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Is GitHub Copilot a blessing, or a curse?

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Re: Is GitHub Copilot a blessing, or a curse?

#71

Post by fraktl »

zaptheimpaler wrote: post #45
elviswolcott wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I agree with your concerns about licensing and copilot, this criticism doesn't seem particularly relevant to the article that was shared.

IMO any place where Copilot is mentioned is a relevant place to put this. I don't know how anyone working in software can just turn a blind eye to shit like this. Anyone who uses Copilot is implicitly endorsing this theft. We have a duty as practitioners in the industry to call it out when we see something wrong. If even devs aren't calling bullshit on Copilot, the media won't care, courts won't care, and it will be…

> Anyone who uses Copilot is implicitly endorsing this theft.

Just like you're endorsing being sponsored and effectively stealing GitHub's bandwith? :)

> We have a duty as practitioners in the industry to call it out when we see something wrong.

It's wrong both ways. You accepted the service from GitHub, the free one where you get to open your account, host your code, share it etc.

What exactly did you expect? To be served for free for your entire lifetime?

Please, get off the moral highground. You ate the devil fruit, now you're whining about it. You should be smart enough to know that this kind of whining will get you nowhere. Just quit.

Re: Is GitHub Copilot a blessing, or a curse?

#72

Post by FeepingCreature »

zaptheimpaler wrote: post #33

Copilot was made from stealing code on Github, ignoring the licenses set on repos such as e.g GPLv2, using AI as a trick to license-launder code. Copilot has announced their plans to become a paid service. So this product that would not be possible without public, open-source code will itself be non-public, closed-source, closed-data. It is extracting value from the commons and funneling it to a private company.

Copilot generally (excepting rare cases where it produces snippets verbatim) does not steal code. The GPL restricts distribution, not usage. And (to my knowledge) no open-source license restricts learning from code. I cannot see anyone who doesn't want others to learn from their code ever release code as open-source.

Re: Is GitHub Copilot a blessing, or a curse?

#73

Post by RandomBK »

singularity2001 wrote: post #49
RandomBK wrote: post #35

Having used Copilot for a couple of hours on a Typescript/React codebase, I've encountered a very wide range of results. Sometimes, the model correctly guesses exactly what I'm trying to write, and gives me non-trivial contextually correct suggestions. More than once I've been impressed enough to pause and take a screen recording of what it generated. Other times, it's a complete mess that competes with the local lan…

makes me wonder whether one can extend the system to filter/correct types/names

I sure hope so, and given Copilot currently integrates with VSCode and its amazing language server APIs, I imagine this could be a (relatively) simple win to make a significant bump in model accuracy.

I do wonder if Copilot has any idea of the structure of what it's generating though. Does it know when something is a comment, a variable, or a piece of syntax?

Re: Is GitHub Copilot a blessing, or a curse?

#74

Post by soco »

ALittleLight wrote: post #57
seumars wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For what it’s worth, Copilot is not being marketed as anything else than code suggestion software - an alternative to google search, perhaps more of a “I’m feeling lucky” without having to actually type the search term. Knowing how to succinctly express a problem is half the problem after all.

It's called "Copilot" and the tagline is "Your AI pair programmer." It's obviously being marketed as more than code suggestion software. It's being marketed as an AI pair programmer. I agree that it is basically just code suggestion software, or like a big autocomplete. But it's definitely being marketed as more.

This sounds almost like Tesla's Autopilot, both in naming and in actual performance.

Re: Is GitHub Copilot a blessing, or a curse?

#75

Post by [deleted] »

kangalioo wrote: post #64
zaptheimpaler wrote: post #33

Copilot was made from stealing code on Github, ignoring the licenses set on repos such as e.g GPLv2, using AI as a trick to license-launder code. Copilot has announced their plans to become a paid service. So this product that would not be possible without public, open-source code will itself be non-public, closed-source, closed-data. It is extracting value from the commons and funneling it to a private company.

While I see how Copilot's data gathering can be considered unethical, in the end I ask myself, does it matter? Would it have been of any concrete advantage to open-source programmers if Copilot hadn't used their source code? I can't think of any

[deleted]

Re: Is GitHub Copilot a blessing, or a curse?

