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The CoPilot team could pull the code from PyPi and use it to train their models, regardless of whether it's on GitHub. If you don't want AI trained on your code

The CoPilot team could pull the code from PyPi and use it to train their models, regardless of whether it's on GitHub. If you don't want AI trained on your code, then either don't publish it, or publish it somewhere that forbids (and preferably enforces) AI companies to index or train on it. But good luck with that... it's public code. Don't publish it if you don't want humans or machines to read it.

teddyh 3y ago
If Microsoft could legally do that, then why is that clause present in the GitHub ToS?
- chatmasta 3y ago
  Because you're pushing the code to GitHub, so they need to enumerate their rights in terms of what they can do with it once you push it there. But if you publish your code to PyPi, the relevant ToS is the PyPi ToS, which has no such clause forbidding either PyPi or others from using the code how they'd like to (and as mentioned by other comments in this thread, the ToS actually explicitly grants others the right to republish the code).
- schemescape 3y ago
  Out of my own curiosity, which clause in the GitHub TOS are you referring to?
  - teddyh 3y ago
    I don’t know, but it seems to be this one: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37425482 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37425482>
- theaiquestion 3y ago
  Because most company's/people are (AFAIK) under the impression that training on public data will fall under "Fair Use" because it's substantially transformative, in the case that it isn't then you've already agreed to it on github. It's a fallback clause, "fair use" is irrelevant if you've already given github permission to use it. By adding that clause you can no longer argue that it's not fair use to use the code you put on github after agreeing to their terms.
labster 3y ago
The GPL should really be updated to say that any code produced from machine learning on GPL code is also GPL licensed.
- chatmasta 3y ago
  Yes, or there should be a ROBOTS.TXT file that describes how the code in a directory may be indexed or used by machines (e.g. malware scanning okay, no LLM training, etc.) But you're probably correct that such rights should just be covered by the license itself. Your reciprocity suggestion could also work, since it would mean any LLM trained on even a single file of GPL code would be "poisoned" in the sense that any code it produced would also be GPL. This would make people wary of using the LLM for writing code, and thus would make the creators of it wary of training it on the code.
- jbaber 3y ago
  This is an interesting idea.
- gaganyaan 3y ago
  I think it's an open question if that would actually work. I would guess that if the courts decided that worked, we'd see a GPL 4 with that sort of clause.
- albertzeyer 3y ago
  You also don't say that if a human has learned from GPL code, that all code that this human produces in the future is GPL licensed.
  - rfw300 3y ago
    Computers aren’t humans. There’s no reason licenses should treat them the same way when completely different considerations of fairness and economic impact apply.
  - contravariant 3y ago
    Humans are also not allowed to simply regurgitate GPL code verbatim, even if they do it by committing the code to memory. There's a reason clean room implementations are a thing, sometimes even the appearance of someone possibly remembering code verbatim is risky enough to warrant extra care. That said usually the risks are acceptable even without extra measures because you can hold the humans responsible. Now just because you don't understand a language model and call its fitting procedure 'learning' doesn't mean that it is doing anything even remotely similar. And even if it does then it has no legal responsibilities so if you want to distribute it then you as the distributor need to assume responsibility for all the copyrights such an act could possibly infringe. There are measures you can take to try to prevent the information from any one code base from entering the model verbatim, by severely restricting the model size or carefully obfuscating the data, but to my knowledge nobody has used any method that gives any proven measure of security.
belorn 3y ago
They could do that, just as much as someone could pull videos and songs from youtube and use that to train a model. Its public content, so if people wanted humans and machines to not access it then don't publish on a public platform. One can argue about ToS and copyright, about different interpretations of fair use, derivative work, DRM protections, and so on. Usually people are not interested to discuss finer details of those things. Most people seems to want to perceive it as either being public or not public, in which case, Youtube is just as public as PyPi.

teddyh 3y ago

If Microsoft could legally do that, then why is that clause present in the GitHub ToS?

chatmasta 3y ago
Because you're pushing the code to GitHub, so they need to enumerate their rights in terms of what they can do with it once you push it there. But if you publish your code to PyPi, the relevant ToS is the PyPi ToS, which has no such clause forbidding either PyPi or others from using the code how they'd like to (and as mentioned by other comments in this thread, the ToS actually explicitly grants others the right to republish the code).
schemescape 3y ago
Out of my own curiosity, which clause in the GitHub TOS are you referring to?
- teddyh 3y ago
  I don’t know, but it seems to be this one: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37425482 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37425482>
theaiquestion 3y ago
Because most company's/people are (AFAIK) under the impression that training on public data will fall under "Fair Use" because it's substantially transformative, in the case that it isn't then you've already agreed to it on github. It's a fallback clause, "fair use" is irrelevant if you've already given github permission to use it. By adding that clause you can no longer argue that it's not fair use to use the code you put on github after agreeing to their terms.

labster 3y ago

The GPL should really be updated to say that any code produced from machine learning on GPL code is also GPL licensed.

chatmasta 3y ago
Yes, or there should be a ROBOTS.TXT file that describes how the code in a directory may be indexed or used by machines (e.g. malware scanning okay, no LLM training, etc.) But you're probably correct that such rights should just be covered by the license itself. Your reciprocity suggestion could also work, since it would mean any LLM trained on even a single file of GPL code would be "poisoned" in the sense that any code it produced would also be GPL. This would make people wary of using the LLM for writing code, and thus would make the creators of it wary of training it on the code.
jbaber 3y ago
This is an interesting idea.
gaganyaan 3y ago
I think it's an open question if that would actually work. I would guess that if the courts decided that worked, we'd see a GPL 4 with that sort of clause.
albertzeyer 3y ago
You also don't say that if a human has learned from GPL code, that all code that this human produces in the future is GPL licensed.
- rfw300 3y ago
  Computers aren’t humans. There’s no reason licenses should treat them the same way when completely different considerations of fairness and economic impact apply.
- contravariant 3y ago
  Humans are also not allowed to simply regurgitate GPL code verbatim, even if they do it by committing the code to memory. There's a reason clean room implementations are a thing, sometimes even the appearance of someone possibly remembering code verbatim is risky enough to warrant extra care. That said usually the risks are acceptable even without extra measures because you can hold the humans responsible. Now just because you don't understand a language model and call its fitting procedure 'learning' doesn't mean that it is doing anything even remotely similar. And even if it does then it has no legal responsibilities so if you want to distribute it then you as the distributor need to assume responsibility for all the copyrights such an act could possibly infringe. There are measures you can take to try to prevent the information from any one code base from entering the model verbatim, by severely restricting the model size or carefully obfuscating the data, but to my knowledge nobody has used any method that gives any proven measure of security.

belorn 3y ago

They could do that, just as much as someone could pull videos and songs from youtube and use that to train a model. Its public content, so if people wanted humans and machines to not access it then don't publish on a public platform. One can argue about ToS and copyright, about different interpretations of fair use, derivative work, DRM protections, and so on. Usually people are not interested to discuss finer details of those things. Most people seems to want to perceive it as either being public or not public, in which case, Youtube is just as public as PyPi.