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GitHub Copilot as open source code laundering?

• agomez314 5y ago
  Posting this due to the recent unveiling of GitHub Co-pilot and the intersection on the ethics of ml training set data.
• corobo 5y ago
  If I as an alleged human have learned purely from GPL code would that require code I write to be released under the GPL too? We should probably start thinking about AI rights at some point. Personally I'll be crediting GPT-3 as any other contributor because it sounds cool but maybe morally too in future
  • pyentropy 5y ago
    That's what I wanted to ask, where do we draw the line of copyright when it comes to inputs of generative ML? It's perfectly fine for me to develop programming skills by reading any code regardless of the license. When a corp snatches an employee from competitors, they get to keep their skills even if they signed an NDA and can't talk about what they worked on. On the other hand there's the no-compete agreement, where you can't. Good luck making a no-compete agreement with a neural network. Even if someone feeds stolen or illegal data as an input dataset to gain advantage in ML, how do we even prove it if we're only given the trained model and it generalizes well?
    • hliyan 5y ago
      Copyright is going to get very muddy in the next few decades. ML systems may be able to generate entire novels in the styles of books they have digested, with only some assist from human editors. True of artwork and music, and perhaps eventually video too. Determining "similarity" too, may soon have to be taken off the hands of the judge and given to another ML system.
    • agomez314 5y ago
      Take it further. You could easily imagine taking a service like this as an invisible middleware behind a front-end and start asking users to pay for the service. Some could argue it's code generation attributable to those who created the model, but reality is that the models were trained by code written by thousand of passionate users at no pay with the intent of free usage.
      • bogwog 5y ago
        > but reality is that the models were trained by code written by thousand of passionate users at no pay with the intent of free usage. I hope you're actually reading those LICENSE files before using open source code in your projects.
    • rhn_mk1 5y ago
      > It's perfectly fine for me to develop programming skills by reading any code regardless of the license. I'd be inclined to agree with this, but whenever a high profile leak of source code happens, reading that code can have dire consequences for reverse engineers. It turns clean room reverse engineering into something derivative, as if the code that was read had the ability to infected whatever the programmer wrote later. A situation involving the above developed in the ReactOS project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReactOS#Internal_audit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReactOS#Internal_audit
    • vsareto 5y ago
      >how do we even prove it if we're only given the trained model and it generalizes well? Someone's going to have to audit the model the training and the data that does it. There's a documentary on black holes on Netflix that did something similar (no idea if it was AI) but each team wrote code to interpret the data independently and without collaboration or hints or information leakage, and they were all within a certain accuracy of one-another for interpreting the raw data at the end of it. So, as an example, if I can't train something in parallel and get similar results to an already trained model, we know something is up and there is missing or altered data (at least I think that's how it works).
  • notkaiho 5y ago
    Unless you were using structures directly from said code, probably not? Compare if you had only learned writing from, say, the Bible. You would probably write in a very Biblical manner, but would you write the Psalms exactly? Most likely not.
    • corobo 5y ago
      I've not seen Copilot in action yet, I was under the impression it doesn't use code directly. In any case my original question was answered by the tweeter in a later tweet I missed https://twitter.com/eevee/status/1410049195067674625 https://twitter.com/eevee/status/1410049195067674625 I get where they're coming from but they are kinda just handwaving it back the other way with the "u fell for marketing idiot" vibe. I wish someone smarter than me could simplify the legal ramifications around this but we'll probably have to wait till it kills someone (or at least costs someone a bunch of money) to get any actual laws set up.
    • edenhyacinth 5y ago
      We have seen Co-Pilot directly output (https://docs.github.com/en/github/copilot/research-recitation https://docs.github.com/en/github/copilot/research-recitatio...) the zen of python when prompted - there's no reason it wouldn't write the Psalms exactly when prompted in the right manner.
      • disgruntledphd2 5y ago
        That's super cool. As long as you do the things you specify at the bottom of that doc (provide attribution if copied so people can know if it's OK to use) then a lot of the concerns of people on these threads are going to be resolved.
        • edenhyacinth 5y ago
          Pretty much! There's only three major fears remaining * Co-pilot fails to detect it, and you have a potential lawsuit/ethical concern when someone finds out. Although the devil on my shoulder says that if Co-pilot didn't detect it, what's to say another tool will? * Co-pilot reuses code in a way that still violates copyright, but is difficult to detect. I.e. If you checked via a syntax tree, you'd notice that the code was the same, but if you looked at it as raw text, you wouldn't. * Purely ethical - is it right to take licensed code and condense it into a product, without having to take into account the wishes of the original creators? It might be treated as normal that other coders will read it, and pick up on it, but when these licenses were written no one saw products like this coming about. They never assumed that a single person could read all their code, memorise it, and quote it near-verbatim on command.
  • wilde 5y ago
    Possibly. We won’t know until this is tested in court. Traditionally one would want to clean room [1] this sort of thing. Co-pilot is…really dirty by those standards. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design
  • edenhyacinth 5y ago
    A machine learning isn't really the same as a person learning - people generally can code at a high level without having first read TBs of code, nor can you reasonably expect a person to have memorised GPL code to reproduce it on demand. What you can expect a person to do is understand the principles behind that GPL code, and write something along the same lines. GitHub Co-Pilot is not a general ai, and it's not touted as one, so we shouldn't be considering whether it really knows code principles, only that it can reliably output code that fits a similar function to what came before, which could reasonably include entire blocks of GPL code.
    • corobo 5y ago
      Well if it is actually straight up outputting blocks of existing code then get it in the bin as a failed attempt to sprinkle AI on development and use this instead https://github.com/drathier/stack-overflow-import https://github.com/drathier/stack-overflow-import
  • lucideer 5y ago
    Your question had already been preempted in the OP. Specifically: > "but eevee, humans also learn by reading open source code, so isn't that the same thing" > - no > - humans are capable of abstract understanding and have a breadth of other knowledge to draw from > - statistical models do not > - you have fallen for marketing -- https://twitter.com/eevee/status/1410049195067674625 https://twitter.com/eevee/status/1410049195067674625
    • corobo 5y ago
      I preemptively commented that I'd seen that tweet three hours before your comment figuring someone was going to quote it at me haha Preemptive, doesn't work as it turns out :) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27687586 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27687586
      • lucideer 5y ago
        Nice catch
  • kitsune_ 5y ago
    I think you are missing the mark here with this comparison, Copilot and its network weights are already the derived work, not just the output it produces.
• thundergolfer 5y ago
  Attempts to litigate any license violation are going to get precisely nowhere I bet, but I find the actual license violation argument persuasive. This is an excellent example of how the AI singularity/revolution/whatever is a total distraction and that a much bigger and more serious issue is how AI is becoming so effective at turning the output of cheap/free human mental labour into capital. If AI keeps getting better and better and status quo socio-economic structure don't change, trillions in capital will be captured by the 0.01%. I would be quite a turn up for the books if this AI co-pilot gets suddenly and dramatically better in 2030 and it negatively impacts the software engineering profession. "Hey, that's our code you used to replace us!" we will cry out too late.
