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GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

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Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#401

Post by astrange »

Jgrubb wrote: post #173
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…

I always assumed that one of the reasons Google et al work on AI is because software engineers are too expensive.

Google has the opposite problem. They make infinite money from ad platforms and hire people just for fun so nobody else can have them. They're working on AI because they need to stop them from getting bored.

Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#402

Post by willseth »

jordemort wrote: post #378
willseth wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not binding because the other party hasn't agreed. You agree to terms when you use the site. One party can't unilaterally change the agreement without consent of the other party.

I see where you're coming from but it's not quite the same thing; Facebook doesn't encourage people to choose a license for the content that they post there, so there's no expectation that there are any terms aside from those in Facebook's ToS. OTOH GitHub has historically very strongly encouraged users to add a LICENSE to their repositories, and also encouraged users to fork other people's code and and push it to Gi…

It has nothing to do with GitHub being exempt from anything. It's that users are bound by the terms they agreed to in a ToS. If there is a conflict between a user-created license and a site's ToS, the burden is on the user to resolve it.

To be clear, I'm not suggesting this is some kind of loophole GitHub is using to trample on users' licenses, even though maybe they could. It's probably completely legal for GitHub to use even the most super-extra-double-GPL-licensed code because copyright law allows it.

The author of the Twitter post's suggestion that Copilot's output must be a derivative work is based on a naive understanding of "derivative" as it's defined in copyright law. It's not hard to find clear explanations of how this stuff works, and it's obvious she didn't bother to do any homework. Several criteria would appear to rule out GitHub's use as infringement. e.g.:

'In essence, the comparison is an ad hoc determination of whether the protectable elements of the original program that are contained in the second work are significant or important parts of the original program.'

https://copyleft.org/guide/comprehensive-gpl-guidech5.html

Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#403

Post by lxpnh98 »

015a wrote: post #212
invig wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Exactly. This comes up with personal data protection as well. There's no problem in me jotting down my acquaintances' names, phone numbers, and addresses and storing it in my computer. But a computer system that stores thousands of names, phone numbers, and addresses must get consent to do so.

Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#404

Post by reidjs »

mysterydip wrote: post #131
MaxBarraclough wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> those left behind working more hours for less Doing what? Isn't the concern here that automation will push many people out of the workforce entirely?

Who debugs the software when there's a problem?

Automated debugging software of course

Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#405

Post by darioush »

function_seven wrote: post #247
yuppiepuppie wrote: post #197

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…

Somehow, I find this a plausible and not entirely undesirable outcome for society. The less time humans spend interfacing with machines, the more points humanity gets anyway.

Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#406

Post by bbrree66 »

akagusu wrote: post #316

For years people have warned about hosting the majority of world's open source code in a proprietary platform that belongs to a for profit company. These people were called lunatics, fundamentalists, radicals, conspiracy theorists, and many other names. Well, they were ignored and this is the result. A for profit company built a proprietary system using every code hosted in its platform without respecting the code li…

If only we could all live in candy land where massively complex systems were provided for free! What a stupid comment. No one is forcing anyone to get on the platform.

Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#407

Post by ipsum2 »

monocasa wrote: post #328

Honestly I think a large part of the value add of machine learning is going to be the ability for huge entities to launder intellectual property violations. As an example, my grandfather (an old school EE who got his start on radar systems in the 50s, who then got his radiology MD when my jewish grandmother berated him enough with "engineer's not doctor though...") has some really cool patents around highlighting int…

I don't understand how your example relates to "launder intellectual property violations". What you're saying is that your grandfather hand wrote some feature extractors that look similar to the neurons that ML models have learned from backpropagation. There's no stealing of IP there at all.

Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#408

Post by olvrng »

pron wrote: post #111
nextaccountic wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In this case we should be able to work less and enjoy the benefits of automation. We just need to live in an economic system where the economic value is captured by the people at large, and not a minority that owns capital.

Or maybe they'll decide they'd be better off enjoying the automation of you working for them. :)

This already happened in academic:

https://slate.com/technology/2021/01/dead-professor-teaching...

Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#409

Post by ipsum2 »

akagusu wrote: post #316

For years people have warned about hosting the majority of world's open source code in a proprietary platform that belongs to a for profit company. These people were called lunatics, fundamentalists, radicals, conspiracy theorists, and many other names. Well, they were ignored and this is the result. A for profit company built a proprietary system using every code hosted in its platform without respecting the code li…

People have trained ML models on code thats on Github before co-pilot. (lots of examples here: https://github.com/src-d/awesome-machine-learning-on-source-...) There's nothing proprietary that other interested people or companies couldn't easily replicate here.

Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

#410

Post by monocasa »

ipsum2 wrote: post #407
monocasa wrote: post #328

Honestly I think a large part of the value add of machine learning is going to be the ability for huge entities to launder intellectual property violations. As an example, my grandfather (an old school EE who got his start on radar systems in the 50s, who then got his radiology MD when my jewish grandmother berated him enough with "engineer's not doctor though...") has some really cool patents around highlighting int…

I don't understand how your example relates to "launder intellectual property violations". What you're saying is that your grandfather hand wrote some feature extractors that look similar to the neurons that ML models have learned from backpropagation. There's no stealing of IP there at all.

He has a set of patents on certain types of highlighting frequency domain patterns in MRIs. In a lot of ways recurrent neural networks can be frequency domain feature extractors as the backwards data flows create sort of delay line memories tapped at interesting periods. The MRI manufacturers after refusing to license his patents, heavily invested in ML models that focus on using recurrent networks for frequency domain feature extraction. Patents aren't like copyright where independent reinvention is a way out; he has a monopoly on the concepts regardless of how someone came about them, even by growing them a bit organically like how ML works.
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