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GitHub Copilot, with “public code” blocked, emits my copyrighted code

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Re: GitHub Copilot, with “public code” blocked, emits my copyrighted code

#611

Post by dividedcomet »

Yeah, I think I’m going to take my personal repos off of GitHub and probably recommend the same thing at our company. Seems to be a liability that our proprietary code could get included in these models and leaked (even if accidentally). I feel similar to this on how I do AI art, which is that I am being taken advantage of by some larger entity so they can make money, even if they’ve been explicitly told it’s illegal.

On the argument of the machine is just leaning like any other human, that is absolute nonsense. Makes me feel ashamed to work in software, the way people can take advantage of other peoples hard work to make a buck with no even request or slightest bit of remorse.

Re: GitHub Copilot, with “public code” blocked, emits my copyrighted code

#612

Post by vidarh »

gernb wrote: post #538
socialismisok wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey Ryan! Have you ever done any reading on the Luddites? They weren't the anti technology, anti progress social force people think they were. They were highly skilled laborers who knew how to operate complex looms. When auto looms came along, factory owners decided they didn't want highly trained, knowledgeable workers they wanted highly disposable workers. The Luddites were happy to operate the new looms, they just…

what happened with auto looms is cloth became cheap which allowed more people to have clothing and expanded the fashion industry by 1000x Sure glad thse Luddites didn't get their way

So you read the comment which specifically made the argument that they didn't want to prevent the new looms from being used and concluded that they wanted to prevent the new looms from being used?

Re: GitHub Copilot, with “public code” blocked, emits my copyrighted code

#613

Post by tluyben2 »

spockz wrote: post #562
thdespou wrote: post #552

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So are you going to report him or you are just whining about why life is unfair? What he does in order to do his job is none of your business as you don't know how his life is behind the scenes.

I read the gp comment as an example of the type of engineer that can be replaced by copilot. Nothing more.

Indeed; that was the intended message. I don’t go reporting random people who slack off but yet complete their work; that would be a really busy job… I think there is even a word for that now in English (I am dutch). I will try to find it.

Re: GitHub Copilot, with “public code” blocked, emits my copyrighted code

#614

Post by tluyben2 »

bamboozled wrote: post #563
tluyben2 wrote: post #540

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you're concerned that software developers job security is at all at risk from co-pilot than you greatly misunderstand how software engineering works. I think you are vastly underestimating how many professionally employed software developers are replaceable by copilot at this very moment. The managers are not caught up yet and you seem to be lucky not having to work with this type of dev, but I have had 1000s of…

Who or what would replace them ? If you got rid of these developers, how would those who did the firing know what they’re doing ?

I use copilot to do things that I would’ve hired people for. I create tests and put comments in my code and copilot comes up with pages of dreary boring shit that would take me 0 pleasure or brainpower but would take a lot of work to just go through.

A real good example is mapping objects: let’s say you have a deep nested object from an ERP and you need to map that to another system(s). This is horrible work and copilot just generates almost everything for it if it knows the input and output objects; it ‘knows’ that address = street and if it is not it will deduct it from the models or comments or both; if there is a separate house number and stuff, it’ll generate code to translate that. I used to hire people for that; no longer; it just pops, I run the tests and fix some thing here and there.

Re: GitHub Copilot, with “public code” blocked, emits my copyrighted code

#615

Post by tluyben2 »

thdespou wrote: post #552
tluyben2 wrote: post #540

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you're concerned that software developers job security is at all at risk from co-pilot than you greatly misunderstand how software engineering works. I think you are vastly underestimating how many professionally employed software developers are replaceable by copilot at this very moment. The managers are not caught up yet and you seem to be lucky not having to work with this type of dev, but I have had 1000s of…

So are you going to report him or you are just whining about why life is unfair? What he does in order to do his job is none of your business as you don't know how his life is behind the scenes.

Why would I report him? He is doing what he is asked to do?

Re: GitHub Copilot, with “public code” blocked, emits my copyrighted code

#616

Post by bluehatbrit »

Waterluvian wrote: post #167

I think people may be drastically over-valuing their code. If it was emitting an entire meaningful product, that would be something else. But it’s emitting nuts and bolts. If the issue is more specifically copyright infringement, then leverage the legal apparatus in place for that. Their lawyers might listen better. This is not a strongly held opinion and if you disagree I would love to hear your constructive thought…

I suppose on the one hand you are right, people may well over-value their code. However the argument isn't really about the value or any monetary damage done through this. It's about a violation of ownership and trust.

Right or wrong, copyright doesn't care about how valuable something is. Everything is equally (not in reality but in theory) protected. GitHub is a platform many people have trusted with protecting ownership of their copyrighted code through reasonable levels of security.