  • gutino 5y ago
    But the rate of product/services that machinery will produce will make that even a small tax to corporations producing everything autonomously will be enough to feed and give a quality of life to everyone with an UBI or partial time jobs. You really want to push for high productivity across all industries, even if that means sacrificing jobs in the short term, because history demonstrated after that, new and more human jobs emerge latter.
    • ohgodplsno 5y ago
      The current state of most wealthy countries do not show any hint of any significant corporation tax. Wealth will continue to accrue in the hands of the few.
      • mikepurvis 5y ago
        Indeed, even here on HN, it's a pretty regular talking point in the comments that the only fair corporate tax rate is 0%.
    • angfxt 5y ago
      Have fun being a hairdresser or prostitute for the 0.01% then. New jobs in academic fields will not emerge. Already now a significant percentage of degree holders are forced into bullshit jobs.
• enriquto 5y ago
  It certainly seems to be a laundering enabler. Say that you want to un-GPL-ify some famous copylefted code that is on the training database. You type a first innocuous characters of it, then the co-pilot keeps completing the rest of the same exact code, for it offers a perfect match. If the completion is not exact, you "twiddle" it a bit until it becomes. Bang! you have a non-gpl copy of the program! Moreover, it is 100% yours and you can re-license it as you want. This will be a boon for copyleft-allergic developers!
  • rlpb 5y ago
    > Bang! you have a non-gpl copy of the program! Moreover, it is 100% yours and you can re-license it as you want. This will be a boon for copyleft-allergic developers! Thinking that this would conveniently bypass the fact that your goal was to copy the code seems to be the most common legal fallacy amongst software developers. The law will see straight through you, and you will be found to have infringed copyright. The reason is well explained in "What Colour are your bits?" (https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23 https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23).
    • enriquto 5y ago
      My message was sarcastic. I'm worried about accidental conversion of free software into proprietary. I mean, "accidental" locally, in each particular instance; but maybe non accidental in the grand scheme of things. EDIT: to I can write my worry, semi-jokingly, as a conspiracy theory: Microsoft is using thousands of unsuspecting (and unwilling) developers to turn a huge copylefted corpus of algorithms into non-copylefted implementations. Even assuming that developers that use the co-pilot use non-copyleft licenses only 50% of the time, there's still a constant trickling of un-copyleftization.
  • freshhawk 5y ago
    I suppose someone should make a OS-generating AI, conceptually it can just have windows, osx and some linux distros in it and output one based on a question about favorite color or something. You'd just have to wrap it in a nice complex model representation so it's a black box you fed example OS's with some meta-data into and it happens to output this very useful data. After all, once you use something as input to a machine learning model apparently the license disappears. Sweet.
• karmasimida 5y ago
  Well this would not be hard to verify though. You can automate this process by providing existing GPL source code and see what CoPilot comes up next. I am sure at some point it WILL produce exact the same code snippet from certain GPL project, provided that you have attempted enough times. Not sure what the legal interpretation would be though, it is pretty gray-ish in that regard. There would always be risk for CoPilot, had it digested certain PII information and people found it out...it would be much more interesting to see the outcome.
  • Enhex 5y ago
    it doesn't have to be exact to be copyright infringement, see non-literal copying. basic idea behind it is if you copy paste code and rename variables that doesn't mean its new code.
    • freshhawk 5y ago
      Yeah, you'd have to assume they are parsing and normalizing this data in some way. There would still be some AST patterns or something similar you could look for in the same way, but it would be much trickier. Plus considering this is a legal issue ... good luck with "there is a statistically significant similarity in AST outputs related to the most unique sections of this code base" type arguments in court. We're currently at the "what's an API" stage of legal tech understanding.
      • int_19h 5y ago
        The real question is whether it constitutes derived work, though. And that is not a question of similarity so much so as provenance - if you start with a codebase that is GPL originally, and it gets gradually modified to the point where it doesn't really look anything like the original, it's still a derived work, and is still subject to the license. Similarity can be used to prove derivation, but it's not the only way to do so. In this case, all the code that went into the model is (presumably) known, so you don't really need any sort of analysis to prove or disprove it. It is, rather, a legal question - whether the definition on the books applies here, or not.
• kklisura 5y ago
  Should we be changing our open source licenses to explicitly prevent training such systems using our code?
  • bencollier49 5y ago
    Good idea, but if carved up into small enough chunks, it may be considered fair use. What is confusing is that the neural net may take lots of small chunks and link them to one another, and then reproduce them in the same order verbatim.
    • falcolas 5y ago
      One of the examples pointed out in the reply threads was the suggestion in a new file to insert the GPL disclaimer header. So, the length of the samples being drawn is not necessarily small: the chunk size is based on its commonality. It could easily be long enough to trigger a copyright violation.
    • svaha1728 5y ago
      With music sampling, copyright protects down to the sound of a kick drum. No doubt Microsoft has a good set of attorneys working on their arguments as we speak.
  • k__ 5y ago
    I don't think so. The code that is already used to train should be problematic for them, not only new Code in the future.
  • onli 5y ago
    I'd assume this: In the same way as you can not forbid a human to learn concepts from your code, you can not forbid an automated system to learn concepts from your code, regardless the license. Also, if you would it would make your code non-free. At least as long as the system really learns concepts. If it just copy & pastes code, then that's a different story (same as with humans).
  • joepie91_ 5y ago
• schnebbau 5y ago
  Newsflash everyone, if you open source your code it's going to be copied or paraphrased anyway.
  • postalrat 5y ago
    I think the issue many people may have with this is it's a proprietary tool that profits on work it was not licensed to use this way.
  • GuB-42 5y ago
    Yes that's the point. But if I do it under a copyleft license like GPL, I expect those who copy to abide by the license and open source their own code too. But sure, people shit on IP rights all the time, and I am guilty of it too. Let's say I didn't pay what I should have paid for every piece of software I have used.
  • nextaccountic 5y ago
    It should be copied and paraphrased, but respecting the license. This means, among other things, crediting the author.
    • schnebbau 5y ago
      It may be hard to believe, but there are sick and twisted individuals in this dangerous world who copy from github without even a single glance at the license, and they live among us.
      • adn 5y ago
        Yes, and those people are violating the licenses of the code when they do that. It's not unreasonable to expect a massive company like microsoft to not do this on a massive scale.
      • iKevinShah 5y ago
        There are always exceptions (maybe they might be norm in this case) but its still not 100%, still not all encompassing. This "AI" seems to be. I think that is like the entire concern. ALL the code is affected for all the instances.
• goodpoint 5y ago
  What is more concerning is that the training kernel belongs exclusively one private company. Microsoft. It can become a massive (and unfair) competitive advantage. Furthermore, Copilot will not work with less popular languages and also prevent popular languages from evolving.
  • giansegato 5y ago
    This feature is effectively impossible to replicate. Only Microsoft positioned itself to have: - dataset (GitHub) - tech (openai) - training (azure) - platform (vscode) I'm impressed. They did an amazing job from a corporate strategy standpoint. Also directionally things are getting interesting
    • djrogers 5y ago
      The dataset is all freely available open source code, right? Just because GH hosts it doesn’t mean the rest of the world can’t use it for the same purpose.
      • midoBB 5y ago
        You'd have to hit rate limiting multiple times no?
