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GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

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Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#291

Post by iKevinShah »

schnebbau wrote: post #119
nextaccountic wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It should be copied and paraphrased, but respecting the license. This means, among other things, crediting the author.

It may be hard to believe, but there are sick and twisted individuals in this dangerous world who copy from github without even a single glance at the license, and they live among us.

There are always exceptions (maybe they might be norm in this case) but its still not 100%, still not all encompassing. This "AI" seems to be. I think that is like the entire concern. ALL the code is affected for all the instances.

Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#292

Post by heeton »

wg0 wrote: post #259

If I read a lot of GPL code, absorb naming conventions, structures, patterns, tricks and later when it comes down to writing a P2P Chat server, I happen to recall similar patterns, naming structures, conventions and many of the utility methods are pretty much how they are in the GPL code bases out there. Now is my produced code is also GPL derivative because I certainly did read through the code base to be able to wr…

https://twitter.com/eevee/status/1410049195067674625

"""

"but eevee, humans also learn by reading open source code, so isn't that the same thing" - no - humans are capable of abstract understanding and have a breadth of other knowledge to draw from - statistical models do not - you have fallen for marketing

Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#294

Post by esailija »

invig wrote: post #88
mrosett wrote: post #67

The 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?

The AI doesn't produce its own code or learn, it is just a search engine on existing code. Any result it gives exists in some form in the original dataset. That's why the original dataset needs to be massive in the first place, whereas actual learning uses very little data.

Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#295

Post by int_19h »

spottybanana wrote: post #59
thundergolfer wrote: post #8

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…

> trillions in capital will be captured by the 0.01%. How is that different from the current situation?

In the current arrangement, capital by itself is useless - you need workers to utilize it to generate wealth. Owners of capital can then collect economic rent from that generated wealth, but they have to leave enough for the workers to sustain themselves. This is an unfair arrangement, obviously; but at least the workers get something out of it, so it can be fairly stable.

In the hypothetical fully-automated future, there's no need for workers anymore; automated capital can generate wealth directly, and its owners can trade the output between each other to fully satisfy all their needs. The only reason to give anything to the 99.99% at that point would be to keep them content enough to prevent a revolution, and that's less than you need to pay people to actually come and work for you.

Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#296

Post by int_19h »

orangeoxidation wrote: post #193
vbezhenar wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They need to defend their capitals from the rest 99.99%. Expect huge combat robots investments and expanding of private armies. And, of course, total surveillance helps to prevent any kind of unionization of those 99.99%.

Unions (and striking) become rather impotent when the means of production run by themselves and you no longer need workers.

Yep; so unions become militias.

Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#297

Post by im3w1l »

makeitdouble wrote: post #238
macinjosh wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure how much it would matter but the main difference I see is that if I upload my own code to GitHub I have the ability to give away the IP, but if I upload Avengers End Game to YouTube I don't have the right to give that away.

I wonder how it would work if we consider you flagged your code as GPL before it hits Github. We could end up in the same situation as the Hollywood movie even if you are also the one setting the original license on the work. Basically you have a right to change the license, but it doesn’t mean you do.

A very plausible scenario: Alice creates GPL project. Bob forks it and uploads to github. Bob does not have a right to relicense Alices' parts.

Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#298

Post by fckthisguy »

naikrovek wrote: post #286

I don't see the point of this tool, independent of the resulting code being derivative of GPL code or not. being able to produce valid code is not the bottleneck of any developer effort. no projects fail because code can't be typed quickly enough. the bottleneck is understanding how the code works, how to design things correctly, how to make changes in accordance with the existing design, how to troubleshoot existing…

Whilst I absolutely agree that writing code fast enough isn't the bottleneck, it's always nice to have tools that reduce repeat code writing.

I use the React plugin for Webstorm to avoid having to write the boilerplate for FCs. Maybe in the future Copilot will replace that usage.

Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#299

Post by Closi »

"About 0.1% the snippets are verbatim"

This implies that by just changing the variable names, the snippets are classed as non-verbatim.

I don't buy that this number is anywhere close to the actual figure if you assume that you can't just change function names and variable names and suddenly say you have escaped both the legality and the spirit of GPL.

Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#300

Post by devetec »

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…

You could say a human is laundering GPL code if they learned programming from looking at Github repositories. Would you, though? The type of model they use isn't retrieving, it's having learned the syntax and the solutions that are used, just like a human would.
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