#76

Post by hippari »

skohan wrote: post #36
eminence32 wrote: post #7

> The code Copilot writes is not very good code. This has been my experience as well. Some of the early promo material for Copilot showed someone writing a function signature with docs, and having Copilot write the entire body. This rarely works for me, except for fairly trivial functions. This is also not how I normally write code. However, where Copilot has been rather good is offering intelligent "tab completion",…

Copilot is also almost certainly going to become better. For example, NVIDIA's DLSS was viewed as a failure at launch, but now it's almost magic in terms of offering better results at a lower performance cost.

To me graphic seems to have a very specific goal of rendering more details & better simulation of real world.

People aren't even agreed on what is "good" code.

Re: Is GitHub Copilot a blessing, or a curse?

#77

Post by zaptheimpaler »

fraktl wrote: post #71
zaptheimpaler wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO any place where Copilot is mentioned is a relevant place to put this. I don't know how anyone working in software can just turn a blind eye to shit like this. Anyone who uses Copilot is implicitly endorsing this theft. We have a duty as practitioners in the industry to call it out when we see something wrong. If even devs aren't calling bullshit on Copilot, the media won't care, courts won't care, and it will be…

> Anyone who uses Copilot is implicitly endorsing this theft. Just like you're endorsing being sponsored and effectively stealing GitHub's bandwith? :) > We have a duty as practitioners in the industry to call it out when we see something wrong. It's wrong both ways . You accepted the service from GitHub, the free one where you get to open your account, host your code, share it etc. What exactly did you expect? To be…

Basically you are saying any product thats free should be able to break the law arbitrarily? Google can decide to post your all email online, your location history for all time, your photos and you would be ok with that because its free? The undoubtedly free DNS server you use can leak all your requests too? You're ok with that?

Yes its free, no they did not tell me or ask for my permission before using the code in this way. Free does not give them the right to break existing laws and licenses. Its pretty simple.

Re: Is GitHub Copilot a blessing, or a curse?

#78

Post by jph00 »

tchalla wrote: post #63
jph00 wrote: post #59

Hi all, Jeremy Howard here, author of the article. I'm happy to answer any questions you have about language models and program synthesis, Copilot, etc.

Thanks Jeremy! Where have language model(s) had the most useful for practical applications in terms of generated text? In terms of practical applications, I specifically mean the inclusion of a language model(s) has made life net better.

I'm actually most interested in language models that are fine tuned for other purposes, such as classification. IMO that's where the biggest immediate opportunities are. I've seen them used quite widely in industry, such as for legal discovery.

Re: Is GitHub Copilot a blessing, or a curse?

#79

Post by krageon »

skohan wrote: post #52
outsomnia wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Better at issuing haphazardly modified boilerplate that already exists... the real costs of writing code are about carefully choosing how pieces will fit together and deciding on minutae with that in mind. Copilot is the antithesis of designing good software.

AI is getting better than humans at a lot of complex task over time. Just because it can't code well now doesn't mean it won't in the future.

What it means that it can't code well, so there's nothing to be excited about. That we cannot predict the future is of course true but really has no bearing on what you're saying, except to lend credence to the idea that it will be able to some day (i.e. that you can predict the future). Which is in essence the opposite of what "we cannot predict the future" should mean. That makes the entire argument kind of disingenuous.

Re: Is GitHub Copilot a blessing, or a curse?

#80

Post by Dylan16807 »

tluyben2 wrote: post #68
kangalioo wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I see how Copilot's data gathering can be considered unethical, in the end I ask myself, does it matter? Would it have been of any concrete advantage to open-source programmers if Copilot hadn't used their source code? I can't think of any

Well, if you chose a viral license like the GPL, you do not do that to have your code and knowledge being reused in a non viral (possibly closed source) licensed solution. So this is a fundamental issue at least GPL minded authors will definitely mind and fight against.

If you want to control knowledge you need a patent, not a copyright license.

(And the design of copilot is an attempt to extract only knowledge.)

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