        • kall 5y ago
          Arenmt mirrors of all GH code available, for example on BigQuery public datasets. If it‘s there, it should be available in a downloadable format too?
        • goodpoint 5y ago
          Not only that, but microsoft could aggressively throttle or outcompete anyone trying to do the same.
        • unfunco 5y ago
          https://console.cloud.google.com/marketplace/product/github/github-repos?filter=solution-type:dataset https://console.cloud.google.com/marketplace/product/github/... BigQuery used to have a dataset updated weekly, looks like it hasn't been updated since about a year after the acquisition by Microsoft.
• VMtest 5y ago
  gonna develop my own linux-like kernel soon, with my own AI model trained on public repositories wanna see the source code of my AI model? oh, it's closed source it's just coincidence that nearly 100% of my future linux-like kernel code looks the same as linux the kernel, bear in mind that my closed-source AI model takes inspiration from GitHub Copilot, there is no way that it will copy any source code
  • throwaway3699 5y ago
    What's the point? Linux is already open under GPL 2.
    • jackbeck 5y ago
      He mentioned that the Linux-like kernel will be closed source which violates GPL
      • Ygg2 5y ago
        Does it, if code was written by a bot that trained on Linux kernel?
        • pjerem 5y ago
          You know, that's precisely what the topic here is about.
        • sp332 5y ago
          Probably. Copyright applies to derivative works.
    • Deathmax 5y ago
      You get to make changes without having to respect the GPL and thus no longer obligated to provide those changes to your end users, as you have effectively laundered the kernel source code by passing it through an "AI" and get to relicense the end result.
    • 5y ago
• Hamuko 5y ago
  The potential inclusion of GPL'd code, and potentially even unlicensed code, is making me wary of using it. Fair Use doesn't exist here and if someone was to accuse me of stealing code, saying "I pressed a button and some computer somewhere in the world, that has potentially seen your code as well, generated it for me" is probably not the greatest defense.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• cycomanic 5y ago
  In the discussion yesterday I pointed to the case of some students suing turnitin for using their works in the turnitin database and the studemts lost [1]. I think an individual suing will not go anywhere. The way to create a precedent is someone feeding all the Harry Potter books and some additional popular books (twilight?) to GPT 3 and letting them write about some kids at a sorcerer school. The outcomes of that case would look very different IMO. [1] https://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2008/03/25/iparadigms-wins-t https://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2008/03/25/iparadigms-wins-t...
  • shawnz 5y ago
    Disney's intellectual property would be a good choice for this exercise
  • intricatedetail 5y ago
    Suing will not go anywhere because Microsoft has billions at their disposal to defend any case.
  • anfelor 5y ago
    Not a lawyer, but in that case it seemed to be a factor that turnitin was transformative, because it never sold the texts to others and thus didn't reduce the market value of them. But that wouldn't apply to copilot which might reduce the usage of libraries since you can "code" equivalent functionality with copilot now. Would it be a stretch to assert that GPL'd libraries have a market value for their creator in terms of reputation etc.?
    • visarga 5y ago
      While we're worrying about ML learning to write our codes we should also break all the automated looms so people don't go without jobs. Do everything manually like God intended! /s Maybe a code that is easily recreated by GPT with a simple prompt is not worth copyrighting. The future is in making it more automated, not protecting IP. If you compete against a company using it, you can't ignore the advantage.
• Miner49er 5y ago
  Microsoft should just GPL CoPilot's code and model. They won't, but it would fix this problem, I think.
  • jordemort 5y ago
    ...unless they've also ingested code that is incompatible with the GPL and CoPilot ends up regurgitating a mix.
• afarviral 5y ago
  While I think this will continue to amplify current problems around IP, aren't current applied-ML approaches to writing software the equivalent of automating the drawing of leaves on a tree? Maybe a few small branches? But the whole tree, all its roots, how it fits in to the surrounding landscape, the overall composition, the intention? If I'm wrong about that than I picked either a good or a bad time to finally learn programming. There's only so many ways you can do things in each language though. Just like in the field of music, only so many "Original" tunes. The concept of IP is incoherent, you don't own patterns (at least not at arbitrary depth), though you may be owed some form of compensation for the billions made off discovering them.
  • visarga 5y ago
    You're right, it's only drawing some leaves, the whole tree or how it relates to the forest is another thing.
• Dracophoenix 5y ago
  This goes into one of my favorite philosophical topics: John Searle's Chinese Room. I won't go into it here, but the question of whether an AI is actually learning how to code or simply substituting information based on statistically common practices (or if there really is a difference between either) is going to be one hell of a problem for the next few decades as we start to approach fine points of what AI is and how it could be defined. However, legally, the most recent Oracle vs. Google case has already settled a major point: APIs don't violate copyright. And as Github co-pilot is an API (A self-modifying one, but an API nonetheless), Microsoft has a good defense. In the near-future, when we have AI-assisted reverse engineering along with Github co-pilot, then, with enough obfuscation there's nothing that can't be legally created or recreated on a computer, proprietary or not. This is simultaneously free software's greatest dream and worst nightmare. Edit: changed Hilary Putnam to John Searle Edit 2: spelling
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • salawat 5y ago
    That's John Searle's thought experiment actually. Hilary Putnam had some thoughts in reference to it along the lines that a brain in a vat might think in a language similar to what we would speak, but the words of that language would necessarily encode different meanings due to the different experience of the external world and sensory isolation. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chinese-room/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chinese-room/
    • Dracophoenix 5y ago
      Thanks for the correction. I made it known in my edit.
  • AJ007 5y ago
    And this applies to everything, not just source code. I’m just presuming we have a future where you can consume unique content indefinitely. Such as instead of binge watching Star Trek on Netflix you press play and new episodes are generated and played continuously, 24/7, and they are actually really good. Thus intellectual property becomes a commodity.
• koonsolo 5y ago
  Does this mean that when I read GPL code and learn from it, I cannot use these learnings in non-GPL code? I get it that the derivative work might be more clear in an AI setting, but basically it boils down to the same thing.
• 6510 5y ago
  Time to make closed source illegal.
• koonsolo 5y ago
  I propose we as developers, start a secret society where we let the AI write the code, but we still claim to write it manually. In combination with the new working from home policies, we can lay at the beach all day and still be as productive as before. Who is in favor of starting it? ;)
  • KMnO4 5y ago
    This would be the demise of the human race. I’m not entirely opposed to that, though. When AI inevitably outperforms humans on almost all tasks, who am I to say humans deserve to be given those tasks?
    • nextaccountic 5y ago
      In this case we should be able to work less and enjoy the benefits of automation. We just need to live in an economic system where the economic value is captured by the people at large, and not a minority that owns capital.
      • pron 5y ago
        Or maybe they'll decide they'd be better off enjoying the automation of you working for them. :)
        • olvrng 5y ago
          This already happened in academic: https://slate.com/technology/2021/01/dead-professor-teaching-online-class.html https://slate.com/technology/2021/01/dead-professor-teaching...
      • huragok 5y ago
        Careful now, that sounds like socialism!
        • easrng 5y ago
          Yes, that's the point.
