You want to defend the big company? Why? Copilot is obviously breaking terms of licenses. At the very least it should only be trained on MIT and return MIT code
Ask HN: What can I personally do to fight AGAINST the Copilot class action?
41–50 of 59 posts
Re: Ask HN: What can I personally do to fight AGAINST the Copilot class action?
#42You could buy a million copies of Microsoft Office, I think that would help.
Re: Ask HN: What can I personally do to fight AGAINST the Copilot class action?
#43You could try to contribute a license-finder for copilot that would detect potential copyright violations and emit valid attribution / reproduce the licenses of copyrighted works that copilot's output is derived from. Oh, and you'll want to detect incompatible software licenses and prevent derivative works from being created with such conflicts . In so doing, you would be helping Microsoft to follow the law and respe…
That's a fairly sane request, but I think people can do a bit better yet.
This is a bug, and IMO the correct solution is to fix it. Preferably people should nip it in the bud at the start of the process, rather than play whack-a-mole with the outcome.
When your model gives you back exactly the same data as was put in, that's called "overfitting". It's a kind of bug (or at very least a smell).
It means (among other things) that it might actually give back the same answer in other situations where it is wrong to do so. It could then also give a different, wrong answer in a situation where this answer was actually the correct one.
It also means that the model spent all this time "learning the answer by heart" instead of the underlying pattern. This is typically a waste of perfectly good training time if nothing else.
And of course if you have an overfit, in this case you end up suggesting copyrighted code to the user instead of something original. This is rather undesirable.
In one of the cases I looked at with a friend, we think many people had actually copied one person's code without attribution. So the training set might contain -say- 100 copies of that same solution. That would then be a strong signal that there is only one correct/common solution to that particular problem: "Copy this one guy and leave off the attribution". Oops.
I wonder how many complaints about copilot are actually +/- "blaming the messenger". I suspect that fixing/improving/mitigating this particular set of bugs may have an unforseen side effect: a number of rather interesting conversations with some of the developers in the source data-set.
Re: Ask HN: What can I personally do to fight AGAINST the Copilot class action?
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
You need to think bigger — if the class action wins, it effectively would ban training AI classifiers on internet data. Yes, we all want to stick it to Microsoft, but that’s not what’s at stake here.
Internet data? Copyright, licenses like GPL MIT etc. mean nothing if it is just all “internet data”.
Whatever happened to “information wants to be free”? There is a post on the front page right now about how it’s totally okay to post copyrighted books online.
Re: Ask HN: What can I personally do to fight AGAINST the Copilot class action?
#45I think it's you who are in the "vocal minority". Microsoft Copilot is an abuse of open source. It is perhaps the greatest theft of intellectual property in human history. We should do everything we can to defeat it. That said, here is my Request For Comments regarding a slightly modified BSD 2-Clause License explicitly prohibiting Copilot-style use: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33458374 We need to do everyth…
Copyright should not protect ideas, only expression. The ideas contained in copyrighted works are fair use for AI to train on, even if you don't like it.
Re: Ask HN: What can I personally do to fight AGAINST the Copilot class action?
#46I think it's you who are in the "vocal minority". Microsoft Copilot is an abuse of open source. It is perhaps the greatest theft of intellectual property in human history. We should do everything we can to defeat it. That said, here is my Request For Comments regarding a slightly modified BSD 2-Clause License explicitly prohibiting Copilot-style use: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33458374 We need to do everyth…
Completely disagree. I think that the output that it produces is sufficiently transformative to be considered fair use, and even when people coerce it to produce code verbatim - it represents a fraction of the original code base. It would be like if J. K. Rowling went to war over the fact that I lifted a few paragraphs from Harry Potter and used them in an entirely different book. Also this is entirely anecdata, but…
I think people opposing Copilot are overly reactive, saying they fight for open source but actively trying to stop "Opener Source". Because Copilot is that - even more open than open source. So open that even open source people are angry. It learns skills and then makes them available to everyone. "How dare AI make its home on our open source lawn? Get off our lawn!"
Re: Ask HN: What can I personally do to fight AGAINST the Copilot class action?
#47For what it’s worth, I agree with you. I understand why most of the HN crowd is against this, because Microsoft is big and evil and people want to see them suffer. But realistically, a win here would effectively ban training AIs on the internet.
You paint us as petty and simpleminded. I have complicated feelings about Microsoft; I think they've done a lot of good and bad over my lifetime. My issues with copilot are principled. I have the exact same issue with non-Microsoft efforts to ingest copyrighted works and emit derivative works to the detriment of artists. Argue against that, not a pathetic strawman.
> ingest copyrighted works and emit derivative works
The compression ratio for Stable Diffusion is 1:25000 or more, 5B images into 5GB. I think you're overly dramatic about it. Not even a single pixel from an image. And a snippet 2-3 lines long of code, that 99.9% of the time is generic, is not worth all this scandal.
There is a distinction between learning and replicating an idea vs. the expression of it. AI is entitled to learn ideas from copyrighted works even if authors don't approve. Only expression is protected. Even API names are ok.
I think the natural balance would be to set filters that restrict replication of copyrighted code. And that's it, every kind of derivative is ok as long as it does not look overly similar to any copyrighted code. But excluding code that is generic and replicated in many sources, because that doesn't deserve to be protected and it would just stunt the model.
Re: Ask HN: What can I personally do to fight AGAINST the Copilot class action?
#48Well, if they're profiting by serving copyright or copyleft code up for others to use after stripping the associated licensing I would think they're in a bad place. Unless their side effect is (again?) to break GPL and other open-source licenses? I would think this a risk that commercial customers would want to avoid - getting something GPLv3 or other "infecting" licenses contaminating their product due to a develope…
Getting 1-2 lines of code at a time does not "contaminate" the project, unless you get 100x that in a row and all from the same source. They are almost always generic codes, short and doing just one simple thing. What kind of GPL project is largely contained in a single line or two? It's more like using words from the same vocabulary, not like quoting paragraphs from a novel.
Re: Ask HN: What can I personally do to fight AGAINST the Copilot class action?
#49The best thing you can do is write OSS and not care who uses it or for what purpose. The more people writing truly free and open software the better. In my mind that is the ultimate end goal of OSS.
Copilot is to Open Source what Open Source is to Closed Source.
Re: Ask HN: What can I personally do to fight AGAINST the Copilot class action?
#50You could try to contribute a license-finder for copilot that would detect potential copyright violations and emit valid attribution / reproduce the licenses of copyrighted works that copilot's output is derived from. Oh, and you'll want to detect incompatible software licenses and prevent derivative works from being created with such conflicts . In so doing, you would be helping Microsoft to follow the law and respe…
That's a fairly sane request, but I think people can do a bit better yet. This is a bug, and IMO the correct solution is to fix it. Preferably people should nip it in the bud at the start of the process, rather than play whack-a-mole with the outcome. When your model gives you back exactly the same data as was put in, that's called "overfitting". It's a kind of bug (or at very least a smell). It means (among other th…
The dataset is so large they only do one single pass, and the content is deduplicated. A study showed that it's usually duplicated content that is overfitted and later regurgitated. Examples that are repeated in many places might have slight variations that help them pass the filter.