621–630 of 806 posts
But Copilot now does the search/copy/paste for me and suddenly uproar? I'm not sure I follow, the capability/possibility hasn't changed, just the convenience has.
This exact code can be found 1000 times on github and many of those are MIT licensed https://github.com/search?q=%22cs+*cs_transpose+%28%22&type=... . Copilot, or any other developer or person, has no way of knowing where the original implementation came from or it's original license. The cat is out of the bag, get used to it.
There are dozens of companies that ship Linux and other GPL code without providing sources, get used to it!
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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 copi…
So you write tests and copilot generates code you shove into production with little overhead ?
Do you read the code thoroughly (kind of negating having it generated for you?), or just have blind faith in it because tests are green and just YOLO it into production ?
I'd feel pretty uneasy deploying code that:
* I, or a trusted peer has not written.
* Hasn't been reviewed by my peers.
* Code I, or my peers don't understand fairly well.
In other words, I have no problem using code generated by co-pilot, but I'd feel the need to read and review it quite thoroughly and then I sort of feel that negates the purpose, and it also means it pulls my back into the role of doing work I'd hire someone else to do.
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> Is it a valid defense against copyright infringement to say “we don’t know where we got it, maybe someone else copied it from you first?” If you do something, it's ultimately you who has to make sure that it is not against the law. "I didn't know" is never a good defense. If you pay with counterfeit cash, it is you who will be arrested, even if you didn't know it was counterfeit. If you use code from somewhere else…
Yet, plenty of tools of this caliber have been made illegal (in some parts of the world).
I would imagine the root problem here is people taking copyrighted code, pasting it in their project and disregarding the license. To me this seems common, especially when it comes to toy, test and hobby projects. I don't see how copilot or similar tools can solve this problem without vetting each project.
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Searching for the function names in his libraries, I'm seeing some 32,000 hits. I suspect he has a different problem which (thanks to Microsoft) is now a problem he has to care about: his code probably shows up in one or more repos copy-pasted with improper LGPL attribution. There'd be no way for Copilot to know that had happened, and it would have mixed in the code. (As a side note: understanding why an ML engine ou…
Well yes, there'd be no way for the copilot model, as currently specified and trained, to know. But it IS possible to train a model for that. In fact, I believe ML models can be fantastic "code archaeologists", giving us insights into not just direct copying, but inspiration and idioms as well. They don't just have the code, they have commit histories with timestamps. A causal fact which these models could incorporat…
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> Is it a valid defense against copyright infringement to say “we don’t know where we got it, maybe someone else copied it from you first?” If you do something, it's ultimately you who has to make sure that it is not against the law. "I didn't know" is never a good defense. If you pay with counterfeit cash, it is you who will be arrested, even if you didn't know it was counterfeit. If you use code from somewhere else…
BitTorrent doesn't automatically download a pirated copy of Lion King when you ask it for something to watch...
Just a heads-up that the person who writes this is Tim Davis[0], author of the legendary CHOLMOD solver[1], which hundreds of thousands of people use daily when they solve sparse symmetric linear systems in common numerical environments. Even if CHOLMOD is easily the best sparse symmetric solver, it is notoriously not used by scipy.linalg.solve, though, because numpy/scipy developers are anti-copyleft fundamentalists…
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The luddites were right. Everything is worse because they did not win, which is obvious if you spend a second thinking about what them not winning means: more concentrated wealth, more disenfranchised workers.
It’s difficult for me to see how 2022 is worse than 1816 all things considered.
Most highly qualified workers loves what they do and would stand for keeping they’re output quality up. On the contrary interchangeable cheap workers have no real incentive to that. The factory’s manager is left alone in charge to balance quality versus cheapness, and the last comes with obsolescence (planned or not), which is good for business.
Sarcasm aside I think there are several possible legal viewpoints here (IANAL):
1. copilot is distributing copies of code and it's not a safe harbor: Microsoft is directly liable to copyright infringement by copilot producing code without appropriate license/attribution.
2. copilot is distributing copies of code and it's a safe harbor: Microsoft is not directly liable, but it should comply with DMCA requests. Practically that would mean retraining with mentioned code snippets/repositories excluded in a timely manner, otherwise I don't see a way how they could disentangle the affected IP from the already trained models.
3. copilot produces novel work by itself not subject to copyright of the training data: I think this is really a stretch. IANAL, but I think producing novel creative work is a right exclusive to living human beings, so machines can't produce them almost by definition. (There is the monkey selfie copyright case, but at least the "living" there was ticked off).
4. the user of copilot is producing novel work by prompting copilot: it's like triggering a camera. The copyright of the resulting picture is fully owned by the operator, even though much of the heavy lifting is done by the camera itself. Even then, this very much depends on the subject.
IMO option 3 doesn't have a legal standing. Microsoft and users of copilot would very much like if it was option 4 that applied always, but this particular case clearly falls under option 1 or option 2, in which case Microsoft should hold some legal liability, even if they can't always track the correct license ahead of time.