• jordemort 5y ago
  What happens when someone puts code up on GitHub with a license that says "This code may not be used for training a code generation model"? - Is GitHub actually going to pay any attention to that, or are they just going to ingest the code and thus violate its license anyway? - If they go ahead and violate the code's license, what are the legal repercussions for the resulting model? Can a model be "un-trained" from a particular piece of code, or would the whole thing need to be thrown out?
  • invokestatic 5y ago
    By uploading your content to GitHub, you’ve granted them a license to use that content to “improve the Service over time”, as specified in the ToS[1]. That effectively “overrides” any license or term that you’ve specified for your repository, since you’ve already licensed the content to GitHub under different terms. Of course, people who are not GitHub are beholden to the terms you specify. [1] https://docs.github.com/en/github/site-policy/github-terms-of-service#g-intellectual-property-notice https://docs.github.com/en/github/site-policy/github-terms-o...
    • antattack 5y ago
      That does not mean that you give them license to your code. In fact some or all of the code may not be yours to give in a first place.
    • jordemort 5y ago
      I think more specifically, the relevant bit is here: https://docs.github.com/en/github/site-policy/github-terms-of-service#4-license-grant-to-us https://docs.github.com/en/github/site-policy/github-terms-o... > We need the legal right to do things like host Your Content, publish it, and share it. You grant us and our legal successors the right to store, archive, parse, and display Your Content, and make incidental copies, as necessary to provide the Service, including improving the Service over time. This license includes the right to do things like copy it to our database and make backups; show it to you and other users; parse it into a search index or otherwise analyze it on our servers; share it with other users; and perform it, in case Your Content is something like music or video. But, it goes on to say: > This license does not grant GitHub the right to sell Your Content. It also does not grant GitHub the right to otherwise distribute or use Your Content outside of our provision of the Service, except that as part of the right to archive Your Content, GitHub may permit our partners to store and archive Your Content in public repositories in connection with the GitHub Arctic Code Vault and GitHub Archive Program. I'm not a lawyer, but it seems ambiguous to me if this ToS is sufficient to cover CoPilot's butt in corner cases; I bet at least one lawyer is going to make some money trying to answer the question.
• mrosett 5y ago
  The second tweet in the thread seems badly off the mark in its understanding of copyright law. > copyright does not only cover copying and pasting; it covers derivative works. github copilot was trained on open source code and the sum total of everything it knows was drawn from that code. there is no possible interpretation of "derivative" that does not include this Copyright law is very complicated (remember Google vs Oracle?) and involves a lot of balancing different factors [0]. Simply saying that something is a "derivative work" doesn't establish that it's copyright infringement. An important defense against infringement claims is arguing that the work is "transformative." Obviously "transformative" is a subjective term, but one example is the Supreme Court determining that Google copying Java's API's to a different platform is transformative [1]. There are a lot of other really interesting examples out there [2] involving things like if parodies are fair use (yes) or if satires are fair use (not necessarily). But one way or another, it's hard for me to believe that taking static code and using it to build a code-generating AI wouldn't meet that standard. As I said, though, copyright law is really complicated, and I'm certainly not a lawyer. I'm sure someone out there could make an argument that Copilot is copyright infringement, but this thread isn't that argument. [0] https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/fair-use-the-four-factors.html https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/fair-use-the-four-fa... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_LLC_v._Oracle_America,_Inc.#Decision https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_LLC_v._Oracle_America,_... [2] https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/fair-use-what-transformative.html https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/fair-use-what-transf... Edit: Note that the other comments saying "I'm just going to wrap an entire operating system in 'AI' to do an end run around copyright" are proposing to do something that wouldn't be transformative and therefore probably wouldn't be fair use. Copyright law has a lot of shades of grey and balancing of factors that make it a lot less "hackable" than those of us who live in the world of code might imagine.
  • imranhou 5y ago
    Google copied an interface(declarative), not code snippets/functions(implementation). Copilot is capable of copying only Implementation. IMO that is quite different and easily a violation if it was copied verbatim.
  • invig 5y ago
• tyingq 5y ago
  "We found that about 0.1% of the time, the suggestion may contain some snippets that are verbatim from the training set" If it's spitting out verbatim code 0.1% of the time, surely it's spitting out copied code where only trivial things are different at a much higher rate. Trivial things meaning swapped order where order isn't important, variable/function names, equivalent ops like +=1 vs ++, etc. Surely it's laundering some GPL code, for example, and effectively removing the license in a way that sounds fishy.
  • drran 5y ago
    I have a much simpler AI Copilot, called "cat", which spills verbatim code more frequently, but it's OK for me. Can I train it on M$ code?
    • BlueTemplar 5y ago
      My cat only spills drinks and produces garbage when walking over the keyboard... :'(
  • dwheeler 5y ago
    It's not just the GPL. Almost all open source software licenses require attribution; without that attribution, any copy is a license violation. Whether or not the result is a license violation is tricky legal question. As always, IANAL.
    • tyingq 5y ago
      I did say "for example".
      • dwheeler 5y ago
        You certainly did! But there are a lot of people who think "OSS license means there are no requirements" and think it's okay to do things like copy without attribution when the license requires attributions. I know you didn't say anything like that either, but some others might think it. It seems to me an important question is, "is this like a human who learns from examples, or is this really a derivative work in the copyright sense?".I'm not sure how to answer that. I'm not a lawyer. I don't know if many lawyers can answer that question either!
• varispeed 5y ago
  People write code in their spare time, often without compensation. Then a big corporation comes in, appropriates it, repackages and sells as a new product. It's a shameful behaviour.
• belter 5y ago
  One interesting aspect, that I thing will make it difficult for GitHub to argue and justify its not a a license violation would be the answer to the following question: Was Copilot trained using Microsoft internal source code or will it be in the future ? As GitHub is a Microsoft company and OpenAI although a non-profit just got a massive one billion investment from Microsoft (presumably not for free), will it start spitting out once in a while Windows kernel code ? :-) And if it was NOT trained on Microsoft source code, because it could starting suggesting some of it...Is that not a validation that the results it produces are a derivative work based on the work of the open source code corpus it was trained on ? IANAL...
  • pc86 5y ago
    The "because" in your last bit is a huge leap. It wasn't trained on internal Microsoft code because the training set is publicly available code. It has nothing to do with whether or not it suggests exactly identical, functionally identical, or similar code. MS internal isn't publicly available. Copilot is trained on publicly available code.
    • pjkundert 5y ago
      You stated a fact "Copilot is trained on publicly available code". The question (and implication) is: why not train it on MS internal code, if the claim that the output isn't license-incompatible is true. If the output doesn't conflict with any open-source license (ie. it springs into existence from general principles, not from "copying" licensed code -- then MS-internal (in fact, any closed-source code) should be open-season. I can imagine a few of the non-obvious segments of code I've written being "recognizable" methods to solve certain problems. And, they are certainly licensed (GPL + Commercial, in my case). I think, at the very least, that a set of AIs should be trained on different compatible sets of code, eg. GPL, AGPL, BSD, etc. Then, you could select what amount of license-overlap is compatible with your project.
