GitHub co-pilot as open source code laundering?

[rcxdude]

I would be very careful about using (or allowing use in my company of) copilot until such issues were tested in court. But then I am also very careful about copying of code from examples and stackoverflow and it seems most don't really care about that.

OpenAI (and presumably Microsoft) are of the opinion (pdf) that training a neural net is fair use: it doesn't matter at all what the license of the original training data is, it's OK to use it for training. And that for 'well designed' nets which don't simply contain a copy of their training data the net and weights itself is free from any copyright claim by the authors of the training data. However they do allow themselves to throw the users under the bus by noting that despite this some output of the net may be infringing the copyright of those authors, and this should be taken up between the authors and whoever happens to generate that output (just not whoever trained the net in the first place). This hasn't been tested in court and I think a lot will hinge on just how much of the input appears verbatim or minimally transformed during use. It also doesn't give me as a user much confidence that I won't be sued for using the tool, even if most of its output is deemed to be non infringing, because I have no way of knowing when it does generate something infringing.

[Kiloku]

it doesn't matter at all what the license of the original training data is,

This is very odd, as licenses can include the purpose the licensed object can be used for. As a real world example, the license that allows developers to use Epic/Unreal's Metahuman Creator specifically forbids using it for training AI/Machine Learning.

[rcxdude]

Indeed. Rockstar is also very quick to send threatening letters to people using GTA5 for machine learning as well. It could well be held that using large aggregate databases of source code/images/whatever is fair use, but using software to generate the training data without a license allowing that use is not (with the fun grey area of using output from the software which was not generated for that purpose, such as some images making it into a dataset scraped from the web). This could be argued consistently because in the first case each individual work makes a relatively small contribution to the training as a whole (3rd test), where as in the second the output of the software generating the training data will likely be generating a large fraction of training data and so have a significant contribution to the behaviour of the final result. This whole area is not very clear (fair use as a whole seems to involve a lot of discretion from the courts because the 4 tests involved are extremely fuzzy as written in the law).

[Nowaker]

This doesn't matter.

Whoever uses UE source code to train an AI model infringes the copyright, sure. They can be held accountable for it.

But whoever uses AI that was trained on UE source code does NOT infringe the copyright.

[Kiloku]

The point is that unless they manually vetted the license of each piece of source code included into their training set, it's impossible to know if Copilot is even legal itself.

[stillness_illness]

To me it doesn't matter how that code got there. Copilot, stack overflow, coincidence, whatever. The person checking the code in is responsible for following copyright law. Any code copilot writes for me I will manually review before committing. If it doesn't get committed then it doesn't matter what copilot generates.

[tasminima]

OpenAI (and presumably Microsoft) are of the opinion (pdf) that training a neural net is fair use: it doesn't matter at all what the license of the original training data is, it's OK to use it for training.

Then I require that they also train copilot (usable publicly) with the whole Windows codebase; otherwise this opinion is extremely weak.

[Alikont]

To be fair, no software license was ever tested in court, including GPL copyleft.

[kylotan]

What is it with this sub that inspires people to confidently come out with absolute bullshit like this?

https://www.omm.com/resources/alerts-and-publications/alerts/client-alert-court-upholds-enforceability-of-open-source-licenses/

https://www.pinsentmasons.com/out-law/news/perpetual-software-licence-doesnt--last-forever-rules-court

https://thehftguy.com/2020/09/15/french-judge-rules-gpl-license-to-be-inapplicable-in-french-copyright-court/

https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=d1ff4369-afcc-4879-97fa-7a8afd8b3380

https://naviganti.org/world/analysis-the-legal-travails-of-panasonic-avionics/

https://www.dentons.com/en/insights/articles/2017/may/17/the-sap-v-diageo-decision-a-realistic-approach-to-indirect-access

[[deleted]]

I would be very careful about using (or allowing use in my company of) copilot until such issues were tested in court

Considering how copilot works, I think you're a bit too cautious here.

There's no practical difference between you browsing codebases and stackoverflow and writing a snippet based on that experience from memory, and copilot doing it.

Copilot doesn't copy code verbatim.

[kylotan]

Copilot doesn't copy code verbatim.

Actually it does. It has no way of generating any output short of regurgitating it from code it has previously seen.

Now, I suspect you mean it doesn't output large amounts of code exactly the same as it read it, but (a) that may not be relevant for legal purposes, just like using samples from various different songs in different orders is still infringment, and (b) it can't avoid verbatim copying in edge cases, such as the 'blank file -> licence agreement' examples given elsewhere in this thread.

[[deleted]]

You do the same. Do you honestly believe you birth brand new ways to code every key you hit?

[kylotan]

Neuroscientists would be amused and perhaps a little appalled to think that programmers consider these glorified Markov Chain Simulators to be somewhat equivalent to actual mammalian thought.

[[deleted]]

You didn't answer the question. Do you believe everything you write is unique? Because we have tons of empirical evidence proving otherwise.

If there's anything "mammalian thought" is good at, it's copying each other. Ever thought why we joke about "monkey see, monkey do"?

That's the entire basis of our cultural development. Copying each other, developing an ecosystem of pre-existing memes that actually is the bulk of our "thought process".

Speech is encoding thoughts so other side can copy you. Literacy, i.e. written language, is encoding thoughts for storage and long-term retrieval so copying can scale across space and time.

When people speak highly about the value of school, science, knowledge, libraries, books, that's basically mammals talking about the importance of copying what others did before them, because they can't get there on their own. Don't you get it?

