The licensing game is really awful imo. It should be that releasing your code on github = fair game. Licenses are seriously hindering development. You either take part in open source or you don’t. I get anxious every time someone asks me to add a license to one of my project because I don’t know which license to use and wonder if it’ll prevent some people from using the software down the line. Once I tried writing my own license that basically said: I don’t care, do whatever. Yet someone complained with “yet another license”.
All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot
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Re: All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot
#152So playing devil's advocate. What if the courts just don't care, and rule that copying code verbatim is not a crime because you didn't copy it, and copilot is not a human so it can't commit crimes. What's the net effect of a system that draws upon all public code repos? It sounds... net beneficial to society? On the plus side, a large body of work effectively becomes public domain. On the negative side, copyleft lice…
>copilot is not a human so it can't commit crimes I can setup my drone to detect me and attempt to crash into me. AI would be quite poor, probably would attempt to crash at any human. Would it be my fault it didn't crash into me and someone lost eyes? Can I setup torrent box that automatically downloads and seeds all detected links from public trackers? Would I be responsible for it?
Both of these examples include you creating something and then using it. I don't know how copilot works, but using the second example, if you wrote a script to download and seed trackers, and someone else used it, I don't think you would be held under any liability, especially if you don't profit off of it.
Not a lawyer or even particularly well informed
edit: I am reminded of the monkey selfie, in which it was ruled that a non-human cannot create copyrightable works. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput...
Re: All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot
#153Out 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.
> 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?
There are many good answers from the legal side. I would also attack this side: the way human beings learn is entirely different from the way ML models are trained. We don't do gradient descent to find the slope of data points and find the most likely next bit of code.
We humans create rational models of the code and of the world, and use deduction from those models to create code. This is extremely visible in the way we can explain the reason behind our code, and in the way we are aware of the difference between copying code we've seen before vs writing new code. It's also visible in that we can be told rules and produce code that obeys those rules that doesn't resemble any code ever written before.
The difference is also easily quantifiable: humans learn to program after seeing vastly fewer code examples than Co-pilot needed, and we are much better at it.
One day, we will design an AI that does learn more similarly to how humans learn, and that day your question will be far more interesting. But we are far from such problems.
Re: All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot
#154Bit confused. If I have code on GitHub with most restrictive licence possible (no commercial reuse, no derived works) then how did Githubs legal get comfortable with this approach? What am I missing ?
By using github you have acceded to their terms of use[1]:
> Short version: You own content you create, but you allow us certain rights to it, so that we can display and share the content you post. You still have control over your content, and responsibility for it, and the rights you grant us are limited to those we need to provide the service. We have the right to remove content or close Accounts if we need to.
[1] https://docs.github.com/en/github/site-policy/github-terms-o...
Re: All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot
#155I mean, if it's considered "fair use" legally (which is surely their position), then why wouldn't they?
Why would they distinguish between licenses if there's no legal need to?
Licenses are only restrictions on top of fair use. Licenses can't restrict fair use.
It would be interesting if someone takes them to court and a judge definitively rules on fair use in this particular case. Or I don't know if there's enough precedent here that the case would never even make it to trial. But with a team of top-paid Microsoft lawyers that gave this the green light, I'm pretty sure they're quite confident of the legality of it.
Re: All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot
#156Suppose you had some kind of AI Deepfake program operating off a large database of copyrighted photos and you asked it to "make a picture of a handsome man on a horse" and the man's head was an exact duplicate of George Clooney's head from a specific magazine cover, would that be infringement? Would selling the services of an AI that took copyrighted photos of celebrities and edited them into porn movies be infringem…
That would potentially be an infringement of the copyright of the photographer but in any case it’s an infringement of the personality rights of George Clooney. You aren’t allowed to sell someone’s likeness without their permission. You don’t need an AI for this if you create a portrait of Clooney and sell it or make any use that isn’t covered by fair use he can sue you. Depending on the composition of the picture fo…
Satire does not usually fall under libel/defamation, though, right?
>For example, in Hustler Magazine v. Falwell (1988), Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, writing for a unanimous court, stated that a parody depicting the Reverend Jerry Falwell as a drunken, incestuous son could not be defamation since it was an obvious parody, not intended as a statement of fact. To find otherwise, the Court said, was to endanger First Amendment protection for every artist, political cartoonist, and comedian who used satire to criticize public figures.
Re: All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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? As someone who has taught students in ICT a quick rule of thumb was that I picked a piece of text that I suspected, wrapped it in doublequotes and put it into a search engine. 9/10 times - possibly more - of the times I had that feeling it was true.…
It’s not AI it is ML. GPT-3 is a very large ML model. It does not reason. It’s a statistical machine.
ML is a subset of AI, in any defintion that I've seen. And both are needlessly anthropomorphizing what are currently simple statistical or rule-based deduction engines.
GPT-3 is no more 'intelligent' in the human sense than it is 'learning' in the human sense.
Re: All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm talking about how it's presented. It starts with >oh my gods. they literally have no shame about this. Then continues with >it's official, obeying copyright is only for the plebs and proles, rich people and big companies can do whatever they want and > GitHub, and by extension @Microsoft , knows that copyright is essentially worthless for individuals and small community projects. THAT is why they're all buddy-bud…
Is that not true? Google and Oracle had a 10 year multi billion dollar legal fight over ~20 lines of code identical between Android and JVM. A non rich individual has basically zero chance of challenging GitHub on these blatant violations, and they know it. > At any rate, it's not even clear to me if me publishing code written with copilot (or even with a random tool that will wget from github) puts the blame on the…
maybe you are correct, but i would agree that it's formulated in a childish/evil spirited way. It smells of outrage hype and cancel culture.
Re: All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot
#159This 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/
I think to actually poison the well, we should add code to existing repos with dead code clearly labelled as "the way that things shouldn't be done" that are wrong in subtle ways. So every time we fix a security issue, we keep the version with the bug with some comments indicating what's wrong with it. Of course, this only works until the AI is trained to weigh the code based on how often the code is called.
That is a funny idea. Personally, too much work for me, and Copilot probably generates subtly wrong code already.
Re: All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot
#160This means that also all illegally leaked codes from Apple, CDPR, Intel, NSA and Microsoft leaks are used in the models? iBoot, Witcher 3? Gwent? NSA backdoors? Does the copilot still learn from new repos? Can I post github enterprise code publicly to let it learn from it? Serious answers only please
I assume that this is a yes to most of those ?
Of course using code generated by Copilot from those would still be illegal.
See also : Napster (and other p2p), the bitcoin blockchain allegedly containing illegal numbers...