  • akerl_ 5y ago
    Without weighing in on the overall question of “is this a license violation”, you’ve created a false dichotomy. “GitHub included Microsoft proprietary code in the training set because they view the results as non-derivative” and “GitHub didn’t include Microsoft proprietary code because they view the results as derivative” are clearly not the only options. They could have not included Microsoft internal code because it was way easier to just use the entire open source corpus, for example.
• tsjq 5y ago
  Microsoft: embrace, extend, extinguish .
• tomcooks 5y ago
  The amount of people not knowing the difference between Open Source and Free Software is astonishing. With the amount of RMS memes I see regularly I would expect things to be settled by now.
• baryphonic 5y ago
  If someone could show that the "copilot" started "generating" code verbatim (or nearly verbatim) from some GPL-licensed work, especially if that section of code was somehow novel or specific to a narrow domain, I suspect they'd have a case. I don't know much about OpenAICodex, but if it's anything like GPT-3, or uses that under the hood, then it's very likely that certain sequences are simply memorized, which seems like the maximal case for claiming derivative works. On the other hand, if someone has GPL'd code that implements a simple counter, I doubt the courts would pay much attention. I do wonder, though, if GPL owners worried about their code being shanghaied for this purpose could file arbitration claims and exploit some particularly consumer-friendly laws in California which force companies to pay fees like when free speech dissidents filed arbitrations against Patreon.[0] Patreon is being forced to arbitrate 72 claims individually (per its own terms) and pay all fees per JAMS rules. IANAL, so I don't know the exact contours of these rules, or if copyright claims could be raised in this way, or even if GitHub's agreements are vulnerable to this loophole, but it'd be interesting. [0]https://www.dailydot.com/debug/patreon-suing-owen-benjamin-fans/ https://www.dailydot.com/debug/patreon-suing-owen-benjamin-f... (see second update from July 31).
  • not2b 5y ago
    You don't need to have a winnable case, just enough of a case for a large company (hello Oracle) to sue a small one. Is any version of Oracle-owned Java in the corpus? Or any of the DBs they bought (MySQL)?
  • sideshowb 5y ago
    But what would we think to the legal start-up that automatically checked all of github to see whether the ai could be persuaded to spit out a significant amount of any project code verbatim? Somehow p-hacking springs to mind
  • duskwuff 5y ago
    > If someone could show that the "copilot" started "generating" code verbatim (or nearly verbatim) from some GPL-licensed work... Under the right circumstances, Copilot will recite a GPL copyright header. It isn't a huge step from that to some other commonly repeated hunk of GPLed code -- I'd be particularly curious whether some protected portion of automake/autoconf code shows up often enough that it'd repeat that too.
• kingsuper20 5y ago
  I was just musing about whether this kind of tool has been written (or is being written) for music composition, business letter writing, poetry, news copy. Interesting copyright issues. Anyone who thinks their profession will continue as-is for the long term is probably mistaken.
• gus_massa 5y ago
  I think copyright is a problem for GPL-like licenses. They should have restricted the training data to MIT/BSD-like. Anyway, there is another problem that is patents and is huger, much huger. I think the Apache license has a provision about patents, but most of other licenses may have code that has patents and if the AI generate something similar it may be included in the patent.
  • joepie91_ 5y ago
    MIT/BSD-like would still require attribution, which they are also not doing.
    • gus_massa 5y ago
      I think you are correct, but (I guess that) most people that use MIT/BSD use them as a polite version of the WTFPL. People that use A/L/GPL usually like the virality and will complain more.
• 6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago
  > previous """AI""" generation has been trained on public text and photos, which are harder to make copyright claims on, but this is drawn from large bodies of work with very explicit court-tested licenses This seems pretty backwards to me. A GPL licensed data point is more permissive than an unlicensed data point. That said, I’m glad that these data points do have explicit licenses that say “if you use this, you must do XYZ” so that it’s clear that our large ML projects are going counter to creators intent when they made it open. I’d love to start seeing licenses about use as training data. Then maybe we’d see more open access to these models that benefit from the openness of the web. I’d personally use licenses that say if you want to train on my work, you must publish the model. That goes for my code, my writing, and my photography. Anyways GitHub is arguing that any use of publicly available data for training is fair use, but they also admit that it’s all new and unprecedented, regarding training data.
• ralph84 5y ago
  I get the sense that GitHub wants this to be litigated so the case law can be established. Until then it’s just a bunch of internet lawyers arguing with each other.
  • pjfin123 5y ago
    Why would you want to? For many open source developers having models trained on your code would be desirable.
  • MadAhab 5y ago
    I got the sense they saw Google beating Sun/Java in the supreme court and said "We'll be fine, lets move the release up"
• warpech 5y ago
  If GitHub Copilot can sign my CLA, stating that it is the author of work, that it transfers the IP to me in exchange for the service subscription price and holds responsibility for copyright infringement, that would be acceptable. Otherwise it's a gray area I don't want to go.
• ballenf 5y ago
  I think the distraction is against how disconnected reality is becoming from copyright/intellectual property regulations. It's still amazing to me that (US-centric context here), it's well established that instructions how to turn raw ingredients into a cake are not protectable but code that results in transforming one set of numbers into another are protectable. AI is just making the silliness of that distinction more obvious.
  • MadcapJake 5y ago
    Code is not the same as a recipe. Recipes are more like specifications. They leave out the implementation. Code has structural and algorithmic details that just have no comparable concept in recipes.
    • Supermancho 5y ago
      > Code has structural and algorithmic details that just have no comparable concept in recipes. Why do you think that? A compiler uses human readable code to create machine code, with arbitrary optimizations and choices.
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    • rjbwork 5y ago
      >They leave out the implementation. Code has structural and algorithmic details that just have no comparable concept in recipes. That is really quite debatable in some contexts. Declarative languages like Prolog, SQL, etc. declare what they want and the system figures out how to produce it. Much like a recipe, really.
  • cmiga 5y ago
    Humans are just sets of atoms, so protecting them is disconnected from reality? These reductionist arguments lead nowhere. Fortunately, IP lawyers -- including Microsoft's who are fiercely pro IP when it suits them -- think in a more humanistic way and consider the years of work of the IP creator. Food recipes are irrelevant; the often go back centuries and it's rather hard to identify individual creators. Not so in software.
• KETpXDDzR 5y ago
  If it's trained with GPL licensed code, doesn't that mean the network they use includes it somewhat? Then, someone could sue that their networks must be GPL licensed too, right?
  • peterkelly 5y ago
    Yes, the neural network would constitute a derived work.
    • jahewson 5y ago
      Actually no because it’s a “transformative use”. This is how search engines are allowed to show snippets and thumbnails.
• _greim_ 5y ago
  As a human programmer, I've also been trained on thousands of lines of other people's code. Is there anything new here, from a code copying perspective? Aren't I liable if segments of my own code exactly match someone else's code, even if I didn't knowingly copy/paste it?
  • qayxc 5y ago
    Well to me those are fundamental questions that need to be addressed one way or the other. Are systems like GPT-x basically plagiarising (doesn't matter the nature of the output, be it prose, code, or audio-visual) or are the results so transformative in nature that they can be considered to be "original work"? In other words, are these systems to be treated like students that learned to perform the task they do from a collection of source material, or are they to be viewed as sophisticated databases that "just" perform context-sensitive retrieval? These are interesting and important questions and I'm glad someone is publicly asking them and that many of us at least think about them.
