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GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

githubcopilotinvestigation.com

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Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#891

Post by trandom199 »

schoen wrote: post #486

Here are a few thoughts I haven't formulated before: It seems clear enough to me that training AIs on copyrighted works is typically or commonly a fair use under existing law, because the AIs can and commonly do learn non-copyrightable elements and aspects of those works. It's very obvious from enormous numbers of examples that current AI systems are capable of learning much more abstract features of human culture (g…

I find that this comment reduces humans to elaborate Markov chains and then uses that misconception to make a point.

Many of humanity's best works (paintings, classical music, golden age of physics) have been created before humans voluntarily reduced themselves to automata.

AI hasn't produced anything apart from mashing together other people's creations, usually with a somewhat creepy result.

In programming this may work because quality does not matter, only LOC and social capital with the rest of the brogrammers. The objection that therefore real programmers do not have to be afraid is false. They either have to join the mediocrity or clean up the mess that the brogrammers make (while being disrespected by them of course).

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#892

Post by the_gipsy »

woah wrote: post #491

It would be sad if someone succeeded in shutting down CoPilot for this kind of copyright stuff. It is genuinely useful. I don't care that it reproduces copyrighted content. The only way you can get it to do that is to bait it with the function names of functions that have already been copy and pasted thousands of times onto GitHub without proper licenses. Luckily, someone will probably come out with a "renegade" vers…

> I don't care that it reproduces copyrighted content.

Do you also just rip any open source code, violating the licenses? Nice.

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#893

Post by burkaman »

johnfn wrote: post #535
burkaman wrote: post #515

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think most people are concerned that Copilot is going to be reproducing verbatim copyrighted code, it's more that it sucks that a giant corporation is going to make a billion dollars from a tool that is entirely built off of millions of peoples' work who were never asked permission and will never be compensated.

That's hardly a new thing! For instance, Google search makes billions of dollars by indexing content that other people make.

That's true, and when Google started extracting information from web pages and displaying it in results pages without driving any traffic to the original websites, the authors of those pages were justifiably upset.

Google Search is ethically acceptable because for the most part website creators like being in search results and are "compensated" in the form of more visitors, and if they don't like it they can easily exclude themselves. Website creators famously do NOT like it when Google indexes their content and then serves it up independently.

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#894

Post by cmrdporcupine »

Unfortunately the tone I'm getting from many of these comments makes me feel that people see open source projects as a resource to be mined rather than as a product to be respected. A very entitled attitude ("I really don't want to lose my lovely tool")

There seems to be -- on the whole -- little respect for the spirit of the GPL and LGPL and it really is quite a change from, say, 20 years ago, when the 'free software' movement was I think more ascendant.

I think we have a generation of software developers who have only known a world where copious quantities of high quality source code has been made available to them under very liberal licenses -- which they in turn make careers and companies out of using / exploiting.

I, too, do this, and I generally open my modest projects under Apache or MIT or Mozilla style licenses. I do this because I want people to use my things, or to be able to use them as resume / portfolio material. Or because my employer at the time has helped fund construction of them.

But I also occasionally use the GPL/LGPL/AGPL, when I want to explicitly avoid corporate entities from exploiting said material without either consulting with me or in turn making their efforts free.

And in turn, I respect the value and power of the GPL for that purpose.

So many of the comments here are trivializing the value of free software and the licenses which make it possible, and acting like there's just this... natural right... to go out there and build on other people's work without recognition / compensation / contribution.

There are too many examples of CoPilot violating the spirit -- if not the actual legal letter -- of the GPL. This is unacceptable. I'm glad that someone is attempting a legal test.

Free software is not your data to mine. It is the blood sweat and tears of thousands of developers who do their work in community spirit, but under explicitly free software principles.

Putting something out under a free software copyleft-style license is not the same as saying "You can do with this what you want." It's "I made this, you can build on it, but what you made also has to be free. Or you negotiate with me."

And what I'm getting from the whole CoPilot fiasco is: GPL / free software does not belong on GitHub. And it might end up having to be put, generally, behind barriers that explicitly (technically and legally) prevent CoPilot & similar systems from getting access to it.

EDIT: I also fully expect a new version of the GPL to be published that includes clauses against this kind of datamining.

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#896

Post by BrainVirus »

iroh2727 wrote: post #664
naet wrote: post #640

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see this basic logic in almost AI ethics threads, and it starts with a big assumption: "humans learn from copyrighted source material without copyright violation". This then gets tenuously extended to "ai also learns, so it must not be in violation of copyright law". The first assumption is highly flawed though. Humans routinely do violate copyright law. Plagiarism is a huge problem in many sectors; un-cited direct…

+1. And let's not forget too that "AI", that is, ML models, are not "autonomous" in the way that humans are autonomous. Sure, we use the word "learn" to describe what they do, which is one word that we also use to describe what people do. But ML models are always wielded by people or corporations for particular purposes. If a corporation was to directly publish some copy that appears plagiarized, we'd call that plagi…

A lot of really good points.

