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Banned: The 1,170 words you can't use with GitHub Copilot

30 points by samizdis 5y ago

Mountain_Skies 5y ago
I'm quite certain I've used the word 'liberal' in comments many times but probably never in a political context. Some of the others have certainly been data values, especially when working on government projects, though that might not apply since they were normally populated from a database table rather than from code.
- torstenvl 5y ago
  "TCP implementations should follow a general principle of robustness: be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others." https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc761 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc761
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literallyaduck 5y ago
I wonder if Copilot will get caught up in the Texas abortion bounty program.
type0 5y ago
> "This prompted a lot of concern about whether Copilot would plagiarize code and violate copyright licenses. So by including 'q rsqrt' on the bad word list, they basically broke an embarrassing demo without addressing the real problem." So if you don't want your GPL code to be included just use some words on the list, apparently GitHub thinks this is how it should be used.
- rasz 5y ago
  You would have to move back in time, and then include "pisswhacker" in every single line of your code.
  - rurban 5y ago
    liberal would be good enough
HomeDeLaPot 5y ago
I haven't looked into CoPilot much, but seeing it spit out a famous function (q rsqrt) verbatim on that Twitter thread was wild. So the answer is definitely yes: CoPilot, at least at right then, could and did regurgitate copyrighted code. The question in my mind now is, how much smarter will it have to get before it can decide on its own how to tread the line between copyright/license violations and writing original code? Is that a long ways off like Tesla's full self driving? Does it basically require human-level intelligence? Or you know, just don't train it on code that isn't MIT licensed and vetted beforehand...

30 points by samizdis 5y ago

I'm quite certain I've used the word 'liberal' in comments many times but probably never in a political context. Some of the others have certainly been data values, especially when working on government projects, though that might not apply since they were normally populated from a database table rather than from code.

torstenvl 5y ago
"TCP implementations should follow a general principle of robustness: be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others." https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc761 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc761

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literallyaduck 5y ago

I wonder if Copilot will get caught up in the Texas abortion bounty program.

type0 5y ago

> "This prompted a lot of concern about whether Copilot would plagiarize code and violate copyright licenses. So by including 'q rsqrt' on the bad word list, they basically broke an embarrassing demo without addressing the real problem." So if you don't want your GPL code to be included just use some words on the list, apparently GitHub thinks this is how it should be used.

rasz 5y ago
You would have to move back in time, and then include "pisswhacker" in every single line of your code.
- rurban 5y ago
  liberal would be good enough

HomeDeLaPot 5y ago

I haven't looked into CoPilot much, but seeing it spit out a famous function (q rsqrt) verbatim on that Twitter thread was wild. So the answer is definitely yes: CoPilot, at least at right then, could and did regurgitate copyrighted code. The question in my mind now is, how much smarter will it have to get before it can decide on its own how to tread the line between copyright/license violations and writing original code? Is that a long ways off like Tesla's full self driving? Does it basically require human-level intelligence? Or you know, just don't train it on code that isn't MIT licensed and vetted beforehand...