• abeppu 5y ago
  The core problem which would allow laundering (that there isn't a good way to draw a straight, attributive line between generated code and training examples) to me also presents a potential eventual threat to the viability of co-pilot/codex. It seems like the same thing would prevent it from knowing which published code was written by humans vs which was at least in part an output from the system. Training on an undifferentiated mix of your model's outputs and human-authored code seems like it could eventually lead the model into self-reinforcing over-confidence. "But snippet proposals call out to GH, so they can know which bits of code they generated!". Sometimes; but after Bob does a co-pilot assisted session, and Alice refactors to change a snippet's location and rename some variables and some other minor changes and then commits, can you still tell if it's 95% codex-generated?
• Timwi 5y ago
  I agree that this is different from humans learning to code from examples and reproducing some individual snippets. However, I disagree with the author’s argument that it's because of humans’ ability to abstract. We actually know nothing about the AI’s ability to abstract. The real difference is that if one human can learn to code from public sources, then so can anyone else. Nobody is explicitly barred from accessing the same material. The AI, however, is kept proprietary. Nobody else can recreate it because people are explicitly barred from doing so. People cannot access the source code of the training algorithm; people cannot access enough hardware to perform the training; and most people cannot even access the training data. It may consist of repos that are technically all publicly available, but try downloading all of GitHub and see if they let you do that quickly, and/or whether you have enough disk space. This puts the owners of the AI at a significant advantage over everyone else. I think this is the core of the concern.
  • thundergolfer 5y ago
    So it’s using a massive-scale public good (non-rivalrous and non-exclusionary access to source code) to create a private product that is rivalrous in the software labour pool? Or is the problem just that it’s not open-access?
• zeptonix 5y ago
  The tone of the responses here is absurd. Guys, be grateful for some progress. Instead of having to retype boilerplate code, your productivity is now enhanced by having a system that can do it for you. This is primarily about reducing the need to re-type total boilerplate and/or copy/paste from Stackoverflow. If you were to let some of the people here run things we'd never have any form of progress with anything ever.
  • qayxc 5y ago
    Questions like this go much deeper and illustrate issues that need to be addressed before the technology becomes standard and widely adopted. It's not about progress or supressing it, it's a fundamental question about whether it is OK for huge companies to profit from the work of others without as much as giving credit, and if using AI this way represents an instance of doing so. The latter aspect goes beyond productivity or licensing - the OP asserts that AI isn't equivalent to a student who learned from examples how to perform a task, but rather replicates (recalls) or reproduces the works of others (e.g. the training material). It's a question that goes beyond this particular application: what about GAN-based generators? Do they merely reproduce slight variations of the training material? If so, wouldn't the authors of the training material have some kind of intellectual property rights to the generated works? This doesn't just concern code snippets, it's a general question about AI, crediting creators, and circumventing licensing and intellectual property rights.
  • joepie91_ 5y ago
    > Instead of having to retype boilerplate code, your productivity is now enhanced by having a system that can do it for you We already invented something for that a couple decades ago, and it's called a "library". And unlike this thing, libraries don't launder appropriation of the public commons with total disregard for those who have actually built that commons.
• sydthrowaway 5y ago
  I’m worried about my job. What do I do to prepare?
  • ostenning 5y ago
    There are much bigger things in this world to worry about. I bet you that by the time that this AI has taken your job, it'll have taken many other jobs, completely rearranging entire industries if not society itself. And even once that happens you shouldn't be worried about your job. Why? Because economically everything will be different and because your job isn't that important, it likely never was. The problems humanity faces are existential. Authoritarianism, ecosystem collapse and mass migration of billions of people. So if you really want to "prepare", then try to make a difference in what actually matters.
• pabs3 5y ago
  There isn't that much enforcement of open source license violations anyway. I bet there are lots of places where open source code gets taken, copyright/license headers stripped off and the code used in something proprietary as well as the bog-standard "not releasing code for modified versions of Linux" violation.
• yunohn 5y ago
  It's astonishing to me that HN+Twitter believe that Github designed this entire project, without speaking to their legal team and confirming that training on GPL code would be possible. Mind-blowingly hilarious armchair criticism.
• pluto7777 5y ago
  >GitHub co-pilot as open source code laundering? The English language as I flush?
• junon 5y ago
  SourceHut is looking real nice these days...
  • kzrdude 5y ago
    Why not gitlab?
    • junon 5y ago
      Too bloated.
• fartcannon 5y ago
  To me, this is similar to all these big org making money off our data. They should be paying us to profit off our minds.
• joshsyn 5y ago
  people worrying about AI. The AI is still shit. lol
• rbarrois 5y ago
  An interesting impact of this discussion is, for me: within my team at work, we're likely to forbid any use of Github co-pilot for our codebase, unless we can get a formal guarantee from Github that the generated code is actually valid for us to use. By the way, code generated by Github co-pilot is likely incompatible with Microsoft's Contribution License Agreement [1]: "You represent that each of Your Submission is entirely Your original work". This means that, for most open-source projects, code generated by Github co-pilot is, right now, NOT acceptable in the project. [1] https://opensource.microsoft.com/pdf/microsoft-contribution-license-agreement.pdf https://opensource.microsoft.com/pdf/microsoft-contribution-...
  • CharlesW 5y ago
    > This means that, for most open-source projects, code generated by Github co-pilot is, right now, NOT acceptable in the project. For this scenario, how is using Co-Pilot generated code different from using code based on sample code, Stack Overflow answers, etc.?
    • gwenzek 5y ago
      A number of company, including Google and probably Microsoft forbid copying code from Stack Overflow because there is no explicit license
      • CharlesW 5y ago
        TIL, thank you!
    • rbarrois 5y ago
      I'd say that it depends on the license; for StackOverflow, it's CC-BY-SA 4.0 [1]. For sample code, that would depend on the license of the original documentation. My point is: when I'm copying code from a source with an explicit license, I know whether I'm allowed to copy it. If I pick code from co-pilot, I have no idea (until tested by law in my jurisdiction) whether said code is public domain, AGPL, proprietary, infringing on some company's copyright. [1] https://stackoverflow.com/legal/terms-of-service#licensing https://stackoverflow.com/legal/terms-of-service#licensing
• 29athrowaway 5y ago
  If I recall correctly, it has been already determined that using proprietary data to train a machine learning system is not a violation of intellectual property.
• pjfin123 5y ago
  I think this would fall under any reasonable definition of fair use. If I read GPL (or proprietary) code as a human I still own code that I later write. If copyright was enforced on the outputs of machine learning models based on all content they were trained on it would be incredibly stifling to innovation. Requiring obtaining legal access to data for training but full ownership of output seems like a sensible middle ground. (Reposting my comment from yesterday)
  • sanderjd 5y ago
    Reposting a summary of my reply: if you memorize a line of code and then write it down somewhere else without attribution, that is not fair use, you copied that line of code. If this model does the same, it is the same.
