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GitHub Copilot is generally available

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Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#261

Post by thethirdone »

natefinch wrote: post #145
karl42 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see the use itself as a problem, but rather that the result is not treated as a derivative work of the input. If I train it on GPL code, the result should be GPL, too.

This is kind of like saying that any programmer who has ever learned something from reading GPL code can only use that knowledge when writing GPL code. It's not literally copying the code. The training set isn't stored on disk and regurgitated. Also - there is logic in copilot that checks to make sure it is not suggesting exact duplicates of code from its training set, and if it does, it never sends them to the user.

> This is kind of like saying that any programmer who has ever learned something from reading GPL code can only use that knowledge when writing GPL code. It's not literally copying the code. The training set isn't stored on disk and regurgitated.

I wouldn't put any hard rules on it, but it does seem very fair for programmers who have learned a lot from GPL code to contribute back to GPL projects. I have learned from and used a lot of open source software so whenever possible I try to make projects available to learn from or use.

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#262

Post by tkiolp4 »

albertzeyer wrote: post #188

I don't really get this argument why it should be a problem that it is being trained on other public code. Every human was just trained in the same way. Why isn't this a problem for every human? I really don't see the difference. One is an artificial neural network while the other is a biological neural network?

It’s not about the learning part, it’s about the copyright and money part. If you learn how to play song X by The Rolling Stones, you cannot just make money playing song X in a concert. Sure thing you can play song X in your father’s birthday.

Here GitHub (Microsoft) is charging for a product that in certain circumstances violates copyright.

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#263

Post by chrisweekly »

natefinch wrote: post #168
uwuemu wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on your budget of course, but I don't think it's worth $10/month. I pay just a little bit more than that for an entire IDE. The problem with Copilot is that it's USEFUL for boilerplate code and when you need a lot of copypaste "coding" (think APIs, controllers, etc... basically shifting data around the place), but any time you need to actually code something with some actual algorithmic logic behind it, it's…

I very often will let it suggest its thing and then tweak it to work how I want. It's like super auto-complete for me. If I can't remember how a specific pattern goes for some library, I'll let it write it for me, and then double check it to make sure it's doing what I want. That's still faster than me going to check the API and writing it all out by hand. Most projects are 90% BS glue code and 10% actually interesti…

This seems pretty reasonable to me / resonates w/ how I might use it.

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#264

Post by quartzic »

xd1936 wrote: post #241
nonethewiser wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm lucky that I don't have to pay moving forward but I would totally pay $10/mo for this. How? I was in beta but looks like I'm kicked out. I also verified my student status but get prompted to pay. Are you a maintainer? Have you verified that you have access?

I _think_ a coupon code or something will eventually be available on the Github Student Pack website[1]. No clear answer yet if it'll be available for Teachers[2] as well. 1. https://education.github.com/pack 2. https://education.github.com/teachers

I didn't see the student license at first, but after re-verifying my educational status, I got it: https://i.quartzic.co/yIoSJFfH

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#265

Post by hnbad »

natefinch wrote: post #196
cube00 wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> monetizing the efforts ...and not compensating (or even attributing as required by the licenses) the authors for it.

It's not copying open source code. If you learn an algorithm to balance a binary tree from reading GPL code, and then go use that algorithm in your own closed-source project, with your own variables and types and context, are you breaking GPL? You're not copying the code. Just because you learned about it from reading GPL code doesn't mean that whenever you write tree balancing code from now until the end of time, al…

If you decompile runtime bytecode and assign your own variable names, does the copyright of the original source code no longer apply?

If you trace a picture and use it in your work of art, does the copyright of the original picture no longer apply?

If you copy a tune but set it to new instruments, does the copyright of the original tune no longer apply?

Sampling is a legal minefield in music, why would it become less of a minefield in code just because you've automated it? So far the best attempt at an answer about the legal issue of Copilot I've seen was that it's "not technically violating copyright", which honestly is not very reassuring and extremely morally inconsistent for a company built by a guy[0] who is philosophically invested enough in intellectual property as the pillar of human society to write An Open Letter To Hobbyists and use his Foundation to convince entire governments of adhering to IP laws instead of allowing the mass production of vaccines and medicine.

[0]: Yeah, I know that he no longer serves an active role in the company but this was very much a founding ethos and this is at least a fair bit hypocritical.

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#266

Post by [deleted] »

threatofrain wrote: post #252
tnorthcutt wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to clarify: are you saying you'd pay $20 for an hour saved, but not $33.33 for an hour saved?

I'm saying that at $100 yearly I'm on the fence of maybe yes or no. At $60 yearly I'm auto-yes without having to think in rational terms. I guess I'm just not at that place in life where $100 is the tier in which I think emotionally. Also, if I magically knew that I could save you 3 hours yearly, but it were spread out over the course of a year, and that your savings would occasionally spike down into negative and th…

[deleted]

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#267

Post by mikkergp »

maccaw wrote: post #176
andrewallbright wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do think they should pay the folks whose code they used to train the AI. Something like how Spotify pays artists based on how much their music/content is listened to.

Do you also think you should be compensated by OpenAI for all the blog posts you've written that went into GPT3's training?

For sure

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#268

Post by native_samples »

dtech wrote: post #143
__alexs wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having used it quite a lot I'm not sure it does save me $10 of time per month. At least as often that it generates usefully correct code it generates correct appearing but actually totally wrong code that I have to carefully check and/or debug. It's quite nice not to have to type generic boilerplate in sometimes I guess but it's very frustrating when it generates junk.

Same experience for me. Checking the code it generated, and the subtle bugs it created which I missed until tests failed, made it at best a net-zero for me. I disabled it after trying for 2 months.

You lasted long than I did! Disabled after a few days.

I think it really depends on what languages you use though. If you use something like Kotlin where there's really almost no boilerplate and the type system is usefully strong, the symbolic logic auto-completion is just far more reliable and helpful. If you're stuck in a language where there's no types, and there's lots of boilerplate to write, then I can see it may be more helpful.

Re: GitHub Copilot is generally available

#270

Post by colechristensen »

qayxc wrote: post #191
colechristensen wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

copilot also got its training sets for free and not really with any kind of consent from the owners of that code, and it's really quite ambiguous as to if what it's doing violates many different open source licenses of its training data Microsoft is selling AI services based on training data they don't own and didn't acquire rights to, nobody writing the licenses of the code it's using had the opportunity to address…

> Microsoft is selling AI services based on training data they don't own and didn't acquire rights to, nobody writing the licenses of the code it's using [...] I agree, but it still uses resources and those don't come for free (hardware, electricity, cooling, maintenance staff, housing, etc.) It's really difficult to assign monetary value to all these aspects and weighing them against each other in a fair manner. The…

I think copilot is pretty clearly copyright violation and in violation of licenses of "public" code. People uploading code to github are bound to the licenses just the same as anyone, unless you're the legitimate owner of all of the copyright in a codebase, you can't give change the license provisions by accepting a ToS.

I don't think it's really that murky, these models contain and have been shown to reproduce copyrighted code with the right prompting, it's not a grey area it's just obfuscated theft.

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