I think the big discussion point here is around ensuring that this tool is acting correctly and respecting rights of an individual. It's very easy for a large company to accidentally step on people and not realise it or brush it away. People want to make sure that isn't happening and right now there are some very compelling examples where it looks like this is happening. The fact that this isn't opt-in and there's no way to opt-out your public repositories means the choice has been taken away from people. Previously you were free to license your code as you see fit, now we have some examples of where that license may not be being respected as a result of an expensive GitHub feature.

I think this is where the conversation is centring. It's not about whether your code is valuable or not. It's whether a large company is making profit by stepping on an individuals right of ownership or not.

On the note of leveraging legal apparatus to figure it out I think you're right. The problem is what individual open source maintainer is going to have the funds to bring a reasonable equal legal challenge to such a large organisation? I maintain a relatively well used open source project and I sure as hell don't. Realistically my option is to either spend a lot of personal time and resources to challenge it (if I think wrong-doing is happening) or just suck it up. Given that there's no easy way to figure out if wrong-doing is happening because it's all in the AI soup, it makes it even harder to consider that approach.

I think the point is a lot less about the value of the code, and much more about a massively organisation playing hard and fast with an individuals rights.

None of this is to say GitHub have actually done anything wrong here. I'm sure we'll figure that out in time, but it would be great if they could figure out a way to provide more concrete explanations.

Re: GitHub Copilot, with “public code” blocked, emits my copyrighted code

#617

Post by JamesonNetworks »

clnq wrote: post #170
deepspace wrote: post #140

This shows how copyright is all screwed up. Let's say the code in question is based on a published algorithm, maybe Yuster and Zwick, (I did not check). What exactly gives Davis a better claim to the copyright than the inventors of the algorithm? Yes, I know software is copyrightable while algorithms are not, but it is not at all clear to my why that should be the case. The effort of translating an algorithm into cod…

To be honest, it would probably benefit all of humanity if we stopped rewriting the same code to then fix the same bugs in it, and instead just used each other's algorithms to do meaningful work. I work for a large tech company whose lawyers definitely care that my code doesn't train an AI model somewhere much more than I do. On the contrary, I would really like to open source all of my work - it would make it more i…

At the same time, a monoculture of implementations can lead to shared bugs with 100% of implementations which is also not good.

Re: GitHub Copilot, with “public code” blocked, emits my copyrighted code

#618

Post by latexr »

robertlagrant wrote: post #580
socialismisok wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey Ryan! Have you ever done any reading on the Luddites? They weren't the anti technology, anti progress social force people think they were. They were highly skilled laborers who knew how to operate complex looms. When auto looms came along, factory owners decided they didn't want highly trained, knowledgeable workers they wanted highly disposable workers. The Luddites were happy to operate the new looms, they just…

But - the only reason anyone makes money (other than tax money) is because they're useful to someone else. Almost all of the clothing industry companies make money from large numbers of people buying their clothes. So they are useful to us. Similarly, the reason Europe put 30% of its populace "out of work" by industrialising agriculture is why we don't have to all go work in fields all day. It is a massive net positi…

> the only reason anyone makes money (other than tax money) is because they're useful to someone else.

Stealing, scamming, gambling, inheriting, collecting interest, price gouging, slavery, underpaying workers, supporting laws to undermine competitors… Plenty of ways to make money without being useful—or by being actively harmful—to someone else.

> Almost all of the clothing industry companies make money from large numbers of people buying their clothes. So they are useful to us.

We don’t need all that clothing, made by monetarily exploiting people in poor countries and sold by emotionally exploiting people in rich countries under the guise of “fashion”. The usefulness line has long been crossed, it’s about profit profit profit.

Re: GitHub Copilot, with “public code” blocked, emits my copyrighted code

#619

Post by JamesonNetworks »

dividedcomet wrote: post #611

Yeah, I think I’m going to take my personal repos off of GitHub and probably recommend the same thing at our company. Seems to be a liability that our proprietary code could get included in these models and leaked (even if accidentally). I feel similar to this on how I do AI art, which is that I am being taken advantage of by some larger entity so they can make money, even if they’ve been explicitly told it’s illegal…

Gitea is very nice: https://gitea.io/en-us/

Re: GitHub Copilot, with “public code” blocked, emits my copyrighted code

#620

Post by alpaca128 »

crummy wrote: post #300
mdaniel wrote: post #40

I didn't feel like weighing into that Twitter thread, but in the screenshot one will notice that the code generated by Copilot has secretly(?) swapped the order of the interior parameters to "cs_done". Maybe that's fine, but maybe it's not, how in the world would a Copilot consumer know to watch out for that? Double extra good if a separate prompt for "cs_done" comingles multiple implementations where some care and s…

In my opinion Copilot helps with the easy, boring stuff by typing what I likely would have typed anyway. The harder the code to write, the less likely I'd be to lean on Copilot.

And the easy, boring, legally unproblematic stuff can already be handled by good IDE completion features. As a bonus those are actually tested and deterministic.
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