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

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

#81

Post by jdm2212 »

LiamPowell wrote: post #54
interroboink wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, somewhat in the style of NP-Completeness, it is often easier to verify that something is correct than it is to generate it from scratch. Even if I can't cook, I can say it's a tasty meal (:

It's usually somewhat easy to verify a piece of code is not obviously wrong, what's much harder is proving that a piece of code is not subtlety wrong. When given a complete piece of code that appears to work, it can be very easy to convince yourself that you understand it well enough to know that it is correct, even when it's not. This problem isn't unique to LLMs, refer to the case of programmers copying binary sear…

"this looks about right and has no obvious bugs" is my standard when reviewing human code, and it's my standard for machine-generated code too. no reason to formally verify GPT-4 outputs if I'm not formally verifying my coworker's either.

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

#82

Post by martin8412 »

soultrees wrote: post #46
redbell wrote: post #35

> Cautioning its own workers not to directly use code generated by Bard undermines Google's claims its chatbot can help developers become more productive The definitive definition of irony o_O This reminds me of two pictures that were circulating on social media a while ago. The first was Zuckerberg holding a book while billions of people are wasting their time in endless scrolling in the Metas; the second was that T…

This is less of a productivity risk than a legal risk. Nobody is denying that these tools enable productivity like we haven’t seen before, but google is afraid of outputting protected code while the courts haven’t fully decided the stance on things. Imagine Google Bard outputs a piece of code for a major new feature, making them a shit ton of money. It’s then found out that code was actually taken copied, almost dire…

Imagine Bard outputs code that is licensed under AGPL.. Suddenly whatever services the code gets included in needs to have their source code made public.

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

#85

Post by davidgerard »

alexhjones wrote: post #75
davidgerard wrote: post #59

Do we know Github's policy on internal use of Copilot?

The equivalent would be GitHub’s policy on employees using Bing for code generation, not copilot.

That's nice. What precisely is Github's policy on using Copilot internally?

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

#86

Post by michaelt »

soultrees wrote: post #47
JoshTriplett wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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,…

Everything you do or know is a derivative of your own training set. True original thoughts without context don’t exist, well at least in any way we can find out as every human is the product of their own training set. Just out curiosity, what makes the code you write, more original than an LLMs who’s training set is way bigger than yours and likely will more variance in how to achieve same goal. I’m not trying to be…

> Just out curiosity, what makes the code you write, more original than an LLMs

Indeed in many ways LLM code is more original than mine, as I limit myself to calling only functions that exist and producing code that will compile, unlike LLMs which have no such limitations. /s

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

#87

Post by tsimionescu »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #29
tsimionescu wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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,…

I was pointing out that the case where the network produces exact copies of copyrighted code (or very very close to exact copies, such as changing a variable name or removing a comment) is clear, and requires no new litigation.

While I also think there is a good chance that what you are claiming (that any output is a derived work of the training set), this is definitely not settled, and will require someone going to court over it. I expect the proceedings over something like this to take a long time, and very likely reach to the supreme court. So, we won't know if you're right or not for quite a while.

A good argument against the idea that any output is a derived work of (all) data in the training set is exactly that verbatim copies of snippets from the Linux kernel can't be a derived work of snippets from GCC, even if GCC was also in the training set. So it is arguable that someone intending to claim copyright infringement for a piece of code generated by an LLM has to identify which particular work of theirs from the training set it infringes on, it can't be a blanket finding.

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

#88

Post by giancarlostoro »

firesteelrain wrote: post #71
stevejobs69 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

as a google swe I find bard almost useless. it doesnt understand any of our internal tooling or context.

So you broke your company’s policy and Fed code to it?

Sounds like they got curious and asked a simple “hello world” type of question to see if it had any value.

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

#89

Post by giancarlostoro »

redbell wrote: post #35

> Cautioning its own workers not to directly use code generated by Bard undermines Google's claims its chatbot can help developers become more productive The definitive definition of irony o_O This reminds me of two pictures that were circulating on social media a while ago. The first was Zuckerberg holding a book while billions of people are wasting their time in endless scrolling in the Metas; the second was that T…

My guess is they dont want their own processes and code secrets leaked through Bard.

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

#90

Post by wccrawford »

Aerroon wrote: post #15
wernercd wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Were we ever NOT there? https://builtin.com/artificial-intelligence/ai-copyright "Can AI Art Be Copyrighted? It has long been the posture of the U.S. Copyright Office that there is no copyright protection for works created by non-humans, including machines. Therefore, the product of a generative AI model cannot be copyrighted."

Wait, so the US copyright office considers the AI model to be the sole creator of the work? So the prompt - the actual intent behind the use of the tool - is irrelevant? Then where is the line? If I use a painting program that runs a Math.random() on a brush and I use this brush to draw something then is that also created by a non-human? If I program a robot arm to draw a picture then is that picture also created by…

I read it that a program/computer/robot cannot hold copyright. If someone uses AI to generate art, the AI doesn't hold the copyright. (Notice it doesn't say anything about the user.) Likewise, if Photoshop is used to create art, Photoshop doesn't hold the copyright.

It's a tool, not a conscious being with rights.

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