Time to make closed source illegal.
GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?
51–60 of 473 posts
Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?
#52Microsoft should just GPL CoPilot's code and model. They won't, but it would fix this problem, I think.
...unless they've also ingested code that is incompatible with the GPL and CoPilot ends up regurgitating a mix.
Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?
#53Attempts 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…
But the rate of product/services that machinery will produce will make that even a small tax to corporations producing everything autonomously will be enough to feed and give a quality of life to everyone with an UBI or partial time jobs. You really want to push for high productivity across all industries, even if that means sacrificing jobs in the short term, because history demonstrated after that, new and more hum…
Every decade was supposed to see fewer hours working for higher pay and quality of life. It didn't happen, as business owners (not just 1% fat cats, the owners of mom and pop shops are at least as guilty as anyone, they just sucked at scaling their avarice).
So the claim that this technological revolution will be different and that it will result in a broad social safety net, universal basic income, and substantive, well-paid part-time work is a joke but not a very good one. It will be more of the same - massive concentration of wealth among those who already hold enough capital to wield it effectively. A few lucky ones who manage to create their own wealth. And those left behind working more hours for less.
Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?
#54I 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? ;)
Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?
#55Should we be changing our open source licenses to explicitly prevent training such systems using our code?
Good idea, but if carved up into small enough chunks, it may be considered fair use. What is confusing is that the neural net may take lots of small chunks and link them to one another, and then reproduce them in the same order verbatim.
One of the examples pointed out in the reply threads was the suggestion in a new file to insert the GPL disclaimer header.
So, the length of the samples being drawn is not necessarily small: the chunk size is based on its commonality. It could easily be long enough to trigger a copyright violation.
Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?
#56What 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 particular piece of code, or would the whole thing need to be thrown out?
Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?
#57This goes into one of my favorite philosophical topics: John Searle's Chinese Room. I won't go into it here, but the question of whether an AI is actually learning how to code or simply substituting information based on statistically common practices (or if there really is a difference between either) is going to be one hell of a problem for the next few decades as we start to approach fine points of what AI is and h…
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Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
We have seen Co-Pilot directly output ( https://docs.github.com/en/github/copilot/research-recitatio... ) the zen of python when prompted - there's no reason it wouldn't write the Psalms exactly when prompted in the right manner.
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 code was the same, but if you looked at it as raw text, you wouldn't.
* 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.
Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?
#59Attempts 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?
Re: GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
But the rate of product/services that machinery will produce will make that even a small tax to corporations producing everything autonomously will be enough to feed and give a quality of life to everyone with an UBI or partial time jobs. You really want to push for high productivity across all industries, even if that means sacrificing jobs in the short term, because history demonstrated after that, new and more hum…
Have fun being a hairdresser or prostitute for the 0.01% then. New jobs in academic fields will not emerge. Already now a significant percentage of degree holders are forced into bullshit jobs.
Would the implication be that we are stagnating as a species then?