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>>a form of laundering open source code into commercial works If it is nothing but a glorified autocomplete that inserts SHORT snippets of code, as in a quote

by toss1 4y ago

>>a form of laundering open source code into commercial works If it is nothing but a glorified autocomplete that inserts SHORT snippets of code, as in a quote from a book in a book review, or the above quote, that's fine. But when it is inserting whole pages, that's beyond Fair Use, and basically a nicely scaled and laundered version of plagiarism. Another key is now much it is modifying the code to suit the situation. Is it generating entirely new synthesized output like DALL-E 2 or GPT-3 such that the output is closer to generative creativity, or is it merely pasting in code blocks found in similar situations? It comes down to the question of how transformative is the output, which is a key concept in copyright law. >>“What is the difference between this and someone doing it manually? " Another key question here. If it is merely cut/paste beyond a line or two, it's plagiarism, but if it is synthesizing new works, it's good. Same as manually: am I using your GPL work for inspiration to generate new works, or am I copy-pasting pages of code? Does anyone have any extensive experience with Copilot to be able to highlight these differences? EDIT: fmt, clarity

cdrini 4y ago
In my experience it's more generative. It responds to variable names in my code, formatting, patterns in how I'm writing (am I using ES6 features? async/await or raw promises? Etc). Granted it could still be copying, but when it's generating usually less than 5 lines at a time... I wonder if you could argue that all possible 5 line code snippets have already been written--wrt to like abstract logic/variable relationships/patterns. Also I think it's important to note that Copilot isn't an independent AI; it's a human in the loop system. In my experience I always make adjustments to the code it generates to better fit my needs. So on top of the transformation that copilot does, I'm also stacking transformation on top of that. So the final, potentially copyrightable product is very far removed from the training data. Copilot's training algorithm, OpenAI Codex, "is a descendant of GPT-3" under the hood. I think code is unique in that unlike text and images, there's much less variance in code. It's not as expressive as English, or visual art. So I think there might be a higher chance it'll generate something similar to its training data--but only because all code is inherently more similar.
- toss1 4y ago
  Thanks - very helpful!! Good points about you adding transformations on top of the Copilot output and less variation in code due to it's structured nature. Interesting also that it responds to variable names and patterns in your writing/code. Does it also respond to comments? Your answer points me more towards the not-infringing argument. Perhaps the best solution would be to have a companion plagiarism-checker tool that examined your code vs it's training set of GPL/MIT licensed code when you are nearly finished to flag significant copying. Shouldn't be too hard and would avoid the whole problem (and also maybe sometimes point you to a library you should be using instead of rolling your own).
  - cdrini 4y ago
    Thanks for listening! The comment thread for anything copilot related is generally super polarised, and I really appreciated your calm comment and your calm response :) If I understand your question correctly, it does respond to comments. One of the best ways to interact with copilot is to write a comment (eg "Read input until y/n is entered") and have it generate the resulting code. If you're asking if it matches commenting style, I think it does, but I haven't pushed it in that direction too much. I think that's an interesting proposal, although it does place the onus on the developer. I would be curious to know how often developers would fail that check even without Copilot! Overall I think there are definitely open questions, but I'm personally really excited by systems like GPT, Copilot, or Dallee. The future is not clear, but I think these tools to some extent make the internet make sense. There's way too much data online to make sense of--be it code, text, or images. Unlike a search engine which just links to hopefully relevant material, these tools "learn" from all that data and respond with an answer of sorts--not a list of references. I think one huge improvement would be making these systems more explainable. So getting a certain response, you can also see the thousands of references that were used to generate that response. That would help a lot in providing transparency in whether there is plagiarism happening, and also just be an immensely useful tool for humanity and the internet. It feels like the next logical step for the internet. I would even say it feels like the internet was built for this!
    - 4y ago

by toss1 4y ago

cdrini 4y ago

In my experience it's more generative. It responds to variable names in my code, formatting, patterns in how I'm writing (am I using ES6 features? async/await or raw promises? Etc). Granted it could still be copying, but when it's generating usually less than 5 lines at a time... I wonder if you could argue that all possible 5 line code snippets have already been written--wrt to like abstract logic/variable relationships/patterns. Also I think it's important to note that Copilot isn't an independent AI; it's a human in the loop system. In my experience I always make adjustments to the code it generates to better fit my needs. So on top of the transformation that copilot does, I'm also stacking transformation on top of that. So the final, potentially copyrightable product is very far removed from the training data. Copilot's training algorithm, OpenAI Codex, "is a descendant of GPT-3" under the hood. I think code is unique in that unlike text and images, there's much less variance in code. It's not as expressive as English, or visual art. So I think there might be a higher chance it'll generate something similar to its training data--but only because all code is inherently more similar.

toss1 4y ago
Thanks - very helpful!! Good points about you adding transformations on top of the Copilot output and less variation in code due to it's structured nature. Interesting also that it responds to variable names and patterns in your writing/code. Does it also respond to comments? Your answer points me more towards the not-infringing argument. Perhaps the best solution would be to have a companion plagiarism-checker tool that examined your code vs it's training set of GPL/MIT licensed code when you are nearly finished to flag significant copying. Shouldn't be too hard and would avoid the whole problem (and also maybe sometimes point you to a library you should be using instead of rolling your own).
- cdrini 4y ago
  Thanks for listening! The comment thread for anything copilot related is generally super polarised, and I really appreciated your calm comment and your calm response :) If I understand your question correctly, it does respond to comments. One of the best ways to interact with copilot is to write a comment (eg "Read input until y/n is entered") and have it generate the resulting code. If you're asking if it matches commenting style, I think it does, but I haven't pushed it in that direction too much. I think that's an interesting proposal, although it does place the onus on the developer. I would be curious to know how often developers would fail that check even without Copilot! Overall I think there are definitely open questions, but I'm personally really excited by systems like GPT, Copilot, or Dallee. The future is not clear, but I think these tools to some extent make the internet make sense. There's way too much data online to make sense of--be it code, text, or images. Unlike a search engine which just links to hopefully relevant material, these tools "learn" from all that data and respond with an answer of sorts--not a list of references. I think one huge improvement would be making these systems more explainable. So getting a certain response, you can also see the thousands of references that were used to generate that response. That would help a lot in providing transparency in whether there is plagiarism happening, and also just be an immensely useful tool for humanity and the internet. It feels like the next logical step for the internet. I would even say it feels like the internet was built for this!
  - 4y ago