Live data from Hacker News

GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

twitter.com

261–270 of 473 posts

Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's super cool. As long as you do the things you specify at the bottom of that doc (provide attribution if copied so people can know if it's OK to use) then a lot of the concerns of people on these threads are going to be resolved.

Pretty much! There's only three major fears remaining * Co-pilot fails to detect it, and you have a potential lawsuit/ethical concern when someone finds out. Although the devil on my shoulder says that if Co-pilot didn't detect it, what's to say another tool will? * Co-pilot reuses code in a way that still violates copyright, but is difficult to detect. I.e. If you checked via a syntax tree, you'd notice that the cod…

> Purely ethical - is it right to take licensed code and condense it into a product, without having to take into account the wishes of the original creators? It might be treated as normal that other coders will read it, and pick up on it, but when these licenses were written no one saw products like this coming about. They never assumed that a single person could read all their code, memorise it, and quote it near-verbatim on command.

It's gonna be really interesting to see how this plays out.

Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh man, that got meta super fast. Its like a mobius strip!

It can always get more meta. For example, the AI tool that Microsoft's lawyers use ("Co-Counsel"), will be filing the DMCA notices and subsequenct lawsuits against Co-Pilot generated code. This will result in a massive caseload for the courts, so naturally they'll turn to their AI tool ("DocketPlus Pro") to adjudicate all the cases. Only thing left is to enter these AI-generated judgements into Etherium smart contrac…

And while the machines are distracted by all that, we can get back to writing code.

Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#263

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…

Seems like a good reason to never use GitHub, and encourage other people not to.

Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#264

Attempts to litigate any license violation are going to get precisely nowhere I bet, but I find the actual license violation argument persuasive. This is an excellent example of how the AI singularity/revolution/whatever is a total distraction and that a much bigger and more serious issue is how AI is becoming so effective at turning the output of cheap/free human mental labour into capital. If AI keeps getting bette…

I don't feel it's morally right to keep a profession around that is automated. Why should software be different?

Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#266

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…

I rather suspect judges would not see "improving the Service over time" as permission to create derivative works without compensation.

The person uploading files to github is also not necessarily doing so with permission from the rights holder, which might be a violation of the terms of service, but would mean there's no agreement in place.

Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh man, that got meta super fast. Its like a mobius strip!

It can always get more meta. For example, the AI tool that Microsoft's lawyers use ("Co-Counsel"), will be filing the DMCA notices and subsequenct lawsuits against Co-Pilot generated code. This will result in a massive caseload for the courts, so naturally they'll turn to their AI tool ("DocketPlus Pro") to adjudicate all the cases. Only thing left is to enter these AI-generated judgements into Etherium smart contrac…

Don't forget settlements paid in Ai-generated crypto-currencies backed by Gold mined in Australia fully automated mine. Run it all on solar and humans can just fuck right off.

Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#268

I 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? ;)

"lay at the beach"

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#269
So, I can't see how they can argue that the code generated is not a derrivative of at least some of the code that it was trained on, and therefore encumbered by a complicated, and for anyone other than GitHub, impossible to disentangle, copyright claims. If they haven't even been careful to only use software under one license that does not require the original author to be attributed, then I don't see how it can even be legal for them to be running the service.

All that said, I'm not confident that anyone will stop them in court anyway. This hasn't tenmded to be very easy when companies infringe other open source code copyright terms.

Until it is cleared up though, it would seem extremely unwise for anyone to use any code from it.

Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#270
post #101

One 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).

It's not clear to me that verbatim would be the only issue. It might produce lines that are similar, but not identical.

The underlying question is whether the output is a derivative work of the training set? Sidestepping similar issues is why GCC and LLVM have compiler exemptions in their respective licenses.

Post reply on HN