• mikewarot 5y ago
  I think the argument has merit. Unfortunately it won't be decided on technical merit, but likely in the manner expressed in this excellent response I saw on Twitter: "Can't wait to see a case for this go in front of an 80 year old judge who rules something arbitrary and justifies it with an inaccurate comparison to something nontechnical."
• wg0 5y ago
  If I read a lot of GPL code, absorb naming conventions, structures, patterns, tricks and later when it comes down to writing a P2P Chat server, I happen to recall similar patterns, naming structures, conventions and many of the utility methods are pretty much how they are in the GPL code bases out there. Now is my produced code is also GPL derivative because I certainly did read through the code base to be able to write larger programs?
  • heeton 5y ago
    https://twitter.com/eevee/status/1410049195067674625 https://twitter.com/eevee/status/1410049195067674625 """ "but eevee, humans also learn by reading open source code, so isn't that the same thing" - no - humans are capable of abstract understanding and have a breadth of other knowledge to draw from - statistical models do not - you have fallen for marketing
    • DemocracyFTW 5y ago
      > humans are capable of abstract understanding and have a breadth of other knowledge to draw from this may be a matter of time and thus is not a fundamental objection. If mankind should fail to answer the perennial question of exploitation of the other and the same, it will be doomed. And rightly so, for mankind must answer this question, it must answer to this question. Instead what we do is increase monetary output then go and brag about efficiency. Neither is this efficient, nor is it about efficiency, nor has the Universe ever cared about efficiency. It just happens to coincide with what Society has decided to be its most looked-upon elements have chosen to be their religion. It is not my religion to be sure.
• cblconfederate 5y ago
  That's like saying that making a blurry , shaky copy of star wars is not derivative but original work. Thing is, the 'verbatimness' of the generated code is positively correlated with the number of parameters they used to train their model
• sipos 5y ago
  So, I can't see how they can argue that the code generated is not a derrivative of at least some of the code that it was trained on, and therefore encumbered by a complicated, and for anyone other than GitHub, impossible to disentangle, copyright claims. If they haven't even been careful to only use software under one license that does not require the original author to be attributed, then I don't see how it can even be legal for them to be running the service. All that said, I'm not confident that anyone will stop them in court anyway. This hasn't tenmded to be very easy when companies infringe other open source code copyright terms. Until it is cleared up though, it would seem extremely unwise for anyone to use any code from it.
• jgalt212 5y ago
  Isn't most of modern coding, just googling for someone who had solved the same problem that you are currently facing and then just copy/paste from Stack Overflow? To the extent that GPT-3 / co-pilot is just an over-fitted neural net, then it's primary value is as an automated search, copy, and paste.
• LeicaLatte 5y ago
  Our software has violated the world and people's lives legally and illegally in many instances. I mean none of us cared when GPT-3 did the same for text on the internet. :) Reminder - Software engineers, our codes, GPLs are not special.
• rhacker 5y ago
  I mean this is already happening. When you hire a specialist in C# servers, you're copying code that they already wrote. I find people tend to write the same functions and classes again and again and again all the time. We have a guy that brought his task manager codebase (he re-wrote it) but it's the same thing he used at 2 other companies. I have written 3 MPIs (master person/patient index) at this point all with the same fundamental matching engine. I mean, one thing we can all agree on is that ML is good at copying what we already do.
• mtnGoat 5y ago
  not a fan of this argument. musicians, artists, all kinds of athletes, all grow by watching observing and learning from others. as if all these open source projects got to where they are without looking at how others did things. i don't think a single function, similar syntax or basic check function is worth arguing about, its not like co-pilot is stealing an entire code base and just plopping it out by reading your mind and knowing what you want. i know developers that have certainly stolen code and implementation details from past employers and that was just fine.
• naikrovek 5y ago
  I don't see the point of this tool, independent of the resulting code being derivative of GPL code or not. being able to produce valid code is not the bottleneck of any developer effort. no projects fail because code can't be typed quickly enough. the bottleneck is understanding how the code works, how to design things correctly, how to make changes in accordance with the existing design, how to troubleshoot existing code, etc. this tool doesn't make anything any easier! it makes things harder, because now you have running software that was written by no one and is understood by no one.
  • fckthisguy 5y ago
    Whilst I absolutely agree that writing code fast enough isn't the bottleneck, it's always nice to have tools that reduce repeat code writing. I use the React plugin for Webstorm to avoid having to write the boilerplate for FCs. Maybe in the future Copilot will replace that usage.
    • ImprobableTruth 5y ago
      To me that - and really any form of common boilerplate - is just evidence that we're lacking abstractions. If your editor is generating code for you, that means that the 'real' programming language you're using 'in your head' has some metaprogramming facilities emulated by your IDE. I think we should strive to improve our programming languages to make less of this boilerplate necessary, not to make generating boiler plate easier. The latter is just going to make software less and less wieldy. Imagine the horror if instead of (relatively) higher level programming languages like C we were all just using assembly with code generation.
      • kemitchell 5y ago
        In a very real sense, we are all just using assembly with code generation. I really like your point on symptoms of insufficient abstraction. I do worry that we always see abstraction as belonging in language. Which in turn we treat as a precious singleton, and fight about. At least in my own hacking, I'm surprised how infrequently I see programmers write programs that write programs. I'm surprised how infrequently I see programmers programming their shell, editor, or IDE.
• dec0dedab0de 5y ago
  I wonder what would happen if someone scraped genius and used the lyrics to make a song writing tool.
• Closi 5y ago
  "About 0.1% the snippets are verbatim" This implies that by just changing the variable names, the snippets are classed as non-verbatim. I don't buy that this number is anywhere close to the actual figure if you assume that you can't just change function names and variable names and suddenly say you have escaped both the legality and the spirit of GPL.
• akagusu 5y ago
  For years people have warned about hosting the majority of world's open source code in a proprietary platform that belongs to a for profit company. These people were called lunatics, fundamentalists, radicals, conspiracy theorists, and many other names. Well, they were ignored and this is the result. A for profit company built a proprietary system using every code hosted in its platform without respecting the code license. There will be a lot of people saying this is not a license violation but it is, and more, it is an exploitation of other people work. Right now I'm asking myself when people will stop supporting these kind of company that exploit people's work without giving anything in return to people and society while making a huge amount of profit.
  • sergiomattei 5y ago
    If we feed the entirety of a library to an AI and have it generate new books, is it an exploitation of people's work? If we read a book and use its instructions to build a bicycle, is it an exploitation of people's work? No, no it's not.
    • nomorewords 5y ago
      I think you are abstracting the matter by taking out the humanity. It's one thing to learn to do something by hand after purchasing the book. It's a totally different thing to read every single book in the world (humanly impossible) and then absorb some knowledge and train yourself to write exceptional books because you (the AI in this scenario) have learned that some words and sentence structures have lead to books having higher ratings than others. It's not humanly possible. Of course we generate the world around us and its rules but I get angry every time we compare people to machines and say that it's the same thing. No it's not. We are constrained by time and space. I can't add more brain or more eyes to my body so I read more books can I? Microsoft can have a small city of servers somewhere and that could replace lots of people's jobs.
