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?
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Google warns its own employees: Do not use code generated by Bard
101–110 of 166 posts
Re: Google warns its own employees: Do not use code generated by Bard
#102This 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…
I don't think the comparison with "employees must wash hands" signs is apt. Should we see legal action against large language model of questionable heritage produced code, the consequences will be dire for companies . Being able to say to their (probably then ex-) employees "I told you so" will gain them nothing. There will not be nearly enough to get from the breaching ex-employee to compensate for any damages.
Let's say I go to a restaurant, get food poisoning, and sue the restaurant. Turns out the employee didn't wash their hands (or at least, that's the legal theory).
If the restaurant has signs like that up, and consistent messaging to their employees, and new employee training, and other "best practices", then I may still be able to sue them and win. But if they don't have all that stuff, I may be able to sue them for treble damages because of negligence.
That is, such measures may not remove liability, but it limits it.
Note well: IANAL. Others who know more, feel free to offer corrections.
Re: Google warns its own employees: Do not use code generated by Bard
#103This 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…
I'm waiting for the patent troll equivalent of training data
Re: Google warns its own employees: Do not use code generated by Bard
#104Earlier 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,…
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…
Worse: The US Supreme Court will reach a verdict. The European equivalent will also reach a verdict, which may be different. And the Australians. And the British. And the Chinese. And...
It won't be over when the first top-level court decides.
Re: Google warns its own employees: Do not use code generated by Bard
#105Earlier 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?
That's reaching. You don't need to put code in to get code out. And you're allowed to have it generate code, just as long as it's not used.
Re: Google warns its own employees: Do not use code generated by Bard
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
I doubt the fact they use a monorepo has any impact on this thinking. A versioned sourced repository is no different from a file server. If some "ai copyright infringed" code made it into the monorepo it doesn't compromise the whole thing. There are still clear distinct projects and products. But exactly, this is a hygiene thing. Staff will still be using these tools anyway.
If they were concerned about that as a risk, the thought that came to my mind was exposing the whole codebase to subpoenas.
Is that one of the big risks of a monorepo? That a request for 'the source' will lead to all code in a monorepo to be exposed? I'm sure that's not necessarily the case, but still.
The other one I'm thinking of; I know this isn't the case with Google because their repo is too big, but, if a piece of copyrighted code would end up in an average repository, it would quickly be distributed to all users that have a copy of that repo, so they can't take it back again.
Re: Google warns its own employees: Do not use code generated by Bard
#107Earlier 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…
> 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.
Someone wrote the first murder mystery. It wasn't something we inherited from amoebas.
Someone wrote the first Regency romance. In fact, we know who it was - Georgette Heyer.
Someone invented calculus. We didn't get that passed down from the cave men via oral history or tribal knowledge.
We've dreamed of flying for millenia, but someone invented the first practical airplane - someone specific. Yes, they built on previous knowledge. But their step was still original. It had never been done before.
And so on, for idea after idea and original creation after original creation. They all originated at some time, with someone.
Re: Google warns its own employees: Do not use code generated by Bard
#108This 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…
I don't think the comparison with "employees must wash hands" signs is apt. Should we see legal action against large language model of questionable heritage produced code, the consequences will be dire for companies . Being able to say to their (probably then ex-) employees "I told you so" will gain them nothing. There will not be nearly enough to get from the breaching ex-employee to compensate for any damages.
> Should we see legal action against large language model of questionable heritage produced code, the consequences will be dire for companies.
I think we're already past the point of no return. Almost every active codebase in the world (at least the JS part of it) has been tainted by LLM generated code at this point if dependencies count.
If courts decided the output of LLMs trained on GPL code was subject to GPL, all the active code in the world would need to be released - which seems impossible to enforce.
Re: Google warns its own employees: Do not use code generated by Bard
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
This doesn’t ring true for me. I have ChatGPT write code for me that I could write myself. I’ve had ChatGPT even rewrite code for me to make it more legible. It’s pretty good at it, especially when it comes to more popular languages.
So much these discussions are pointless arguments over things we aren't even bothering to define in the discussion.
One person says "write code" in the context of chatGPT and they mean Common Lisp and chatGPT3.5
Someone else says "write code" and they mean React components and chatGPT4.
It is a mirror to how imprecise and intellectually lazy our own language and minds have become in the context of online discussion. Compressed thinking in order to fit in a twitter box along with years of being rewarded with attention the more muddled the thinking since the more people that disagree with the point the more responses it will generate.
It is like we have been running a giant language miscommunication RLHF model and the end result is an incredibly accurate system at creating miscommunication.
Re: Google warns its own employees: Do not use code generated by Bard
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Well... after fairly long experience, we have discovered that your standard is mostly adequate for human generated code (as long as it's not going into a critical system). That may be based on the (empirically collected) statistics of how human-generated code fails - that if it's wrong, it usually either "looks" wrong or obviously fails.
GPT-produced code may have different failure statistics, and therefore the human heuristic may not work for GPT-produced code. It's too early to tell.