling it. This is absolutely incorrect. Independent creation is a complete defense to copyright infringement. Funny enough, Learned Hand gives a near identical example to highlight the opposite conclusion ("if by some mag…

Sorry, you're right. I feel bad.

You wouldn't be able to claim independent creation though by reproducing a work with Copilot.

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#979

Post by bamboozled »

toastal wrote: post #766
bamboozled wrote: post #556

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I pay for Github because I thought it was a nice, reputable service who wouldn't go through my stuff without asking me first.

Whew... that username checks out.

You've done nothing to refute my point and so it still stands.

I pay GitHub / Microsoft to host my code, and that's all I expect them to do with it, host it, as securely as possible. It sounds like Microsoft are doing more than this so what's your actual deal...if you have one?

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#980

Post by Aeolun »

smt88 wrote: post #390
Aeolun wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It would be because it's illegal and violates the licenses, desires, and intentions of the thousands of workers who wrote the code in its corpus. Yeah, the vocal few. Do you think I give a rats ass that Copilot is duplicating my OS code? I have to imagine most people are completely ambivalent. Of course I have no proof, I just can’t imagine anything else. The lines probably fall somewhere along the MIT vs GPL camps…

> Of course I have no proof, I just can’t imagine anything else. "Ambivalent" means "of two minds," but I'm going to assume you meant that you're indifferent. If people are/were indifferent, their licenses should reflect that. They overwhelmingly don't. Regardless, Microsoft is legally bound to obey the licenses.

Good point, I meant indifferent.

> If people are/were indifferent, their licenses should reflect that. They overwhelmingly don't.

Apparently, overwhelmingly they do. At least if the licenses used are any indication.

https://github.blog/2015-03-09-open-source-license-usage-on-...

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