>Sure, we use the word "learn" to describe what they do, which is one word that we also use to describe what people do. But ML models are always wielded by people or corporations for particular purposes.

This is extremely important. "Learning" in machine learning is an aspirational label, not a descriptive one. People who claim otherwise either drank too much of their own Kool-Aid or are simply dishonest. This isn't just "wrong" in some taxonomical sense, this is dangerous in a very practical way. Conflating machine "learning" and human learning will inevitably lead to various kinds of sabotage of human learning.

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#897

Post by judge2020 »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #894

Unfortunately the tone I'm getting from many of these comments makes me feel that people see open source projects as a resource to be mined rather than as a product to be respected. A very entitled attitude ("I really don't want to lose my lovely tool") There seems to be -- on the whole -- little respect for the spirit of the GPL and LGPL and it really is quite a change from, say, 20 years ago, when the 'free softwar…

What do you expect when people grant GitHub an extra license to their repos[0]?

0: https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/github-terms/github-t...

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#898

Post by abecedarius »

schoen wrote: post #610
jameshart wrote: post #572

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What stops humans from reproducing thinly disguised copies of their influences is, essentially, their ethical judgement. Which amounts to saying, humans are trained with a model that they can use to recognize when something they are thinking of producing is 'too similar' to something they have seen before. And, of course, some humans choose not to apply that filter and go ahead and plagiarize anyway; some humans try…

That's a great point about what we naturally do. > In the case where an AI is coming up with the work, perhaps the mistake is in relying on humans to try and apply their own trained judgement to figuring out if the result is unoriginal. We need an AI that scores work for how likely it is to be infringing on a prior copyright. Isn't that latter AI going to be more likely to need to contain verbatim copies of original…

> copyright holder might complain that the existence of an unlicensed copy inside the model is already objectionable

I'd be wary of this one. There doesn't seem much distance between this and the same claim against a human's memory of a work in their own brain. Yes, that sounds like dystopian fiction. So do some things that have already happened.

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#899

Post by paphillips »

williamcotton wrote: post #819
naet wrote: post #640

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see this basic logic in almost AI ethics threads, and it starts with a big assumption: "humans learn from copyrighted source material without copyright violation". This then gets tenuously extended to "ai also learns, so it must not be in violation of copyright law". The first assumption is highly flawed though. Humans routinely do violate copyright law. Plagiarism is a huge problem in many sectors; un-cited direct…

> If an AI is ingesting and perfectly reproducing someone else's copyrighted works, it is in violation of copyright law in the same way a human would be if they reproduce someone else's copyrighted works. "In computer programs, concerns for efficiency may limit the possible ways to achieve a particular function, making a particular expression necessary to achieving the idea. In this case, the expression is not protec…

In my opinion this is a key comment in this thread and everyone subject to United States law should read the Abstraction Filtration Comparison (AFC) legal test when refining their opinion. Also, I have no legal background, but as far as I know patent law != copyright law.

Specifically within AFC, note the "idea/expression dichotomy" [1] which clearly states:

"copyright law protects an author's expression, but not the idea behind that expression"

Thus, if this tools spits out someone else's code verbatim it is a definite copyright infringement. If it outputs code that is similar but not verbatim then it "could" be an infringement, at your own risk, and to be determined by the courts. Simply expressing the same idea in a different way is not a definite infringement.

Program code is naturally copyright-risky because the keyword/grammar space is constrained. It is far more difficult to accidentally duplicate verbatim the expression of one's ideas in a full language, such as English, than in C. And what of two separate programs (or constituent sub-parts such as functions) that by chance emit the same compiled binary?

Personally, for now I won't use this tool due to the risk of accidental plagiarism, and because it is a black box: I can't examine any lineage or attribution metadata to understand the source(s) of what I would then be incorporating into my own body of work. Of course I doubt I could get that type of traceability information for any other trained ML model I might use, so perhaps I need to re-examine my policies heading into the future.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idea%E2%80%93expression_distin...

Re: GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion

#900

Post by xyzzy_plugh »

judge2020 wrote: post #897
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #894

Unfortunately the tone I'm getting from many of these comments makes me feel that people see open source projects as a resource to be mined rather than as a product to be respected. A very entitled attitude ("I really don't want to lose my lovely tool") There seems to be -- on the whole -- little respect for the spirit of the GPL and LGPL and it really is quite a change from, say, 20 years ago, when the 'free softwar…

What do you expect when people grant GitHub an extra license to their repos[0]? 0: https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/github-terms/github-t...

This can't possibly hold up in court, can it? I have multiple repos that are mirrors of various open source projects. Some are not even Free Software! I have no right to grant such things to anyone let alone GitHub.
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