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Google warns its own employees: Do not use code generated by Bard

theregister.com

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Re: Google warns its own employees: Do not use code generated by Bard

#21

Post by buro9 »

This is Google, who have a monorepo, who are afraid of the legal risks to the monorepo.

The copyright of the output of these tools is not yet determined, it's a risk.

The advice not to use the tools in a risky way not only directly mitigates the risk but like an "employees must wash hands" sign in a restaurant restroom, it can be seen as a reasonable step that transfers some of the liability to the staff member.

It's not a verdict on the output of the tools, it's a reflection of risk aversion in a monorepo company that is very protective of what is in the monorepo.

Re: Google warns its own employees: Do not use code generated by Bard

#22

Post by [deleted] »

Lerc wrote: post #6

Is this because of the accuracy of the results, or is it the rights to the content that is the problem? Barring any AI court case setting a precedent, We're still at 'AI generated works are public domain' aren't we? There's probably going to be some big money arguing for the right to own content generated by their AI. I can't really see that being in the public interest though.

[deleted]

Re: Google warns its own employees: Do not use code generated by Bard

#24

Post by londons_explore »

lyu07282 wrote: post #23

But has anyone actually tried Bard for coding in practice? It's so awful, practically unusable. GPT4 feels several generations ahead of Bard.

Agreed. I frequently use GPT-4's code. It is especially useful coding in a domain I'm not familiar with. I recently asked it to write a blender plugin to export certain polygons to a spreadsheet (with coordinates projected and transformed in certain ways), and it did admirably. I had never used blender before, and it would have taken me hours otherwise.

Re: Google warns its own employees: Do not use code generated by Bard

#25

Post by 6gvONxR4sf7o »

Lerc wrote: post #6

Is this because of the accuracy of the results, or is it the rights to the content that is the problem? Barring any AI court case setting a precedent, We're still at 'AI generated works are public domain' aren't we? There's probably going to be some big money arguing for the right to own content generated by their AI. I can't really see that being in the public interest though.

> Barring any AI court case setting a precedent, We're still at 'AI generated works are public domain' aren't we?

Barring a court case, we’re more in an uncertain place. I think it’s more likely for courts to hold that many model uses aren’t transformative enough to get a fair use exemption. But until a court says either way, it most definitely does NOT just default to public domain.

Re: Google warns its own employees: Do not use code generated by Bard

#26

Post by oxygen_crisis »

londons_explore wrote: post #24
lyu07282 wrote: post #23

But has anyone actually tried Bard for coding in practice? It's so awful, practically unusable. GPT4 feels several generations ahead of Bard.

Agreed. I frequently use GPT-4's code. It is especially useful coding in a domain I'm not familiar with. I recently asked it to write a blender plugin to export certain polygons to a spreadsheet (with coordinates projected and transformed in certain ways), and it did admirably. I had never used blender before, and it would have taken me hours otherwise.

If you can't write the code yourself, you're not a good judge of how competent it is. If you admire any code that simply works at all when you don't know how it should be done, then your admiration isn't a measurement worth considering.

Ask an LLM how to do something you already know very well how to do properly, only then can you see its flaws through its mindless bravado.

Re: Google warns its own employees: Do not use code generated by Bard

#28

Post by pgeorgi »

ineedasername wrote: post #12
travisr wrote: post #11

This isn’t surprising. It’s like saying “don’t post sensitive/proprietary info on stackoverflow and don’t blindly paste code from there into your professional work.”

Except they have an offering in the market for other people to do just that. Put stackoverflow aside, that’s not Google. Gooogle telling staff to not use Bard would be like telling them a decade ago “don’t use android”

> Except they have an offering in the market for other people to do just that.

bard.google.com states right on the front page: "Bard is an experiment and may give inaccurate or inappropriate responses."

Also, the warning is about _all_ LLMs.

Re: Google warns its own employees: Do not use code generated by Bard

#29

Post by JoshTriplett »

tsimionescu wrote: post #19
Lerc wrote: post #6

Is this because of the accuracy of the results, or is it the rights to the content that is the problem? Barring any AI court case setting a precedent, We're still at 'AI generated works are public domain' aren't we? There's probably going to be some big money arguing for the right to own content generated by their AI. I can't really see that being in the public interest though.

> AI generated works are public domain That's not the status quo. The biggest concern is that AI can sometimes generate code from the training set verbatim, in which case that code has the copyright of the original training set - which might be GPL or proprietary or whatever else.

> The biggest concern is that AI can sometimes generate code from the training set verbatim

Not just verbatim: AI-generated code is arguably a derivative work of code in the training set even if it doesn't generate verbatim copies of training data, in the same way that any code can be a derivative work even if it doesn't contain bitwise-identical lines.

If you take a piece of Python code, and translate it to C code, without a single line being copied verbatim, the resulting C code is still almost certainly a derivative work of the Python code.

Re: Google warns its own employees: Do not use code generated by Bard

#30

Post by csdreamer7 »

Lerc wrote: post #6

Is this because of the accuracy of the results, or is it the rights to the content that is the problem? Barring any AI court case setting a precedent, We're still at 'AI generated works are public domain' aren't we? There's probably going to be some big money arguing for the right to own content generated by their AI. I can't really see that being in the public interest though.

> We're still at 'AI generated works are public domain' aren't we?

As far as the US Copyright Office is concerned. I do not believe other countries have weighed in yet.

Also, when your training data is based on copyleft source code, and in some cases is a direct ripoff of it, will that license be applied to it?

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