There isn't that much enforcement of open source license violations anyway. I bet there are lots of places where open source code gets taken, copyright/license headers stripped off and the code used in something proprietary as well as the bog-standard "not releasing code for modified versions of Linux" violation.
GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?
211–220 of 473 posts
Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?
#212The second tweet in the thread seems badly off the mark in its understanding of copyright law. > copyright does not only cover copying and pasting; it covers derivative works. github copilot was trained on open source code and the sum total of everything it knows was drawn from that code. there is no possible interpretation of "derivative" that does not include this Copyright law is very complicated (remember Google…
If you can read open source code, learn from it, and write your own code, why can't a computer?
Many behaviors which are healthy and beneficial at human-level scale can easily become unhealthy and unethical at industrial automation scale. There's little universal harm in cutting down a tree for fire during the winter; there is significant harm in clear-cutting a forest to do the same for a thousand people.
Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?
#213As a human programmer, I've also been trained on thousands of lines of other people's code. Is there anything new here, from a code copying perspective? Aren't I liable if segments of my own code exactly match someone else's code, even if I didn't knowingly copy/paste it?
Well to me those are fundamental questions that need to be addressed one way or the other. Are systems like GPT-x basically plagiarising (doesn't matter the nature of the output, be it prose, code, or audio-visual) or are the results so transformative in nature that they can be considered to be "original work"?
In other words, are these systems to be treated like students that learned to perform the task they do from a collection of source material, or are they to be viewed as sophisticated databases that "just" perform context-sensitive retrieval?
These are interesting and important questions and I'm glad someone is publicly asking them and that many of us at least think about them.
Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?
#214It's astonishing to me that HN+Twitter believe that Github designed this entire project, without speaking to their legal team and confirming that training on GPL code would be possible.
Mind-blowingly hilarious armchair criticism.
Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?
#215>GitHub co-pilot as open source code laundering?
The English language as I flush?
Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?
#216Earlier quoted context omitted.
By uploading your content to GitHub, you’ve granted them a license to use that content to “improve the Service over time”, as specified in the ToS[1]. That effectively “overrides” any license or term that you’ve specified for your repository, since you’ve already licensed the content to GitHub under different terms. Of course, people who are not GitHub are beholden to the terms you specify. [1] https://docs.github.co…
How is this different from uploading a hollywood movie to youtube? Just because there is a passage in the terms that the uploader supposedly gave them those rights, this does not mean they actually have the power to do that.
You can't give Github or Youtube or anybody else copyright rights if you don't have them in the first place. This is what ultimately torpedoed "Happy Birthday" copyright claims: while it's pretty undisputed that the Hill sisters gave their copyright to (ultimately) Warner/Chapelle, it was the case that they actually didn't invent the lyrics, and thus Warner/Chapelle had no copyright over the lyrics.
So if someone uploads a Hollywood movie to Youtube, Youtube doesn't get the rights to play that movie from them because they didn't have the rights in the first place. Of course, if the actual copyright owner uploads it, it's now permissible for Youtube to play it, even if it's the copy that someone else provided. [This has torpedoed a few filesharing lawsuits.]
Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?
#217SourceHut is looking real nice these days...
Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?
#218One interesting aspect, that I thing will make it difficult for GitHub to argue and justify its not a a license violation would be the answer to the following question: Was Copilot trained using Microsoft internal source code or will it be in the future ? As GitHub is a Microsoft company and OpenAI although a non-profit just got a massive one billion investment from Microsoft (presumably not for free), will it start…
Not a problem because it's possible to check if the code is verbatim from the training set (bloom filters).
Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?
#219I’m worried about my job. What do I do to prepare?
There are much bigger things in this world to worry about. I bet you that by the time that this AI has taken your job, it'll have taken many other jobs, completely rearranging entire industries if not society itself.
And even once that happens you shouldn't be worried about your job. Why? Because economically everything will be different and because your job isn't that important, it likely never was. The problems humanity faces are existential. Authoritarianism, ecosystem collapse and mass migration of billions of people.
So if you really want to "prepare", then try to make a difference in what actually matters.
Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?
#220I propose we as developers, start a secret society where we let the AI write the code, but we still claim to write it manually. In combination with the new working from home policies, we can lay at the beach all day and still be as productive as before. Who is in favor of starting it? ;)
This would be the demise of the human race. I’m not entirely opposed to that, though. When AI inevitably outperforms humans on almost all tasks, who am I to say humans deserve to be given those tasks?
> When AI inevitably outperforms humans on almost all tasks
Correct me if I’m wrong, but is that even possible? I kind of thought that AI is just set of fancy statistical models that requires some (preferably huge) data set in order to infer the best fit. These models can only outperform humans in scenarios where the parameters are well defined.
Many (most?) tasks humans regularly perform don’t have clean and well defined parameters, and there is no AI we can conceive of which are theoretically able to perform the task better then an average human with the adequate training.