It seems to me that in principle it should be possible to maintain attributions through the training process, so that Copilot outputs could come with a list of weighted sources, possibly discarding those that fall below a certain weight threshold. Doing so would likely be much more expensive in terms of the computational power needed for training, and probably also in the size of the model. But it would be great to actually be able to see what went into a specific Copilot output.
GitHub Copilot investigation
101–110 of 1001 posts
Re: GitHub Copilot investigation
#102I'd be rather saddened if Copilot was shut down or neutered because of a few vocal few protesting against it. It's been a massive productivity improvement to our senior devs, and I got so used to it that it's an annoyance when Copilot doesn't respond.
Copilot wouldn't be shut down or neutered because "a few vocal people" protested against it. 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. You act like Microsoft is trying to do a public service and people are angry about it. The reality is that they're taking billions of hours of work and using it to build a product t…
> 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.
I wonder how many people on HN would be on the side of the creators if we were talking about content created by Walt Disney and whether pirating was ethical?
Re: GitHub Copilot investigation
#103One issue I see with Copilot is that they get free access to all open-source data on GitHub, but using GitHub APIs to download the data yourself isn't possible (rate limiting). This is an unfair advantage. Copilot is not only making money off of open-source, they are making money off of open-source in a way others can't. I would love to see a lawsuit which requires GitHub to provide their full Copilot dataset.
Github does plenty of stuff that you can't do. e.g. the contributions graph as just one example that comes to mind.
That's not unfair, and not the basis for a lawsuit, it's just business.
> Copilot is not only making money off of open-source, they are making money off of open-source in a way others can't.
Of course! That's why MS paid squillions to buy Github.
Re: GitHub Copilot investigation
#104Why can't Tim Davis (or another software author whose code is emitted verbatim by Copilot) demand that Microsoft take down Copilot, or at least the part of Copilot that contains his code?
Microsoft is distributing his software without a license, isn't it?
Re: GitHub Copilot investigation
#105I find it hard to see a scenario where MS doesn’t get absolutely wrecked in court.
Re: GitHub Copilot investigation
#106There are lots of comments arguing for or against Copilot on a value judgment, and having an opinion on it being ethical or legal, etc isn't going to be the same for everyone. But I think regardless of where you stand, there should be some sort of legal ruling to clarify the gray areas that Butterick breaks down.
Agreed, but I also hate how so much of our substantive law basically has to be created by the courts because (a) many of our legislatures, especially at the federal level, have become more and more non-functional, and (b) IMO legislatures are especially bad at implementing technical legislation.
I think there is a good, fundamental legal/societal question of how copyright should apply to AI output. I just don't think our existing copyright structures handle this question well.
Note there is currently a very important case before the SCOTUS that is related to this issue, [1] where the original photographer of a Prince photo is suing Andy Warhol's estate for copyright infringement. The fundamental question is whether the Warhol series of painting are "transformative" enough of the original photo. While there are always gray lines on what "transformative" means, if there is any chance that Warhol's painting are legal and not infringing, I don't see how Copilot could be in the wrong. Copilot's output, even if it contains a substantial amount of the original source, appears to me much more "transformative" than the Warhol paintings are compared to the original photo.
1. https://www.npr.org/2022/10/12/1127508725/prince-andy-warhol...
Re: GitHub Copilot investigation
#107It seems like there's no good license that places absolutely no restrictions or requirements on people using your code (such as attribution and respecting patent rights) worldwide. I want my code to be used the way people treated text in the old days. There's texts that have been re-written, added to and edited by thousands of people over the centuries and yet they don't come with thousands of pages of attribution no…
You don't need to license it, you can just publish it with a declaration that as the author, you are releasing your work in to the public domain. However, in terms of licensing I believe MIT is the most permissive.
MIT still requires the license text to be included with the source. Copilot, if it is not fair use, violates the license of MIT code it re-emits.
Re: GitHub Copilot investigation
#108I'd be rather saddened if Copilot was shut down or neutered because of a few vocal few protesting against it. It's been a massive productivity improvement to our senior devs, and I got so used to it that it's an annoyance when Copilot doesn't respond.
I’d claim that it’s more than a “few vocal” protestors. If the system is illegal, it needs to become legal or disappear. If I’m writing code for a query optimizer, the SQL Server solution isn’t going to magically show up.
It’s not illegal, it’s at worst a fancy code search tool that Github has the right to show you the results via the license you grant them when you upload and make public code on Github which is way stronger than other search engines like Sourcegraph have to show public code.
It doesn’t mean you have the right to use any of the code it generates but Copilot itself isn’t illegal in any meaningful sense.
Re: GitHub Copilot investigation
#109One issue I see with Copilot is that they get free access to all open-source data on GitHub, but using GitHub APIs to download the data yourself isn't possible (rate limiting). This is an unfair advantage. Copilot is not only making money off of open-source, they are making money off of open-source in a way others can't. I would love to see a lawsuit which requires GitHub to provide their full Copilot dataset.
It’s not making money off of open source, it’s making money off of hosting open source.
Re: GitHub Copilot investigation
#110I think the test for whether an AI is infringing or not should be: Can this AI regurgitate the vast majority of the creative aspects of an original/novel piece of software with minimal prompting, to the point where the output code looks mostly and directly cloned to a reasonable person trained in the art?
_Maybe_ software is fundamentally different to other "creative works" which rely on copyright protection, but it's not immediately clear it is, and as far as I know it's certainly not a "special edge case" as defined in copyright law in general.
So "Can this AI regurgitate the vast majority of the creative aspects of an original/novel piece of software" is not the test that, for example, the music industry uses when determining if a sample is infringing. The test there is "is a sample, however small, identifiable as part of a copyright work by a reasonable person trained in the art?"
You can't own copyright in a composition of a single middle c note. But lawsuits have been won for copyright infringement of melodies of 2 bars (fewer than about 16 consecutinve notes). Men At Work lost a copyright case for the flute melody in Land Downunder which is the same as a 90 year old tune Kookaburra Sits In The Old Gunmtree https://www.claytonutz.com/knowledge/2010/february/men-at-wo...
Whether that's done by a flute player or an AI, really doesn't make any difference as far as copyright law sees things.
(Whether copyright law is a "good fit" for source code, and whether it makes sense to apply laws meant for books/literature/music/film to software is a different but very good question. I don't have much in the way of other ideas which take original author's efforts and potential rights to benefit from then though...)