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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

#641

Post by vasco »

jefftk wrote: post #628
enriquto wrote: post #578

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…

In case anyone interprets this literally: if copilot regurgitates literal code it was trained on that doesn't actually give you an unencumbered version.

So how long till new software licenses that prohibit any use of code for model training purposes? I'd be willing to bet there's a significant group of people that won't be happy either its literal or not, the fact that it was used in the training might be enough.

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

#642

Post by Gigachad »

woah wrote: post #413
Gigachad wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not the OP but I have a sinking feeling that these AI tools are going to take away from the most enjoyable careers and creative pursuits and leave us with only mundane button pusher AI supervisor jobs. Current AI is not replacing anything yet but I feel we are only a few years before AI can do a better job at drawing or programming than someone with years of practice. Sure, you can utilise those tools to stay ahead.…

It seems like these AI tools, if anything, will take away the least enjoyable parts of creative careers. Artists will less time thinking about how to adjust a camera lens or mix paints, and more time thinking about how to tell a story that connects with people. Programmers will spend less time banging out boilerplate, and more time thinking about system design.

AI isn’t replacing camera usage or paint mixing. It’s replacing the years of learning to draw with prompt engineering. Like how the camera obsoleted the art of realistic painting, I feel that AI will replace the art of drawing. Which is something I like doing. But I like doing it because it’s hard but with purpose.

It’s not satisfying to painstakingly work on something that I could have generated with an AI in seconds.

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

#643

Post by badRNG »

steve_gh wrote: post #474
mjr00 wrote: post #11

Same issue with Stable Diffusion/NovelAI and certain people's artwork (eg Greg Rutkowski) being obviously used as part of the training set. More noticeable in Copilot since the output needs to be a lot more precise. Lawmakers need to jump on this stuff ASAP. Some say that it's no different from a person looking at existing code or art and recreating it from memory or using it as inspiration. But the law changes when…

Now here's a question: Suppose we trained the open AI model on the entire corpus of pop hits from about 1960 onwards. What are the chances it would get sued for copyright infringement. If the derivative nature is clear in the same model being trained on popular song, then it should be the same for code (or visual art, or a number of other domains). Not arguing for current copyright law, just pointing out the inconsis…

This isn't the situation Copilot is in.

A more analogous situation would be if the AI model occasionally returned the entirety of "Baby One More Time" by Britney Spears. Yes, I think you'd be sued if you passed off Baby One More Time as an original work just because you got it from an open AI tool.

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

#644

Post by itronitron »

minhazm wrote: post #404
svnt wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This doesn’t at all address the primary issue, which is one of licensing. 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 someone violated the copyright of a song by sampling too much of it and released it in the public domain (or failed to claim it at all), and you take the entire sample from them, would that hold up in a le…

It does address it, although not that clearly. This happens all the time with news media. They will post a picture and say they got permission from X person, but X person actually didn't even own the copyright in the first place. That doesn't make any of it okay, but it does mean that the organization has legal cover in this case and the worst that will happen is that they'll have to take the content down. In GitHub'…

I may be misinformed but my understanding of copyright is that it protects the 'expression' of something (like an algorithm or recipe) so someone can rewrite a copyrighted chunk of code into another language and be free of the original copyright, while also able to assert their own copyright on their new expression.

If that is true then one way to get around copyright restrictions on existing code is to create a new language.

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

#645

Post by krab »

socialismisok wrote: post #472
_ryanjsalva wrote: post #313

Howdy, folks. Ryan here from the GitHub Copilot product team. I don’t know how the original poster’s machine was set-up, but I’m gonna throw out a few theories about what could be happening. If similar code is open in your VS Code project, Copilot can draw context from those adjacent files. This can make it appear that the public model was trained on your private code, when in fact the context is drawn from local fil…

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…

While an interesting take, it doesn't apply directly. In my opinion, the situation is more similar to search engines bringing you code snippets - they shouldn't be stripped of their original licenses. At least that's the legal framework we used to operate in.

Sure the legal framework can change, but such profound change will have surely many consequences we won't foresee, for good or bad.

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

#646

Post by klqpl »

_ryanjsalva wrote: post #313

Howdy, folks. Ryan here from the GitHub Copilot product team. I don’t know how the original poster’s machine was set-up, but I’m gonna throw out a few theories about what could be happening. If similar code is open in your VS Code project, Copilot can draw context from those adjacent files. This can make it appear that the public model was trained on your private code, when in fact the context is drawn from local fil…

There is a very simple solution: Use Microsoft proprietary code for training the model. Keep your hands off open source code.

There you have the "most responsible way".

The GPL should be updated to prohibit code to be used for "learning" (i.e., regurgitating copyrighted fragments).

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

#647

Post by carom »

socialismisok wrote: post #472
_ryanjsalva wrote: post #313

Howdy, folks. Ryan here from the GitHub Copilot product team. I don’t know how the original poster’s machine was set-up, but I’m gonna throw out a few theories about what could be happening. If similar code is open in your VS Code project, Copilot can draw context from those adjacent files. This can make it appear that the public model was trained on your private code, when in fact the context is drawn from local fil…

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…

I am violently opposed to copilot and it has nothing to do with feeling threatened. I would gladly use a model whose weights were open sourced or proprietary that paid for its training material.

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

#648

Post by matwood »

tluyben2 wrote: post #540
dmix wrote: post #486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What alternative are you suggesting? Things turned out pretty great economy-wise for people in the UK. So that's a poor example even if Luddites didn't hate technology. Not working on the technology wouldn't have done the world any favours (nor the millions of people who wore the more affordable clothes it produced). I personally think it'd be rewarding to make developers lives easier, essentially just saving the cou…

> 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…

> ‘put code and see the result’

Isn't this basically all UI programming? :D

Joking aside, I see this 'person X doesn't know anything, but they are still delivering' attitude quite a bit on HN now. They clearly know something, and projects like co-pilot will make them even more effective.

I think the opposite of you - that projects like co-pilot will further lower the barriers of entry to programming and expand those who program. I also think that like all ease of programming advances in the past, business requirements will continue to grow at the edges where those who care about the craft will still be required.

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

#650

Post by jefftk »

vasco wrote: post #641
jefftk wrote: post #628

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In case anyone interprets this literally: if copilot regurgitates literal code it was trained on that doesn't actually give you an unencumbered version.

So how long till new software licenses that prohibit any use of code for model training purposes? I'd be willing to bet there's a significant group of people that won't be happy either its literal or not, the fact that it was used in the training might be enough.

The claim that most people training models make is that what they are doing is sufficiently transformative that it counts as fair use, and doesn't require a license. That means putting something in a software license that prohibits model training wouldn't do anything.

In this case, what the model is doing is clearly (to me as an non-lawyer) not transformative enough to count as fair use, but it's possible that the co-pilot folks will be able to fix this kind of thing with better output filtering.

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