Copilot regurgitating Quake code, including sweary comments

The word 'master' is useful for me, and I don't believe for a nanosecond that anyone, American or not, is ACTUALLY offended by it. I believe that some people (mostly affluent white Americans) are searching for things that they think they SHOULD be offended by.

How would that work, anyway? Rare, distinctive code forms seem much more difficult for an ML thing to suggest with a high-ish confidence level, since there won't be much training data. The Quake thing makes sense because it's one of the most famous sections of code in the world, and probably exists in thousands of places in the public Github corpus.

I'm emphasizing distinctive because a lot of boilerplate takes up a lot of room, but still doesn't make a reasonable argument for copyright infringement when yours looks like somebody else's.

- "[I]f You Share Adapted Material You produce [..] The Adapter’s License You apply must be a Creative Commons license with the same License Elements, this version or later, or a BY-SA Compatible License."

- "Adapted Material means material [..] that is derived from or based upon the Licensed Material" (emphasis added)

- "Adapter's License means the license You apply to Your Copyright and Similar Rights in Your contributions to Adapted Material in accordance with the terms and conditions of this Public License.'

- "You may not offer or impose any additional or different terms or conditions on, or apply any Effective Technological Measures to, Adapted Material that restrict exercise of the rights granted under the Adapter's License You apply."

A program that includes a code snippet is unquestionably a derived work in most cases. That means that if you include a Stack Overflow code snippet in your program, and fair use does not apply, then you have to license the entire program under the CC-BY-SA. Alternately, you can license it under the GPLv3, because the license has a specific exemption allowing you to relicense under the GPLv3.

For open source software under permissive licenses, it may actually be okay to consider the entire program as licensed under the CC-BY-SA, since permissive licenses are typically interpreted as allowing derived works to be licensed under different licenses; that's how GPL compatibility works. But you'd have to be careful you don't distribute the software in a way that applies any Effective Technological Measures, aka DRM. Such as via app stores, which often include DRM with no way for the app author to turn it off. (It may actually be better to relicense to the GPL, which 'only' prohibits adding additional terms and conditions, not the mere use of DRM. But people have claimed that the GPL also forbids app store distribution because the app store's terms and conditions count as additional restrictions.)

For proprietary software where you do typically want to impose "different terms or conditions", this is a dead end.

Note that copying extremely short snippets, or snippets which are essentially the only way to accomplish a task, may be considered fair use. But be careful; in Oracle v. Google, Google's accidental copying of 9 lines of utterly trivial code [2] was found to be neither fair use nor "de minimis", and thus infringing.

Going back to Stack Overflow, these kinds of surprising results are why Creative Commons itself does not recommend using its licenses for code. But Stack Overflow does so anyway. Good thing nobody ever enforces the license!

See also: https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/6777/can-i-us...

[1] https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode

[2] https://majadhondt.wordpress.com/2012/05/16/googles-9-lines/

Well, in this case, it would have been good to understand that "V. Petkov" is a person unrelated to the project being written, and that "2015" is a year and not the one we're currently in. Sometimes the referent will be a method defined in an external library, which perhaps has a signature, and constraints about inputs, or properties which apply to return values.

> You can't underestimate the level of complex behavior emerging from a big enough system under optimization. After all, all the crazy stuff we do - coding, art, etc. is produced by a system under evolutionary optimization pressure to make more of itself.

I think this can verge into a kind of magical thinking. Yes, humans also look like neural nets, and we might even be optimizing for something. But we learn to program (and we do our best job programming) by having a goal for program behavior, and we use interactive access to try to run something, get an error, set a break point, try again, etc. I challenge anyone to try to learn to "code" by never being given any specific tasks, never interacting with docs about the language, an interpreter, a compiler, etc, but merely to try to fill in the blank in paper code snippets. You might learn to fill in some blanks. I highly doubt you would learn to code.

This is totally a case where the textual representation of programs is easier to get and train against, and that tail is being allowed to wag the dog to frame both the problem and the product.

None of this is to say that high-bandwidth DNN approaches don't have a place here -- but I think we should be looking at language-specific models where the DNN receives information about context (including some partial description of behavior) and outputs of the DNN are something like the weights in a PCFG that is used in the program search.