GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

Post by treesprite82 » Wed, Jun 30, 2021, 4:04 PM UTC

bogwog wrote: post #40

freshhawk wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suppose someone should make a OS-generating AI, conceptually it can just have windows, osx and some linux distros in it and output one based on a question about favorite color or something. You'd just have to wrap it in a nice complex model representation so it's a black box you fed example OS's with some meta-data into and it happens to output this very useful data. After all, once you use something as input to a…

That would be interesting: * Someone leaks Windows 10/11 source code * Copilot picks it up in its training data * Someone uses copilot to generate a Windows clone and starts selling it I wonder how Microsoft would react to that. I wonder if they've manually blacklisted leaked source code from Windows (or other Microsoft products) so that it doesn't show up in Copilot's training data. If they have, that means Microsof…

Post by 2OEH8eoCRo0 » Wed, Jun 30, 2021, 4:05 PM UTC

invokestatic wrote: post #69

jordemort wrote: post #56

What happens when someone puts code up on GitHub with a license that says "This code may not be used for training a code generation model"? - Is GitHub actually going to pay any attention to that, or are they just going to ingest the code and thus violate its license anyway? - If they go ahead and violate the code's license, what are the legal repercussions for the resulting model? Can a model be "un-trained" from a…

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…

Post by drran » Wed, Jun 30, 2021, 4:07 PM UTC

tyingq wrote: post #76

"We found that about 0.1% of the time, the suggestion may contain some snippets that are verbatim from the training set" If it's spitting out verbatim code 0.1% of the time, surely it's spitting out copied code where only trivial things are different at a much higher rate. Trivial things meaning swapped order where order isn't important, variable/function names, equivalent ops like +=1 vs ++, etc. Surely it's launder…

Post by nerpderp82 » Wed, Jun 30, 2021, 4:09 PM UTC

not2b wrote: post #189

akerl_ wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without weighing in on the overall question of “is this a license violation”, you’ve created a false dichotomy. “GitHub included Microsoft proprietary code in the training set because they view the results as non-derivative” and “GitHub didn’t include Microsoft proprietary code because they view the results as derivative” are clearly not the only options. They could have not included Microsoft internal code because i…

Or: they used the entire open source corpus because they thought it was free for the taking, and when people point out that it is not (that there are licenses) they spin that (claim that only 0.1% of output is directly copied, but that would mean 100 lines in 100k program) and pass any risk onto the user (saying it is their responsibility to vet any code they produce). So they aren't saying that users are in the clea…

Post by fartcannon » Wed, Jun 30, 2021, 4:12 PM UTC