4 ms·

How have people been thinking about licensing and attribution when it comes to using AI code assistance tools like this? In my personal work, I'm avoiding it si

How have people been thinking about licensing and attribution when it comes to using AI code assistance tools like this? In my personal work, I'm avoiding it since being trained on "publicly available code from GitHub" feels too risky for me if I were to say accidentally pull in GPL code to a private project.

mnd999 4y ago
I wouldn’t touch it with a barge pole for this reason.
_bohm 4y ago
I have been using it on a fairly large project, and in practice I find it rarely, if ever, spits out anything other than something that resembles what I would have written next anyways, taking context clues from the file I'm editing.
- packetlost 4y ago
  Yeah, this is my experience too. You can prod it into generating code that exactly matches something from the training data, but it seems like you have to really try.
netr0ute 4y ago
That's exactly why my projects are GPL, so I don't have to worry about that.
- mnd999 4y ago
  Not all public code on GitHub is licensed in a GPL compatible way.
dijit 4y ago
Someone asked me to pay for a team subscription for Copilot. As I'm CTO (and thus legally responsible for those agreements that you normally just click through); I read the terms of service, and they do not actually grant license to the code. They say in very clear terms: YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR TAKING SUGGESTIONS. So, as I don't want to encourage people to think that they can simply copy over copilot solutions I decided against buying access to it, even though I am quite certain it would have boosted developer productivity. (and goodwill, people like shiny!). I was also a little concerned because it is additionally the case that a AI is confidently incorrect sometimes, so there are suggestions that have subtle and hard to see bugs. I really don't really want to hear that a bug is caused by AI, since from my perspective the whole point of you being paid a handsome salary comparable to a doctor is because you take responsibility for the code you write; which is actually somewhat in-line with the Copilot license agreement[0] [0]: https://github.com/customer-terms/github-copilot-product-specific-terms https://github.com/customer-terms/github-copilot-product-spe...
- tubs 4y ago
  Do you also disallow your employees from reading github, stack overflow, or other sources of code?
  - dijit 4y ago
    I disallow copying of copyrighted code into our product repositories unless the license is clear, I have even reached out to people to directly license copyrighted software, or for them to relicense their public AGPL/GPL license (for a fee). To answer your statement directly: 1) StackOverflow submissions are CC-BY-SA, so if a person copies' code from there, even if it's copyrighted you can consider it good faith and remove the offending code from your product. This is actually a licensing nightmare but the current situation is the same as when the music industry accidentally uses an unlicensed sample and there's no current reason to consider it otherwise. 2) Github has a neat repository licensing feature (LICENSE) so you can easily tell what repo has what, not having a license file means the repository is fully copyrighted by default by the way; if we bundle GPL code then we would have to open source our game, which is not going to happen, so no you're not allowed to just copy code, but you can take inspiration; which is what Copilot is saying you should do in their terms *NOT COPY CODE VERBATIM*. Ultimately: Software licensing is a joke to you because it doesn't really concern you, however it concerns me as it is quite literally part of my job to protect the company from being sued over doing something wrong here.
    - tubs 4y ago
      Right. So it's up to you to educate your developers to not copy code from sources that have licenses incompatible with your project. Much the same as educating the same developers that "YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR TAKING SUGGESTIONS" from copilot. I do not see any difference here. It's an extremely personal attack to claim software licencing is a joke to me. You have zero context on the work I do professionally and as open source. I'd appreciate it if you could limit your arguments to not include personal insults.
    - YetAnotherNick 4y ago
      What if someone copied a GPL code to stackoverflow? It wouldn't even be hard to look for examples like this. In situations like this, my opinion is to just assume that license will first bite big guy, so I am willing to play by the fire if someone who is 10x bigger than me are doing the same.
corobo 4y ago
I don't use it for dayjob stuff because I don't want to deal with the hassle of explaining and selling someone on it to get the use approved, and admittedly there are (however small) risks of sending confidential stuff over the wire. Copilot isn't enabled for those projects. Personal stuff? I don't really think about it at all outside of these threads, no. I'm not exactly citing every source for where I learned each concept, and people smarter than me say that's how Copilot learned it too. That'll do for me and my side projects, I'll keep up with the law as it keeps up with AI.
danielvaughn 4y ago
I honestly don't think it's going to be a risk for developers. I don't believe you can accurately run attribution on any of the source code generated for you, right? If so, that should give you plausible deniability, while putting all the liability on Github's shoulders. It's their responsibility to make sure they don't violate licenses in their own model.
- AlexandrB 4y ago
  > It's their responsibility to make sure they don't violate licenses in their own model. Maybe morally that's true. But who do you think is easier to sue? Small startup using copilot or Microsoft?
  - danielvaughn 4y ago
    Yeah true, you're right. Still, intuitively it seems like the better legal case would be against MS, even if it's not the more practical one.

mnd999 4y ago

I wouldn’t touch it with a barge pole for this reason.

