Is GitHub Copilot a blessing, or a curse?

Post by thereddaikon » Tue, Jul 20, 2021, 3:16 PM UTC

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…

Post by skohan » Tue, Jul 20, 2021, 3:47 PM UTC

krageon wrote: post #166

skohan wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We can't know the future, but we guess based on past trends. Technology has been pretty good at replacing humans in the past, and a lot of times we've said "a machine can't do this" and been wrong. We'll have to see, but I think it's silly to say it's not working now so it never will.

We've heard breathless claims that AI will replace people coding ever since the advent of AI in some form or another. If we truly were going on past trends, we would conclude it is not very useful and will probably stay that way.

Post by skohan » Tue, Jul 20, 2021, 3:56 PM UTC

hippari wrote: post #76

skohan wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Copilot is also almost certainly going to become better. For example, NVIDIA's DLSS was viewed as a failure at launch, but now it's almost magic in terms of offering better results at a lower performance cost.

To me graphic seems to have a very specific goal of rendering more details & better simulation of real world. People aren't even agreed on what is "good" code.

Post by sweetheart » Tue, Jul 20, 2021, 5:16 PM UTC

sombremesa wrote: post #137

sweetheart wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Regardless of the nuances of that point, GitHub copilot violates copyright because the content it was trained on still lives in it, and you can get it to spit it out verbatim. If I were a master artist, my existence wouldn’t violate copyright, but I would certainly be violating it every time I chose to reproduce a copyrighted work for a client.

Post by wffurr » Tue, Jul 20, 2021, 5:59 PM UTC

necovek wrote: post #89

toxik wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I as an open source author absolutely do not want Microsoft to get richer from using my code, code that I contributed or published for the benefits of other developers. They took my work, removed my name and trained an advanced pattern matching technique to try to make code like mine and then sell it. It’s so obviously ethically questionable it’s insane. Developers are absolutely pissed about this, and rightfully so.

Not even copyleft licenses prohibit somebody from earning money from what you released, and that includes Microsoft. The idea behind free software is that it benefits all users equally, even if other developers get the biggest direct benefit. The best question to ask yourself is if you would be annoyed as much if a company like Black Duck did a similar training or analysis with their OpenHub (openhub.net)? I think on…