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Is GitHub Copilot a blessing, or a curse?

fast.ai

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Re: Is GitHub Copilot a blessing, or a curse?

#121

Post by dmurray »

onion2k wrote: post #99
tvirosi wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a difference between building a product using open source and not contributing back, and copying licensed code into your own codebase. One is rude and the other is straight up illegal.

The code doesn't exist in Copilot. The instructions for how to recreate the code does. On a very pedantic level those are not the same, but it probably is enough to argue that the product is 100% legal. It is still quite rude to do that though.

I don't think there's any water in that argument at a fundamental level. By that logic you could encode copyrighted information in any reversible format and it would be OK.

If I copy the code line by line with my eyes and keyboard, then the code briefly doesn't exist, but the instructions to recreate it do. Copying it is then a two-phase process: first I read the code, then I type it in. It is clear that I'm allowed to look at the code, so it's the action of typing it in that violates copyright. In the same way, distributing Copilot doesn't necessarily break copyright, but using it may.

Re: Is GitHub Copilot a blessing, or a curse?

#122

Post by hvis »

onion2k wrote: post #99
tvirosi wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a difference between building a product using open source and not contributing back, and copying licensed code into your own codebase. One is rude and the other is straight up illegal.

The code doesn't exist in Copilot. The instructions for how to recreate the code does. On a very pedantic level those are not the same, but it probably is enough to argue that the product is 100% legal. It is still quite rude to do that though.

Did "instructions" recreate this?

https://twitter.com/stefankarpinski/status/14109710611816816...

Re: Is GitHub Copilot a blessing, or a curse?

#123

Post by cortexio »

Personally i dont believe in any AI project that requires "context". Making a program understand "context" is almost impossible, and we are not even close to making it happen. We will eventually have it, but it's going to take probably 10-15 more years in order to do it decently.

A basic context based AI example would one that could say: this is a person in a picture shown on a tv in the reflection of a mirror.

Without it being programmed to know what these reflection/tv/photo/etc concepts are, it has to somehow learn these concepts by itself by studying conversations and images and a dictionary/wiki. It's going to take a while before that happens.

Re: Is GitHub Copilot a blessing, or a curse?

#124

Post by jasode »

ahepp wrote: post #108
seumars wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For what it’s worth, Copilot is not being marketed as anything else than code suggestion software - an alternative to google search, perhaps more of a “I’m feeling lucky” without having to actually type the search term. Knowing how to succinctly express a problem is half the problem after all.

Taken directly from the copilot product page: >Tests without the toil. Tests are the backbone of any robust software engineering project. Import a unit test package, and let GitHub Copilot suggest tests that match your implementation code. Accompanied by a picture of copilot filling out the implementation of a unit test, based on the test's name. The implication seems very clearly that it is more than a google search…

> According to the ads, it understands your code well enough to write the unit tests for it!

Yes, Github Copilot marketing has overstatements -- but it also has caveats about its limitations and creating errors.

In other words, the landing page has a mix of statements ... some hyping up the potential -- and some disclaimers to mention the reality and pitfalls.

Excerpt from that same Copilot landing page about it being wrong more often than right: https://copilot.github.com/

>How good is GitHub Copilot?

>We recently benchmarked against a set of Python functions that have good test coverage in open source repos. We blanked out the function bodies and asked GitHub Copilot to fill them in. The model got this right 43% of the time on the first try, and 57% of the time when allowed 10 attempts.

>Does GitHub Copilot write perfect code?

>No. GitHub Copilot tries to understand your intent and to generate the best code it can, but the code it suggests may not always work, or even make sense. While we are working hard to make GitHub Copilot better, code suggested by GitHub Copilot should be carefully tested, reviewed, and vetted, like any other code.

Re: Is GitHub Copilot a blessing, or a curse?

#125

Post by goodpoint »

garmaine wrote: post #91
FeepingCreature wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Copilot generally (excepting rare cases where it produces snippets verbatim) does not steal code. The GPL restricts distribution, not usage. And (to my knowledge) no open-source license restricts learning from code. I cannot see anyone who doesn't want others to learn from their code ever release code as open-source.

The GPL very much restrict derivative works. It's the whole point of the GPL. "Usage" in the context of the GPL does not have the meaning you are using.

MIT/BSD also restrict derivative works by requiring attribution. Something that Copilot disregards.

Re: Is GitHub Copilot a blessing, or a curse?

