All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot

Post by neom » Thu, Jul 08, 2021, 2:40 PM UTC

BlueTemplar wrote: post #104

neom wrote: post #87

Curious what the consensus is on how GH should have approached this to avoid such blowback. Best case scenario, they explained in advance on the GH blog they're going to be doing some work on ML and coding, and they'd like people to opt into their profile being read via a flag setting/or put a file in the repo that gives permission like robots.txt? Second best case scenario, same as first but opt out vs opt in, and l…

Code (co)created with Copilot has to follow all the licenses of the source (heh) code. This generally means at the very least automatically including in projects getting help from Copilot a copy of all the licenses involved, and attribution for all the people the code of which Copilot has been trained on. (Not sure for the cases where there is no license and therefore normal copyright applies, but AFAIK this isn't th…

Post by ghoward » Thu, Jul 08, 2021, 2:40 PM UTC

CyberRabbi wrote: post #89

ghoward wrote: post #70

This is why I relicensed my code [1] yesterday to a license I wrote [2], which is designed to poison the well for machine learning. [1]: https://gavinhoward.com/2021/07/poisoning-github-copilot-and... [2]: https://yzena.com/yzena-network-license/

That’s safe but it’s probably not necessary to be protected from what GitHub, OpenAI, and Microsoft are doing. When these licenses were crafted there was no reasonable expectation that companies could use ML applications as a loop hole in existing copyright licenses, so just because there is no explicit clause denying it doesn’t mean they are in the clear for using copyright-protected code that way. Licenses give per…

Post by MayeulC » Thu, Jul 08, 2021, 2:41 PM UTC

einarfd wrote: post #34

Yoric wrote: post #13

Out of curiosity, how do we define license violation in that case? I, as a human being, have trained by reading code, much of which is covered by licenses that are somehow not compatible with code I'm writing. Am I violating licenses? Asking seriously. It's really unclear to me where law and/or ethics put the boundaries. Also, I'd guess it's probably country dependent.

> Out of curiosity, how do we define license violation in that case? I, as a human being, have trained by reading code, much of which is covered by licenses that are somehow not compatible with code I'm writing. Am I violating licenses? That depends, if you end up writing copies of the code you've studied then yes. You are on thin ice. Plagarization is definitely something that you can do with computer code. There ha…

   var1 = var1 ^ var2
   var2 = var2 ^ var1
   var1 = var1 ^ var2

Post by kevincox » Thu, Jul 08, 2021, 2:43 PM UTC

sandruso wrote: post #48

raspyberr wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well you can read public code all you like but you can't just take chunks of code and write them under different licenses like how copilot has been shown doing.

If you grab chunk of licensed code and put into private repo, what prevents you from doing that? How much of licensed code is scattered across private projects? I’m curious how these license violations are detected.

Post by whimsicalism » Thu, Jul 08, 2021, 2:44 PM UTC

CyberRabbi wrote: post #96

Tenoke wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it would stiffle NLP research immensely and we likely wouldn't see anything better than gpt3 for years if such restrictions are put in place.

You’re free to privately research with this data but commercializing other people’s work using ML is theft. Edit: commercializing of the derived work is one explicit consideration used by US law in making a fair use determination. That said, even if it weren’t commercialized it may still be infringement and I believe it is.