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GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

githubcopilotinvestigation.com

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Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#121

Post by beebmam »

smt88 wrote: post #78
19h wrote: post #52

I'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…

Why should Copilot engineers, and the company that invests in it, not be rewarded for their incredible product and SaaS offering they spend resources on providing?

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#122

Post by rcoder »

keithnz wrote: post #79
armchairhacker wrote: post #37

One 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.

why use the API? why not just use git to get the code? All you need the API for is repository discovery

I'm gonna guess that Microsoft GitHub (tm) would shut you down pretty quickly if you tried to clone tens or hundreds of thousands of repos in a short window of time, b/c of course that's sketchy/abusive use of their infrastructure, right?

But of course if the data is already sitting in object storage inside your cloud environment and all you have to do is run some MapReduce jobs to get at it...

Hence: unfair, anticompetitive, intellectual-property-right-abusing behavior. Microsoft GitHub (tm) can prevent anyone else from running the kinds of analysis they do by simple "operational security", while running literally any kind of analysis, model training, etc. they want. Don't like it? But their commercial services and products so you can run Microsoft GitHub (tm) on your very own Microsoft Azure (tm) infrastructure, using Microsoft Visual Studio Code (tm) and Microsoft GitHub Codespaces (tm) so work on _your_ code privately.

Best of all, you can still still take advantage of the huge library of "free" code offered by Microsoft GitHub Copilot (tm) to ensure your private, proprietary codebase still has all of the advantages of Open Source Software, brought to you exclusively by the Microsoft GitHub Platform (tm).

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#123

Post by TAForObvReasons »

bakugo wrote: post #95
jamiek88 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does this comment even mean? I cannot parse what you are suggesting.

As far as I can tell it's just a more convoluted way of saying "new good, old bad, only old people disagree"

It's more nuanced.

Copilot exists publicly, which also means some copilot-lite thing trained on a smaller subset of repos probably exists privately in many different places. It may not be as good today, but these private instances will improve over time. Since the demand for a copilot-like service exists, eventually a large VC-funded public instance will show up.

In that lens, it is more sensible on the individual level to prepare for a world where copilot thrives than to put all of your eggs in the "ban copilot" basket.

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#124

Post by scarface74 »

lbotos wrote: post #117
scarface74 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Wait, I'm not sure what you are trying to say? Can you clarify?

That many people who are criticizing Microsoft for using open source code and claiming “fair use” and saying it’s not fair to creators are the same ones that say pirating digital content is harmless.

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#126

Post by thfuran »

rkagerer wrote: post #87
RunSet wrote: post #13

> Microsoft char­ac­ter­izes the out­put of Copi­lot as a series of code "sug­ges­tions". Microsoft "does not claim any rights" in these sug­ges­tions. But nei­ther does Microsoft make any guar­an­tees about the cor­rect­ness, secu­rity, or exten­u­at­ing intel­lec­tual-prop­erty entan­gle­ments of the code so pro­duced. Once you accept a Copi­lot sug­ges­tion, all that becomes your prob­lem: > "You are respon­si­ble…

intel­lec­tual prop­erty scan­ning With "normal" code I can generally see (or figure out) who posted/published it and reach out for explicit permission. It's not uncommon for me to do this. How is one supposed to do that for the generated stuff? Seems like an awefully hands-off attitude. As challenging as it is, they really ought to be qualifying the input samples of training code before ingesting.

I don't think it's right to characterize it as hands off after they had their hands all up in the generated code. It's just malfeasant. They've produced a tool that is fundamentally (legally) unsafe to use and said that's not their problem.

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#127

Post by Spivak »

scarface74 wrote: post #102
smt88 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I don’t think anyone at all is here arguing that an AI trained on a massive corpus of movies that outputs snippets of film based on a prompt would be illegal. Such a thing would literally be the same as Midjourney with images. The fact that you can likely coax any AI to output snippets close to some of the source material is not likely to really matter and would be as if you recreated a copyrighted work using any other tools.

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#128

Post by rockemsockem »

What do people think the future looks like where publicly available resources on the Internet (art, code, etc) aren't fair use for training ML models? Where you have to opt into models or can opt out (and many wind up doing so)?

OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, et al will STILL train such models that can do all the same things, but it will be much harder for non-industry-backed individuals to navigate the legal minefield where you must ensure you properly attribute your model outputs, only train on opt-in data, etc, etc. Surely no one really thinks that a court case against Microsoft/OpenAI (even if they lose) would stop CoPilot?

Most of these complaints seem to be extremely emotional and cherry-picked. "People's legal rights are being violated!" (you definitely don't know that, no one knows that, the article is 100% right about that), "look I prompted CoPilot for this piece of code that I already knew about and it spit it right out" (that's not how it's going to be used in practice).

It seems to me that the longer-term implications of the outcome of a lawsuit like this are far more interesting, yet almost all the comments I see are nitpicking and whining about how the world isn't the way they want it to be. I wish the conversations around generative AI could be...just better.

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#129

Post by Sirened »

ClassAndBurn wrote: post #84

My view is the copilot is not stealing open source code. It is learning from it just as a human reader would. People's disguste is based on the assimilation of what they thought was a human trait being machine derived from their work. The copilot service backed by an army of actual humans wouldn’t be a story at all. Nor would anyone be angry, if an individual offered coding skills as a service, and had gone through t…

You aren't allowed to just read code and regurgitate it in order to claim it as your own. That is, just because you memorized this great new novel you read, it doesn't mean you can go and sit down and hammer it out and sell new copies. People go to great lengths to do this sort of things (see: clean room reverse engineering [1]) in order to try and wash themselves of liability.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#130

Post by freeqaz »

rkagerer wrote: post #87
RunSet wrote: post #13

> Microsoft char­ac­ter­izes the out­put of Copi­lot as a series of code "sug­ges­tions". Microsoft "does not claim any rights" in these sug­ges­tions. But nei­ther does Microsoft make any guar­an­tees about the cor­rect­ness, secu­rity, or exten­u­at­ing intel­lec­tual-prop­erty entan­gle­ments of the code so pro­duced. Once you accept a Copi­lot sug­ges­tion, all that becomes your prob­lem: > "You are respon­si­ble…

intel­lec­tual prop­erty scan­ning With "normal" code I can generally see (or figure out) who posted/published it and reach out for explicit permission. It's not uncommon for me to do this. How is one supposed to do that for the generated stuff? Seems like an awefully hands-off attitude. As challenging as it is, they really ought to be qualifying the input samples of training code before ingesting.

There are some techniques used mostly to detect when students copy paste code. I've seen some of the tools in that space and they have varying degrees of accuracy. MOSS is a common one[0].

There are some vendors in this space too (BlackDuck comes to mind) but they're $$$ so only within the scope of large corporations.

If anybody has any ideas relating to this type of analysis, I'd be excited to chat. I am working on a project[1] in this space for "Software Composition Analysis" which could potentially overlap with snippet detection for code like Co-Pilot. (We basically just have a big pipeline of analysis jobs that run on code and store the results. I need to update the docs!)

0: https://yangdanny97.github.io/blog/2019/05/03/MOSS

1: https://github.com/lunasec-io/lunasec/tree/master/lunatrace

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