    • akagusu 5y ago
      If you read a book and use the instructions to build a bicycle you are learning a new skill and this is obviously not exploitation of people's work. When you read a book and copy this book partially or entirely to create a new book or create a derivative work using this book without citation it's called plagiarism and copyright infringement. It is not only exploitation, it is against the law. If you feed an entire library to an AI to generate new books without source citation and copyright agreements it is not only exploitation, it is against the law. We can call this automated plagiarism and copyright infringement, and automated or not, it is against the law. Except if you use public domain books. It wouldn't be illegal but highly unethical considering there are powerful companies with big pockets bending public domain's laws to avoid their assets to be public available (I'm looking at you Disney), but that is another story.
• oscribinn 5y ago
  Check out the comments on the original post about GitHub co-pilot. The top one reads just like an ad: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27676845 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27676845 Some posts that definitely aren't by shills (including the third one because I simply don't believe there's a person on the planet that "can't remember the last time Windows got in my way"): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27678231 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27678231 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27686416 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27686416 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27682270 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27682270 Very mild, yet negative sentiment opinion (downvoted quickly): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27676942 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27676942
• monocasa 5y ago
  Honestly I think a large part of the value add of machine learning is going to be the ability for huge entities to launder intellectual property violations. As an example, my grandfather (an old school EE who got his start on radar systems in the 50s, who then got his radiology MD when my jewish grandmother berated him enough with "engineer's not doctor though...") has some really cool patents around highlighting interesting parts of the frequency domain in MRIs that should make detection of cancer a whole lot easier. As an implementation he did a bunch of tensor calculus by hand to extract and highlight those features because he's an incredibly smart old school EE with 70 years experience cranking that kind of thing out with only his trusty slide rule. He hasn't gotten any uptake from MRI manufacturers, but they're all suddenly really into recurrent machine learning models to highlight the same sorts of stuff. Part of me wants to tell him to try selling it as a machine learning model and just obfuscate the fact that the model was carefully hand written rather than back propagated. I'm personally pretty anti intellectual property (at least how it's implemented in the states), but a system where large entities that have the capital investment to compute the large ML models can launder IP violations, but little guys get stuck to the letter of the law certainly seems like the worst of both worlds to me.
  • 908B64B197 5y ago
    > Part of me wants to tell him to try selling it as a machine learning model and just obfuscate the fact that the model was carefully hand written rather than back propagated. How many models are back-propagated first and then hand-tuned?
    • monocasa 5y ago
      That's a great question. I had assumed that the workflow of an ML engineer consisted of managing the data and a relatively high level set of parameters around a search space of layers and connectivity, as the whole shtick of ML is that the hyperparameter space of the tensors themselves is too complex to grok or tweak when generated from training. But I only have a passing knowledge of the subject, pretty much just enough to get myself in trouble in these kinds of discussions. Any chance some fantastic HNer could chime in there?
• afro88 5y ago
  Man reading the response tweets really highlights how bad twitter is for nuanced discussion.
• nemoniac 5y ago
  So as I understand it, AGPL was introduced to cover an unforeseen loophole in GPL that adapted code could be used to power a web service. Could another new version of the license block allowing code from use to train such GitHub co-pilot like models?
• darkerside 5y ago
  The conclusion seems a bit unfair. > "but eevee, humans also learn by reading open source code, so isn't that the same thing" - no - humans are capable of abstract understanding and have a breadth of other knowledge to draw from - statistical models do not - you have fallen for marketing Machines will draw on other sources of knowledge besides the GPL code. Whether they have the capacity for "abstract thought" is probably up for debate. There's not much else said in those bullets. It's not a good argument.
• sirsinsalot 5y ago
  "Who owns the future?" by Jaron Lanier covers lots of this stuff in a realli interesting way. If heart surgeons train an AI robot to do heart surgery ... shouldn't they be compensated (as passive income) for enabling that automation? Shouldn't this all be accounted for? If my code helps you write better code (via AI) shouldn't I be compensated for the value generated? We are being ripped off.
• greyman 5y ago
  > github copilot was trained on open source code and the sum total of everything it knows was drawn from that code. there is no possible interpretation of "derivative" that does not include this I don't understand the second sentence, i.e. where's the proof?
• mattdesl 5y ago
  By submitting any textual content (GPL or otherwise) on the web, you are placing it in an environment where it will be consumed and digested (by human brains and machine learning algorithms alike). There is already legal precedent set for this which allows its use in training machine learning algorithms, specifically with heavily copyrighted material from books[1]. This does not mean that any GitHub Co-Pilot produced code is suddenly free of license or patent concerns. If the code produces something that matches too closely GPL or otherwise licensed code on a particularly notable algorithm (such as video encoder), you may still be in a difficult legal situation. You are in essence using "not-your-own-code" by relying on CoPilot, which introduces a risk that the code may not be patent/license free, and you should be aware of the risk if you are using this tool to develop commercial software. The main issue here is that many average developers may continue to stamp their libraries as MIT/BSD, even though the CoPilot-produced code may not adhere to that license. If the end result is that much of the OSS ecosystem becomes muddied and tainted, this could slowly erode trust in open licenses on GitHub (i.e. the implications would be that open source libraries could become less widely used in commercial applications). [1] - https://towardsdatascience.com/the-most-important-supreme-court-decision-for-data-science-and-machine-learning-44cfc1c1bcaf https://towardsdatascience.com/the-most-important-supreme-co...
  • deleted 5y ago
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  • 6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago
    I assume that google had legal access to those books. In the case of GPT-3 derived models, they contain common crawl and webtext2 corpuses, which may include large amounts of pirated content (books and magazines uploaded in random places, paywalled content that's been uploaded elsewhere).
• danielEM 5y ago
  In a day MS bought github I knew that is on their agenda
• lend000 5y ago
  Perhaps someone at Github can chime in, but I suspect that open source code datasets (the kind they are trained on) should require relatively permissive licenses in the first place. Perhaps they filter for MIT licenses in Github projects and StackOverflow answers used to train the models?
  • jonstaab 5y ago
    Nope, they explicitly note that the GPL showed up 700k times in the training data: https://twitter.com/eevee/status/1410067860299255810 https://twitter.com/eevee/status/1410067860299255810
• hyperpallium2 5y ago
  Autocompletion of a comment can be enough for copyright infringement.
• hyperpallium2 5y ago
  Just wanted to say that everything is ultimately "derivative", and this literal ordinary meaning differs from the legal meaning, which is informed by context, policy and what makes sense. Where do you draw the line? That's for the courts to decide!
• eterevsky 5y ago
  I don't think anyone is interested in stealing small code snippets. It's easy enough to rewrite them. Where GPL does matter is in complete products. In other words, it's never "if only we could use this GCL-licensed function", it's almost always "if only we could link this GPL-licensed library or executable". And this GitHub co-pilot in no way infringes on full codebases.
• twistedpair 5y ago
  Neat tool, but needs context. I'm getting a lot of suggestions that make no sense. What's worse, the suggest code has invalid types, and won't compile. I'm surprised they didn't prune the solution tree via compiler validation.
• alexmikhalev 5y ago
  That's brilliant: I would argue that since MS used code with GPL type of licenses to train the Co-Pilot algorithm it shall release the Co-pilot model in its entirety. The ones who differentiate data and code missed their classes on Gödelization and functional programming.