#126

Post by drran »

qiqitori wrote: post #96
zaptheimpaler wrote: post #33

Copilot was made from stealing code on Github, ignoring the licenses set on repos such as e.g GPLv2, using AI as a trick to license-launder code. Copilot has announced their plans to become a paid service. So this product that would not be possible without public, open-source code will itself be non-public, closed-source, closed-data. It is extracting value from the commons and funneling it to a private company.

The following is just my opinion, and I'm not that hard-set in case anyone has any nice arguments. Generally, when you (for example) use GANs to learn from (copyrighted) images and generate new images, I see no reason why those new images should inherit any copyrights from the original image if the resulting images look sufficiently different. (Obviously, if you just train on 1000 images of Mickey Mouse, you'll get m…

"AI training" is not a "training" in human sense. It's algorithm.

> In other words, I don't think using of an algorithm on copyrighted code violates copyright

It does.

Re: Is GitHub Copilot a blessing, or a curse?

#127

Post by drran »

onion2k wrote: post #97
yreg wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shaming companies for using OpenSSL for free without any strings attached seems to go against the idea of free software.

No part of any open source license says I have to like companies that extract billions in value from open source projects without contributing back to the project. My opinion is simply that once you get to a few million in revenue putting a few thousand back in to the code that got you there is a decent thing to do, and if you don't then you're not very nice. The fact that the license allows you to do this is great;…

GPL asks to release back changes to code made by a company, for which the company paid already, i.e. it's almost zero price for the company, and just look how much companies are afraid to donate zero ($0) worth of code back to the opensource project and prefer to pirate it instead, including such mega-rich companies as M$.

Re: Is GitHub Copilot a blessing, or a curse?

#128

Post by sweetheart »

drran wrote: post #126
qiqitori wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The following is just my opinion, and I'm not that hard-set in case anyone has any nice arguments. Generally, when you (for example) use GANs to learn from (copyrighted) images and generate new images, I see no reason why those new images should inherit any copyrights from the original image if the resulting images look sufficiently different. (Obviously, if you just train on 1000 images of Mickey Mouse, you'll get m…

"AI training" is not a "training" in human sense. It's algorithm. > In other words, I don't think using of an algorithm on copyrighted code violates copyright It does.

Do you have a link discussing how it does? Ive only seen an article from a lawyer explaining how it doesn’t, in their professional opinion.

Re: Is GitHub Copilot a blessing, or a curse?

#129

Post by Ieghaehia9 »

robbedpeter wrote: post #47
908B64B197 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The part of dev that you get paid to do is not writing the code. It's the part where you define what the code should do. That's where all the value in development resides. Getting AI to write the syntax is 100% upside for the tech industry. I guess they felt the same ways when the first compilers were introduced. Or interpreters. > the lack of available developers at a cost-effective price. There's already develope…

It's not like gpt models are some sort of random walk or Markov bot. They produce nuanced text with deep semantic relationships between large segments of text. There's a direct relationship between the algorithms human brains used to produce the training data and the algorithms being approximated by these models. No, gpt-3 isn't human level generally, but it is human level competent in some domains. These tools are e…

> There's a direct relationship between the algorithms human brains used to produce the training data and the algorithms being approximated by these models.

Eh. That deep learning networks is like the brain is like saying that cars are like cheetahs. Sure, they go really fast by converting some kind of fuel into kinetic energy, and they move by exerting force on the ground, but that's about it.

Brains don't have ReLU units. Brains have lots of different types of topology, not just an uniform network, and can handle some of that topology arbitrarily being shut off due to damage. Brains use global chemical changes for (otherwise) out-of-band signaling purposes. Brains don't use gradient descent. Etc...

Re: Is GitHub Copilot a blessing, or a curse?

#130

Post by sweetheart »

zaptheimpaler wrote: post #33

Copilot was made from stealing code on Github, ignoring the licenses set on repos such as e.g GPLv2, using AI as a trick to license-launder code. Copilot has announced their plans to become a paid service. So this product that would not be possible without public, open-source code will itself be non-public, closed-source, closed-data. It is extracting value from the commons and funneling it to a private company.

Using the word “extract” seems misleading to me. It has connotations of removing something, or exploiting scarcity. When we extract water from the Earth, there is less there for others to use. But in this case nothing is being removed from the code they trained on. I don’t mean to have the argument devolve into mere semantics, but I really think the use of that word demonstrates an assumption about the issue: people are perceiving a loss to the folks whose code was trained upon.
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