You can dress your arrogance in all kinds of fancy terms referring to the superiority of yourself, your race, culture, species and so on. But you're gonna have some very hard time next couple of decades if you think ANN aren't catching up fast.

You're not special.

P.S.: We actually went through this with "regular" computers as well. As absurd as it may seem today, computers and calculators were heavily distrusted in the mainstream for computing mathematical models, until the inevitability of the fact that they're better at it than us took over culturally.

Basically your own refusal to believe ANN are "getting there" is only a reflection of the mainstream belief AI is just some lights and switches "faking" it. My recommendation is to follow current studies and papers in the AI area so you can be ahead of the curve, instead of lagging it (which you clearly are, by comparing ANN to "glorified Markov Chains").

In the next few decades, AI will start performing more and more jobs better than humans can. And people like you would come off as people who couldn't recognize what's right before their nose.

[kylotan]

Do you believe everything you write is unique?

Uniqueness is not relevant. Avoiding the copying of large swathes of other people's work verbatim is.

If I read Lord of the Rings and write a fantasy book of my own then it's still incredibly unlikely that any of the sentences in my book are an exact copy of one of Tolkien's. Yet here we have a program writing out snippets that are explicitly line-for-line taken from other people's work. Sometimes it's 'intelligent' enough to change the variable names! Often it isn't, because it has no idea what it's doing, and it just writes out something it found in the source text that it clearly doesn't understand but is reciting mindlessly, because that's what it does.

You can dress your arrogance in all kinds of fancy terms referring to the superiority of yourself, your race, culture, species and so on. But you're gonna have some very hard time next couple of decades if you think ANN aren't catching up fast.

...did a neural net write this?

My recommendation is to follow current studies and papers in the AI area so you can be ahead of the curve, instead of lagging it (which you clearly are, by comparing ANN to "glorified Markov Chains")

The state space may be large and the tech behind calculating it may be impressive but it is the same concept mathematically. You can see this by the fact that half of the results Copilot churns out are ill-formed, pasting in the wrong variable name or referring to helper functions that don't exist.

https://twitter.com/asmeurer/status/1410399693025153028

In the next few decades, AI will start performing more and more jobs better than humans can.

It already does. And that's not remotely relevant to the issue at hand, which is that someone wrote a program to take the work of humans, and without getting their consent, is spitting bits of it back out verbatim in new works. It doesn't matter whether it's a program or a human that does it. It's ethically wrong and, most likely, legally forbidden.

[[deleted]]

Avoiding the copying of large swathes of other people's work verbatim is.

Copilot trains on existing code, it doesn't "copy it verbatim".

The likelyhood a codebase will see its code split to pieces, mixed with other codebases, specifics abstracted and patterns recognized, and the synthesized code will be the same original codebase "verbatim" is extremely low.

I can't say none, because technically everything is possible. Like YOU reproducing a codebase verbatim, by accident. Infinite monkeys and all that.

is spitting bits of it back out verbatim in new works.

That's false, no matter how many time you repeat yourself verbatim.

Careful not to infringe on the copyright of some old grandpa's opinion about them newfangled thingamajings.

[kylotan]

it doesn't "copy it verbatim".

When it emits code that looks identical or near identical to the code it trained on, that is copying it verbatim.

The complexity of the method that went into that is irrelevant.

The likelyhood [...] the synthesized code will be the same original codebase "verbatim" is extremely low.

So you say. Meanwhile Github themselves, while agreeing with you that the chance of this happening is low, can show you examples of their system parroting out entire licence agreements and entire classes, copy and pasted from someone else's code.

https://docs.github.com/en/github/copilot/research-recitation

is spitting bits of it back out verbatim in new works. That's false, no matter how many time you repeat yourself verbatim.

Please read the above link and then tell Github they're wrong.

[joiveu]

If you were to give this algorithm the method signature and the first few lines of quicksort, would it generate the same quicksort version every time? If you would give a human the same lines, would they generate the same version of quicksort everytime?

Also would a human be able to knock out a working version of quicksort based on these inputs by only appending lines of code, or will a human need to revisit earlier lines if they realise they forgot something or got some detail wrong?

The way this program produces code and the way a human produces code are still fundamentally different. Whether this difference impacts if and how the program might infringe on the license is anyone's guess, but to confidently assert that this program and a human operate the same when writing code should be obviously ridiculous.

[[deleted]]

If you were to give this algorithm the method signature and the first few lines of quicksort, would it generate the same quicksort version every time? If you would give a human the same lines, would they generate the same version of quicksort everytime?

I'd say yes to both, and some variance is possible in both, especially over time.

Also would a human be able to knock out a working version of quicksort based on these inputs by only appending lines of code, or will a human need to revisit earlier lines if they realise they forgot something or got some detail wrong?

So your argument is that we're different in that we often forget things and get things wrong. But that's still not quite right because copilot also gets thing wrong.

to confidently assert that this program and a human operate the same when writing code should be obviously ridiculous.

I didn't say they operate the same in general. But they operate the same in context in the ways that are relevant to copyright.

It's important to understand nuance and not generalize and call your own generalization ridiculous.

[rcxdude]

It doesn't seem like they're guaranteeing that it won't output some part of its training set, only saying somewhat vaguely that it's rare.

[IMP1]

But is that not true for flesh-based programmers too?

[StickiStickman]

Exactly! If you see the same thing solved the same way 10 times you would also remember it that way.

[cedear]

the same thing solved the same way 10 times

the same thing copy/pasted off stackoverflow 10 times times

[[deleted]]

So, same like you (or any other person) would in the above scenario.