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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

#651

Post by CPLX »

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…

You see this argument over and over again but it’s the exception that proves the rule.

Most of the time when it’s made it’s just papering over yer another situation where a surplus is being squeezed out of a transaction by a parasitic manager class using principal-agent problem dynamics.

The people who invented this stuff are always trying to tell you they’ve invented the cotton gin or something when in fact they’ve just come up with a clever way to take someone else’s work and exploit it.

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

#652

Post by bryanrasmussen »

latexr wrote: post #618
robertlagrant wrote: post #580

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 n…

>sold by emotionally exploiting people in rich countries under the guise of “fashion”.

only emotionally crippled people like fashion, if they were healthy they would all dress in gray unitards and march in formation towards the glorious future!

hey I too have often been carried away by my own rhetoric but come on!

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

#653

Post by bamboozled »

CPLX wrote: post #651
robertlagrant wrote: post #580

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You see this argument over and over again but it’s the exception that proves the rule. Most of the time when it’s made it’s just papering over yer another situation where a surplus is being squeezed out of a transaction by a parasitic manager class using principal-agent problem dynamics. The people who invented this stuff are always trying to tell you they’ve invented the cotton gin or something when in fact they’ve…

Would for you to present a concrete example of this. Genuinely curious.

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

#654

Post by kaetemi »

robertlagrant wrote: post #582
_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…

> If similar code is open in your VS Code project, Copilot can draw context from those adjacent files I'm concerned that "draw context from" is a euphemism. Does it mean it uses code that's only on your laptop to train its AI?

It's personalised to you. In general, it mimics the project's coding style. (And if the project code is terrible, good luck.)

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

#655

Post by FeepingCreature »

guitarbill wrote: post #459
carom wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Copilot is the largest disrespect to open source software I have ever seen. It is a derivative work of open source code and it is not released under the same license. It is also capable of laundering open source code. Congratulations for working on the "extinguish" phase of embrace, extend, extinguish for open source.

The chilling effect of this decision is something everybody who uses open source software should be worried about.

I'm worried that this will harm open source, but in a different way: lots of people switching to unfree "no commercial use at all" licenses, special exemptions in licenses, and so on. I'm also worried that it'll harm scientific progress by criminalizing a deeply harmless and commonplace activity such as "learning from open code" when it's AIs that do it. And of course retarding the progress of AI code assistance, a vital component of scaling up programmer productivity.

From an AI safety perspective, I'm also worried it will accelerate the transition to self-learning code, ie. the model both generating and learning from source code, which is a crucial step on the way to general artificial intelligence that we are not ready for.

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

#656

Post by zarzavat »

fulafel wrote: post #461
zarzavat wrote: post #457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Algorithms cannot be copyrighted. What is copyrighted is the creative expression of an algorithm. The variable names, the comments, choosing a for loop vs a while loop, or a ternary operator over an “if”, the order of arguments to a function, architectural decisions, etc. Copyright is formed when a human makes a choice about equivalent ways of implementing an algorithm.

Also this depends on jurisdiction.

Is there a jurisdiction that allows purely algorithms to be copyrighted? As far as I know, usually algorithms come under the umbrella of patents (in jurisdictions that allow software patents) rather than copyright.

For example, it would interfere with e.g. copyright of scientific/mathematical papers if algorithms were copyrightable, as mathematicians would not be able to extend another mathematician’s ideas without first gaining permission.

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

#657

Post by isworenot2 »

LtWorf wrote: post #571
judge2020 wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?” I mean, in humans it's just referred to as 'experience', 'training', or 'creativity'. Unless your experience is job-only, all the code you write is based on some source you can't attribute combined with your own mental routine of "i've been given this problem and need to emit cod…

Humans have creativity. The first C developers wrote C code despite lacking a training set of C code. AI can't do that. It needs C code to write C code. See the difference here?

The training set for C was algol and a bunch of other languages.

AI could be used to create languages based on design criteria and constraints like C was, but it does bring up the question of why one of the constraints should be character encodings from human languages if the final generated language would never be used by humans...

I mainly think it's funny watching all of these Rand'ian objectivists reusing ever excuse used by every craftsman that was excised from working life...machines need a machinist, they don't have souls or creativity, etc.

Industry always saw open source as a way to cut cost. ML trained from open source has the capability to eliminate a giant sink of labor cost. They will use it to do so. Then they will use all of the arguments that people have parroted on this site for years to excuse it.

I'm a pessimist about the outcomes of this and other trends along with any potential responses to them.

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

#658

Post by carom »

efdee wrote: post #549
sngz wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really wonder what all those people who said Microsoft acquisition of Github was a good thing for opensource think now. I'm sure there will still be mental gymnastics involved.

Claiming Github's Copilot is Microsoft's "Extinguish" step against open source _is_ the mental gymnastics.

It really isn't mental gymnastic. Copilot, the model, is a program that is a derivative work of open source code. It should be open source.

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

#659

Post by wccrawford »

numpad0 wrote: post #321
seanwilson wrote: post #245

For DALL-E and Stable Diffusion, the model size is an order of magnitude smaller than the total size of all the training set images? So it's not possible for the model to regurgitate every image in the training set exactly? For Copilot, is there a similar argument? Or its model is large enough to contain the training set verbatim?

How small is DALL-E/SD, compared to say, training dataset images shrank to 120x120, JPEG compressed at q=0.3, compressed as .tar.bz2?

IIRC, 2.5 billion images were used to create a 4.5GB dataset. That is less than 2 bytes per original image.

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

#660

Post by manholio »

shadowgovt wrote: post #111
ianbutler wrote: post #85

I just tested it myself on a random c file I created in the middle of a rust project I'm working on, it reproduced his full code verbatim from just the function header so clearly it does regurgitate proprietary code unlike some people have said, I do not have his source so co-pilot isn't just using existing context. I've been finding co-pilot really useful but I'll be pausing it for now, and I'm glad I have only been…

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…

> his code probably shows up in one or more repos copy-pasted with improper LGPL attribution.

Can Copilot prove that and link to the source LGPL code whenever it reproduces more than half a line of code from such a source?

Because without that clear attribution trail, nobody in their right mind would contaminate their codebase with possibly stolen code. Hell, some bad actor might purposefully publish a proprietary base full of stolen LGPL code, and run scanners on other products until they get a Copilot "bite". When that happens and you get sued, good luck finding the original open source code both you and your aggressor derive from.

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