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> train on open source projects To be specific, the FAQ states: "It has been trained on natural language text and source code from publicly available sources,
by password4321 4y ago
> train on open source projects
To be specific, the FAQ states: "It has been trained on natural language text and source code from publicly available sources, including code in public repositories on GitHub."
Some have raised concerns that Copilot violates at least the spirit of many open source licenses, laundering otherwise unusable code by sprinkling magic AI dust... most likely leaving the Copilot user responsible for copyright infringement.
- causi 4y agoYep. The only reason it hasn't been utterly dogpiled by lawyers is that far fewer people care about code than other forms of IP. If I made an AI assistant called PhotoStar to help with digital art and it just attaches Big Bird's face onto a character in my children's book I'm going to get sued. "Hey now, I just hit paste, the software pressed copy by itself" is not going to hold up.
- shadowgovt 4y agoBut if you made DALL-E and it just remixes images sourced from a broad scan of the Internet, filtered through several layers of machine learning indirection, you're all good.
- causi 4y agoSure, if it's remixed to the point where most people don't go "hey that's Big Bird!" CoPilot doesn't, or at least doesn't always, like when it just copied Quake's fast inverse square code with the verbatim comments including profanity. Using CoPilot to create commercial code opens the coder to significant liability if there's enough money at stake.
- bastardoperator 4y agoOr the fact that you grant GitHub an implicit license as outlined in the ToS.
- eropple 4y agoGitHub has never asked for representation to provide an unlimited-rights license to GitHub themselves for any purpose. Further, the person posting GPLed code to GitHub is not necessarily the only or sole copyright holder, and GitHub has never represented that there was a problem with this.
- causi 4y agoGitHub isn't liable. That's been established in court with regards to training AIs. Who is liable is you who may or may not have the legal right to use the code CoPilot spits out for you.
- visarga 4y agoThis has been explained many times - you can check word for word the output is original. All it takes is a bloom filter trained on the Copilot training set and an ngram extractor.
- causi 4y agoYes, and you'll be fine if you do. The problem is you might not bother.
- omginternets 4y agoAlpha-equivalence be damned!
- bee_rider 4y agoIt seems like this space will open up all sorts of interesting novel legal questions. It is possible to provide CoPilot with a sequence of inputs that produces some of the input, which was copyrighted. Let's say you want to help people violate copyright, so you as a third party distribute a script that provides that sequence of inputs. Who's violating the copyright there? Alternatively -- it is apparently legal to produce a clean-room implementation that duplicates a copyright implementation. Supposing you were to use a tool like CoPilot, which has just been trained on that copyright implementation. Is your room still clean? You might even be able to get it to spit out identical functions! Or, if you have a ML algorithm which has been trained on leaked closed source code, and it is sufficiently over-fitted as to just provide the source code given the filename or the original binary, who is violating copyright when this tool is used? If it is just the end user, then this seems like a really convenient way to launder leaked closed source code.
- rasz 4y agohttps://i.postimg.cc/0QhH9bS8/dallemini-2022-6-22-0-48-28.png https://i.postimg.cc/0QhH9bS8/dallemini-2022-6-22-0-48-28.pn...
- twic 4y agoFortunately, it can also generate high-quality completely novel characters, every bit as lovable and unthreatening as Big Bird: https://imgur.com/a/ppeclPL https://imgur.com/a/ppeclPL
- taftster 4y agoThis is legit. While it seems it takes forever to bring this kind of stuff to trial, it will be an interesting case for sure. Especially in the broader more general sense. AI is just recomposition of existing snippets of code, art, text, music, etc. Does an AI fall under fair use? What happens when an AI produces something too similar to an existing work or trademark. I know the computer won't get sued, the owner/user will. But still, it's a hard problem. Even if Copilot was initialized with snippets from Open Source Software (exclusively), it doesn't mean that copyright infringement isn't a concern.
- visarga 4y ago> AI is just recomposition of existing snippets of code, art, text, music, etc. It's not random recomposition, which is worthless. It's useful recomposition, adapted to the request and context. It adds something of its own to the mix.
- lamontcg 4y agoAnother concern is that nearly every stackoverflow answer or wikipedia article that isn't a trivial algorithm tends to be buggy at its edge conditions. Most of them look like they were submitted by college students and not experts.
- shadowgovt 4y agoRemember when we believed that experts were over because the wisdom of the crowds would reign supreme? Been a hell of a decade, hasn't it.
- TimTheTinker 4y agoWhen the wisdom of the crowds is all easily accessible, the hard part becomes curating.
- xpe 4y agoThe "wisdom of the crowds" doesn't mean what many people think it means. The wisdom of crowds works best when: 1. participants are independent (otherwise you may get failure modes, such as "groupthink" or "information cascades") 2. participants are informed, but in different ways, with different opinions; 3. there is a clear, accepted aggregation mechanism, where individual errors "cancel out" to some degree I view the topics in James Surowiecki's book (or the Wikipedia summary of it, at least) as required thinkinpg for everyone, preferably synthesized with a study of statistics and political economy. In particular, the Wikipedia article's section on "Five elements required to form a wise crowd" is a slightly different slicing of the required elements that I offer above. * If you read that section, trust is listed. I, however, don't see trust as a necessary condition for a "wise crowd". Trust is often useful (or even necessary) when a collective decision is used for governance, decision-making, and policy.
- silisili 4y agoI still can't believe they trained it with open source code, and didn't have some tag system to a) exclude based on licensing, and b) autoinclude licensing, or at least warn about it before applying code. Especially when many cases were shown of it line by line writing code from the same exact codebase.
- capableweb 4y agoNot to mention that just because the code is public, doesn't mean you can use it however you want. You can publish code and still retain copyright. Wonder if GitHub looked at the license when they gathered the data for the model.
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 4y agoIt seems unfortunately clear that generative ML as typically practiced falls under fair use of even the most restrictive licenses or lack thereof (e.g. a training set including disney movies without disney’s permission). Some people say that’s great and it’s legal hooray, but I would love it if the law caught up and added requirements to the models trained this way. If you benefit from other people’s stuff without their permission then you ought to have to give back in some way.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- visarga 4y agoIf you can't prove your code was stolen you shouldn't have a claim. And Codex should just skip code that exists in the training set. All that remains is creative code.
- cauefcr 4y agoWhat is actually crazy is having copyright/patents/whatever apply to mathematical structures and code, and be retainable for long, it's rent on ideas, such a ridiculous concept.
- munchler 4y agoCopyright and patents are very different. I think the general consensus among developers is that software patents are silly, but copyright on source code is very important.
- Gigachad 4y agoIt’s hardly different from reading those projects yourself and learning from them.
- adamckay 4y agoLearning from them would be fine, reproducing them as-is without abiding by the license is not and that's where the difference lies.