_bohm 4y ago

I have been using it on a fairly large project, and in practice I find it rarely, if ever, spits out anything other than something that resembles what I would have written next anyways, taking context clues from the file I'm editing.

packetlost 4y ago
Yeah, this is my experience too. You can prod it into generating code that exactly matches something from the training data, but it seems like you have to really try.

netr0ute 4y ago

That's exactly why my projects are GPL, so I don't have to worry about that.

mnd999 4y ago
Not all public code on GitHub is licensed in a GPL compatible way.

dijit 4y ago

Someone asked me to pay for a team subscription for Copilot. As I'm CTO (and thus legally responsible for those agreements that you normally just click through); I read the terms of service, and they do not actually grant license to the code. They say in very clear terms: YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR TAKING SUGGESTIONS. So, as I don't want to encourage people to think that they can simply copy over copilot solutions I decided against buying access to it, even though I am quite certain it would have boosted developer productivity. (and goodwill, people like shiny!). I was also a little concerned because it is additionally the case that a AI is confidently incorrect sometimes, so there are suggestions that have subtle and hard to see bugs. I really don't really want to hear that a bug is caused by AI, since from my perspective the whole point of you being paid a handsome salary comparable to a doctor is because you take responsibility for the code you write; which is actually somewhat in-line with the Copilot license agreement[0] [0]: https://github.com/customer-terms/github-copilot-product-specific-terms https://github.com/customer-terms/github-copilot-product-spe...

tubs 4y ago
Do you also disallow your employees from reading github, stack overflow, or other sources of code?
- dijit 4y ago
  I disallow copying of copyrighted code into our product repositories unless the license is clear, I have even reached out to people to directly license copyrighted software, or for them to relicense their public AGPL/GPL license (for a fee). To answer your statement directly: 1) StackOverflow submissions are CC-BY-SA, so if a person copies' code from there, even if it's copyrighted you can consider it good faith and remove the offending code from your product. This is actually a licensing nightmare but the current situation is the same as when the music industry accidentally uses an unlicensed sample and there's no current reason to consider it otherwise. 2) Github has a neat repository licensing feature (LICENSE) so you can easily tell what repo has what, not having a license file means the repository is fully copyrighted by default by the way; if we bundle GPL code then we would have to open source our game, which is not going to happen, so no you're not allowed to just copy code, but you can take inspiration; which is what Copilot is saying you should do in their terms *NOT COPY CODE VERBATIM*. Ultimately: Software licensing is a joke to you because it doesn't really concern you, however it concerns me as it is quite literally part of my job to protect the company from being sued over doing something wrong here.
  - tubs 4y ago
    Right. So it's up to you to educate your developers to not copy code from sources that have licenses incompatible with your project. Much the same as educating the same developers that "YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR TAKING SUGGESTIONS" from copilot. I do not see any difference here. It's an extremely personal attack to claim software licencing is a joke to me. You have zero context on the work I do professionally and as open source. I'd appreciate it if you could limit your arguments to not include personal insults.
  - YetAnotherNick 4y ago
    What if someone copied a GPL code to stackoverflow? It wouldn't even be hard to look for examples like this. In situations like this, my opinion is to just assume that license will first bite big guy, so I am willing to play by the fire if someone who is 10x bigger than me are doing the same.

corobo 4y ago

I don't use it for dayjob stuff because I don't want to deal with the hassle of explaining and selling someone on it to get the use approved, and admittedly there are (however small) risks of sending confidential stuff over the wire. Copilot isn't enabled for those projects. Personal stuff? I don't really think about it at all outside of these threads, no. I'm not exactly citing every source for where I learned each concept, and people smarter than me say that's how Copilot learned it too. That'll do for me and my side projects, I'll keep up with the law as it keeps up with AI.

danielvaughn 4y ago

I honestly don't think it's going to be a risk for developers. I don't believe you can accurately run attribution on any of the source code generated for you, right? If so, that should give you plausible deniability, while putting all the liability on Github's shoulders. It's their responsibility to make sure they don't violate licenses in their own model.

AlexandrB 4y ago
> It's their responsibility to make sure they don't violate licenses in their own model. Maybe morally that's true. But who do you think is easier to sue? Small startup using copilot or Microsoft?
- danielvaughn 4y ago
  Yeah true, you're right. Still, intuitively it seems like the better legal case would be against MS, even if it's not the more practical one.