Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

631–640 of 734 posts

Re: All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot

#631

Post by sjy »

systematical wrote: post #628

The solution here seems simple. If you don't want your code used for AI/ML like co pilot, then place a license in your code that explicitly forbids it. Looking at the MIT License as-is, which is used by many maintainers on github, there is nothing that forbids co-pilot. It's easy to add a few sentences to that which explicitly forbid the code being used by AI, ML, code generation or other code automation and calling…

Using copyright works to train an AI may qualify as fair use, meaning the terms of any copyright licence can be ignored, as argued in this blog post by reference to the Google Books litigation: https://juliareda.eu/2021/07/github-copilot-is-not-infringin...

Re: All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot

#633

Post by pyuser583 »

fleddr wrote: post #551

To me, the particular use case and whether it is fair use or not, is of minor interest. A far more pressing matter is at hand: AI centralization and monopolization. Take Google as an example, running Google Photos for free for several years. And now that this has sucked in a trillion photos, the AI job is done, and they likely have the best image recognition AI in existence. Which is of course still peanuts compared…

Google doesn’t have the best (publicly) available reverse image search AI. That would be Yandex.

Google is actually pretty crappy at reverse image searches.

https://www.bellingcat.com/resources/how-tos/2019/12/26/guid...

Re: All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot

#634

Post by londons_explore »

est31 wrote: post #574
jspaetzel wrote: post #564

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Google makes an amazing model that no-one can beat it will only be dominate as long as others get access to it freely. But if there are restrictions on access or if it's too expensive, other options will appear and even if they're not as perfect, they'll still be very usable. Imagine a coalition of companies all feeding data, that could compete just as well.

Google has all the data of all the users though. I'd wager that they won't just let AI companies scrape it.

I don't think Google uses user photos to train their photo search algorithm.

They use photos from the web for training, and then user photos are only used for the actual indexing.

Re: All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot

#635

Post by bartimus »

mikewarot wrote: post #575
fleddr wrote: post #551

To me, the particular use case and whether it is fair use or not, is of minor interest. A far more pressing matter is at hand: AI centralization and monopolization. Take Google as an example, running Google Photos for free for several years. And now that this has sucked in a trillion photos, the AI job is done, and they likely have the best image recognition AI in existence. Which is of course still peanuts compared…

I have about 300,000 photos that haven't been scanned by AI (unless someone at Backblaze did it without permission). I'm sure there are lots of other photographers out there who miss Picassa, which Google killed off to push everyone's data to their service. (It did really well in matching faces, even across age, but the last version has a bug when there are multiple faces in a picture, sometimes it swaps the labels)…

There would still need to be a central model (and centralized management thereof) if I understand correctly.

Re: All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot

#636

Post by Talanes »

RandomBK wrote: post #515
AaronFriel wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, see Authors Guild v. Google. Even without a license or permission, fair use permits the mass scanning of books, the storage of the content of those books, and rendering verbatim snippets of those books. The Google Books site is not a derivative work of the millions of authors they copied from, and if they did copy any coincidentally GPL, AGPL, or creative commons copyleft work, the fair use exception applies befo…

For any discussion on copyright and fair use, we should distinguish between the implications to Copilot the software itself and the implications to users of Copilot. For Copilot itself, I do see the case for fair use, though it gets fuzzy should Microsoft ever start commercializing the feature. Nevertheless it remains to be seen whether ML training fits the same public policy benefits public libraries and free debate…

>In your hypothetical, this would be akin to me going on Google books and copying snippets of copyrighted works for my own book.

A book completely written by pasting passages of other books would actually be a pretty interesting transformative work.

Re: All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot

#637

Post by Houshalter »

ageyfman wrote: post #358
habitue wrote: post #353

I am really confused by HN's response to copilot. It seems like before the twitter thread on it went viral, the only people who cared about programmers copying (verbatim!) short snippets of code like this would be lawyers and executives. Suddenly everyone is coming out of the woodworks as copyright maximalists? I know HN loves a good "well actually" and Microsoft is always suspect, but let's leave the idea of code la…

Try doing any type of deal (fundraising, M&A) where you can't point to the provenance of your application's code. This isn't good for programmers, programmers WANT clean and knowable copyrights. This is good for lawyers, who'll now have another way to extract thousands of $$ from companies to launder their code.

If you do get sued, the Copilot page is written in a way that would make Github legally responsible for it, not you. "Just like with a compiler, the output of your use of GitHub Copilot belongs to you."

Re: All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot

#638

Post by _ph_ »

leventov wrote: post #475
habitue wrote: post #353

I am really confused by HN's response to copilot. It seems like before the twitter thread on it went viral, the only people who cared about programmers copying (verbatim!) short snippets of code like this would be lawyers and executives. Suddenly everyone is coming out of the woodworks as copyright maximalists? I know HN loves a good "well actually" and Microsoft is always suspect, but let's leave the idea of code la…

Perhaps people on HN start sensing that successors of Github Copilot will take their programming job. Rightly so. Personally, I think that in the age of AI programming any notions of code licensing should be abolished. There is no copyright for genes in nature or memes in culture; similarly, these shouldn't be copyright for code.

The problem with Copilot is, that so far it doesn't seem to be much of an AI and more of an copy-bot. If you are just copying code, you quickly run into copyright issues with your sources. A true AI based on training on open source software would be something different.

Re: All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot

#639

Post by dang »

unanswered wrote: post #446
elliekelly wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t disagree with your point but was it necessary to make it in such a snarky way?

[flagged]

Would you please stop breaking the site guidelines? You've been doing it repeatedly and it's not cool. Please just be kind.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: All public GitHub code was used in training Copilot

#640

Post by pulkitsh1234 »

mikewarot wrote: post #575
fleddr wrote: post #551

To me, the particular use case and whether it is fair use or not, is of minor interest. A far more pressing matter is at hand: AI centralization and monopolization. Take Google as an example, running Google Photos for free for several years. And now that this has sucked in a trillion photos, the AI job is done, and they likely have the best image recognition AI in existence. Which is of course still peanuts compared…

I have about 300,000 photos that haven't been scanned by AI (unless someone at Backblaze did it without permission). I'm sure there are lots of other photographers out there who miss Picassa, which Google killed off to push everyone's data to their service. (It did really well in matching faces, even across age, but the last version has a bug when there are multiple faces in a picture, sometimes it swaps the labels)…

While possible, only the tech-savvy people would take part in this "collective", which is of-course a minor fraction of the data which Google has access to. This is the same argument as saying that if you care about privacy "just" don't use Google, easier said than done for the vast majority of people on earth.
Post reply on HN